Srini Rao is an author and podcaster focused on what makes us creative. He joins Dr. Hill on Head First to discuss how to build that into your life, with tips on creative output, how to find your unique voice, and other life-hacking wisdom and strategies.
Episode Summary
On a recent episode of my Head First podcast, I talked with author and podcaster Srini Rao, host of The Unmistakable Creative, about how creativity actually gets built into a life. He has interviewed more than 700 people across every walk of life, and he describes himself as an accidental biohacker. What he stumbled into through trial and error maps closely onto what I see in brain maps and in the behavioral science. So let me translate his hard-won habits into the circuits and mechanisms underneath them, and give you the tools that follow.
Why does creativity work better as a daily habit than as inspiration?
Srini writes a thousand words every morning and has done so for about five years. He credits that single habit with nearly everything he has built. Most academics, by contrast, are told to write for the first two hours of the day and most never do. They wait for the deadline, the grant, the clear morning that rarely comes.
Here is the mechanism. Repeated practice drives myelination, the layering of insulating sheaths around the axons of frequently used circuits. Myelin speeds signal conduction and makes a skill faster, more automatic, and less effortful to access (Fields, 2008). You cannot myelinate a circuit you only fire on a deadline. The daily writer is building white matter in the language and idea-generation networks; the deadline writer is asking cold circuits to perform under pressure.
There is a volume argument too. Srini says ninety percent of what he writes is bad, and that is fine, because he produces so much that the good ten percent still adds up to several books. High output is also how you externalize ideas, get them off your mental plate, and free up working memory for the next one. If you want the deeper version of how to build skills this way, I cover it in Biohacking Learning. For the broader case that the brain rewires through use, see Biohacking Plasticity.
A trained circuit beats inspiration because inspiration is a state and a habit is a circuit. You can rely on a trained circuit.
Why is the first hour of the day a vulnerable window for your brain?
Srini avoids technology for the first hour after waking. Gratitude journal, coffee, ten to twenty minutes of meditation, a physical book. He says the brain is in a suggestible state early in the morning, and that checking email or social media at 7:30 tends to set the tone for the whole day.
His intuition tracks the neuroscience reasonably well. In the transition out of sleep, your EEG carries more slow activity, with theta and alpha rhythms still prominent before the faster beta of full waking engagement takes over. That state is more permeable to whatever you feed it. When you open a phone, you get an intermittent stream of small rewards that trigger dopamine release in the striatal reward circuit. Train that loop first thing and you have primed the day toward seeking, checking, and reacting.
The fix is concrete. Keep the phone out of the bedroom. Put a physical book and a notebook on the nightstand. Protect the first sixty to ninety minutes for input you choose rather than input that is sold to you. If you want a structured version of this, I built Biohacking Your Morning around the minimum viable practice for circadian and cognitive health. The meditation piece has its own mechanisms, which I lay out in Biohacking Meditation.
What does it actually take to start a habit?
Srini described how he built the writing habit, and he leaned on tools from behavioral science. The core lever is activation energy. Lower the friction for the behavior you want, raise it for the behavior you want to avoid. He sets out the pen and notebook the night before. He opens his writing software so it is the first thing on screen. Small moves, but each one removes a step between intention and action.
Every additional click or decision between you and a behavior reduces the probability you do it. The prefrontal cortex pays a metabolic cost to initiate effortful action, and that initiation cost is exactly where most good intentions die. Reducing physical friction means the circuit has less to overcome.
He also uses what behavioral writers call success accelerants. If your goal is a thousand words and you start by copying a sentence from your morning reading, you now have nine hundred to go instead of a thousand. The brain registers progress relative to the goal and that registration sustains motivation. You are using a quirk of how reward circuits track goal proximity to your own advantage.
The general principle, with the underlying circuitry, is in New Year, New Habits and the related work on Biohacking Bad Habits. The reset move when you stall sits in Procrastination.
How do social media apps hijack your attention, and what stops it?
Srini made a sharp point: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and dating apps are designed to be habit-forming, and the defaults are set to keep you there. Notifications on. Email on every reply. He strips those defaults, removes social apps from his phone, and uses tools that block distracting sites and surface where his time goes.
This is one of the cleanest examples of operant conditioning in modern life. B. F. Skinner showed that you can shape a behavior an organism already performs by reinforcing it (Skinner, 1938). His pigeons already knew how to peck; he got them to peck in specific patterns by delivering food. That is different from Pavlov, who paired a neutral stimulus with a reflex.
Social media is a Skinner box. You already check; the like, the match, the retweet reinforce the checking. The critical piece is the schedule. You do not get a reward every time, and you do not get nothing every time. That intermittent reinforcement schedule is the most powerful and most resistant to extinction of any schedule (Ferster & Skinner, 1957), which is why slot machines and swiping apps feel so compelling. The dating app actually does better if you keep swiping than if you meet someone, because a paired-off user stops being a user.
Knowing the mechanism gives you concrete moves. Turn off notifications, which removes the intermittent cue. Take the apps off the phone, which raises activation energy for the loop. When you are with people you care about, turn the phone off entirely; Srini notices a clear quality difference in his interactions when he does. The deeper your phone is buried, the less the reward circuit gets pinged.
Does multitasking actually work?
No. Srini gave a sharp personal example: editing a podcast episode takes him thirty minutes with everything else closed and ninety minutes with Facebook, Slack, and Twitter open. That three-to-one ratio is not unusual.
The brain does not run two attention-demanding tasks in parallel. It switches between them, and each switch carries a cost. You pay to disengage from one task and re-engage another, and the residue of the first task lingers and degrades performance on the second (Rubinstein, Meyer & Evans, 2001). Studies of self-identified heavy multitaskers, including high-achieving students at selective universities, consistently find they are worse at filtering irrelevant information, not better (Ophir, Nass & Wagner, 2009). The subjective sense of efficient multitasking is itself a glitch.
For sustained, single-task concentration, the relevant brain training target is the sensorimotor rhythm and related self-regulation circuits. I cover that in SMR Neurofeedback. The state of deep, absorbed work that Srini hits after his first thousand words has its own neuroscience, which I break down in Biohacking Flow State.
What does the morning sequence look like once it works?
When the friction is removed and the distractions are blocked, the free-writing often tips into a flow state. Srini said the first two thousand words might take an hour, then the next two thousand take thirty minutes as ideas start arriving on their own.
That acceleration is the signature of flow: a state with reduced prefrontal self-monitoring, where action and idea feel coupled and effort drops away (Dietrich, 2004). You do not summon it directly. You build the conditions, start the cold work, and the state shows up partway through. The morning reading he does first is priming, feeding the associative networks raw material so the generative system has something to combine.
Why does creative work feel uncertain, and is that a problem?
I raised a real difficulty on the show. When I make a decision building a company, the only justification in the moment is that I trust my own vision. I do not find out if the call was right until it is out in the world. Creative work is generative and refining, getting closer over time to a felt internal vision rather than a defined target.
Srini's answer was honest: you cannot always know if the work is good until later, and that uncertainty is intrinsic to creativity. What you can do is regularize the process even when the output is unpredictable. The volume habit handles this directly. If you produce daily, a single bad day costs you almost nothing, because you only need a small fraction of the total to be good.
His other tools for managing the cognitive load are worth naming. He guards diet for cognition, on the simple logic that poor inputs produce poor output. He treats exercise, surfing and snowboarding in his case, as a deliberate disconnect and a reliable source of flow rather than as exercise for its own sake. Physical activity that demands full presence forces the attention system off the rumination loop and into the body. For people whose stress runs high, that kind of reset is regulating the fight-or-flight response; the circuitry is in Biohacking Fight or Flight.
How do you reset when the morning falls apart?
I asked Srini what he does when midday hits and nothing has gone right. He had a perfect live example, having spent his morning fighting with his insurance company and a broken chair. His answer: write the day off and use the daily reset. Tomorrow is the reset. The structure protects you precisely because no single day carries the whole load.
The deeper benefit he named is worth sitting with. Building a new habit produces direct behavioral evidence that you can shape your own behavior and that change is possible. That evidence generalizes. Once your nervous system has demonstrated that you can control one routine, you start looking for other places to apply it.
That is also, in a sense, what brain training does. When you give the brain feedback on its own activity and it learns to shift, you are demonstrating to the system that change is possible. If you want to see what the research says about that, start with Is Neurofeedback Legitimate? and the broader neurofeedback topic.
Pick one part of your day that you control completely, protect it, and run it every day. Lower the friction the night before. Put the phone in another room. Start the cold work before you feel ready. Do that consistently and the circuits, the white matter, and the sense of agency build themselves.
References
- Ferster (1957). Concurrent schedules of reinforcement in the chimpanzee. doi:10.1126/science.125.3257.1090
- Dietrich (2004). Endurance exercise selectively impairs prefrontal-dependent cognition. doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2004.03.002
Full Transcript
[Music] folks welcome to another episode of head first with dr. hill today's guest is shri near al who's the host and founder of the unmistakable creative podcast he's also an entrepreneur and author and an accidental bio hacker and so welcome to the show Serena nice to have you yeah thanks for having me for those of our listeners who aren't familiar with your podcast or you personally can you give us a little taste of who you are and and what you're doing in this space these days yeah so as you mentioned I am the host and founder of the unmistakable creative podcast where I have interviewed probably more than 700 people from every walk of life imaginable I mean they've ranged from performance psychologists like yourself to you no bank robbers to drug dealers to authors entrepreneurs with the the common theme I think being that every one of them is insanely interesting in some way and has managed to take you know this insanely interesting part of their life and make it a really big part of who they are and their own work um so you know it started about I think almost nine years ago 2009 I was on the tail end of an MBA program and couldn't find a job so I just started tinkering around with you know blogs and content creation and eventually I started a blog as a part of that blog I started a weekly interview series called interviews with up-and-coming bloggers which was really the foundation for what would eventually go on to become unmistakable creative and you know the the you know short version of a long story which we can get into more detail about is that all that after about nine years has turned into this sort of multi-hyphenate career as an author a speaker and an entrepreneur great so nine years we're just getting started with this one I feel a lot of content yeah it's definitely a ton I think the the thing that you know we what's interesting is the idea of nine years seems ridiculous to most people because the world moved so fast and you know I think people have a very warped perception of what longevity should look like like they think a year is a long time nowadays but you know I think in my mind I was not looking at okay how do I you know make something that makes a splash for a year I wanted to make something that has a lat impact that stands the test of time you know because I you know as what my friend Ryan holiday would refer to as something that's perennial right something that remains a classic I would much rather have something that grows slowly but stands the test of time than something that you know becomes an overnight sensation and then it's forgotten about next week so you know a lot of these performance podcasts of which you have one I have one are really focused on high-level individuals how did you end up with drug dealers and people that had you know rob banks how did that come into your your content yeah so you know one of the things so you know as I mentioned we started out as a podcast for bloggers and we could kind of see where the podcast world was headed and we thought you know we we wanted to do a rebrand and without you know we want to have a much wider range of guests in terms of what's possible which is what kind of drove the rebrand because we were realizing we were being limited in terms of not just our potential audience but our potential guests too by being branded the podcaster bloggers the other thing we saw is that suddenly podcasting was becoming this thing like you just said you know everybody sort of interviewing the same people over and over again you know you could see like the entrepreneur podcast if you go through iTunes and look at them it's largely the same guests on every single show and you know the downside to that is that makes it really hard to create anything that stands out so you know we basically kind of said you know what we're really at our core a storytelling show you know my friend Chris Ducker once said he's like even if you don't necessarily you know know what the interview about it about is about or care for the interview view is you can't help but listen because it's like a TV show you know I think we're entertainers first educators second we happen to blend both but I I think that you can't overlook the fact that podcasting is largely an entertaining medium and that the human brain is wired to listen to stories we find stories much more compelling naturally so that is a big part of why we've ended up with the sort of guests that we do the other part of it is my own personal curiosity like I thought you know there's so much more to the world than just people who start online businesses or blogs I mean there are all these fascinating people out there and some of the most interesting people on our show are the ones that you've probably never heard of create my pick your pick your mind or good girl's show for some guests for my stuff you know my strategy for getting out of that rut of the same the same thing every time was being less of a guest and more of a host and you know the tables but now I find that I often don't you know talk about the things that I want to talk about as much so I need to find that balance I think so um tell us what also you're doing you're doing this this this podcast you're also an author you have a book you're working on or you've published yeah so I have multiple books actually so I have a self-published book called the art of being unmistakable that actually is no longer available because we just had a book come out last year with penguin portfolio called unmistakable why only is better than best and currently I'm working on a second book with penguin about creative habits and and you know how you stay productive and creative and an increasingly distracted world and also making you know a case for creativity for its own sake I think that you know one of the the sad byproducts of the world that we live in is that every single thing that anybody does creatively is always design done with you know some outcome in mind or some you know goal in mind like I have to monetize this thing I have to build an audience and in that sense we've kind of lost creativity for its own sake but what's interesting is when you look at many of the really wildly successful creators they didn't follow some sort of formula a lot of them you know really were like I want to do this thing and I find this thing incredibly rewarding you look a perfect example I think is something like Maria Popov's brain pickings which started out as a link you know collection of links that she sent to seven friends and now has millions of readers I think that when we think too much about the idea of millions of readers or fame or you know sort of external accolades I think the problem with that is that one you know you and I have had some conversations about meditation and presence when you're thinking so much about the external you're not present and if you're not present the quality of your work suffers so that that's the ironic paradox is that you know in your obsessive desire to try to reach an audience of masses of people and millions of people you actually lessen the likelihood of that happening when that is all you're concerned about whereas if you're focused on the quality of the work I think the quality of the work goes I mean don't get me wrong I'm not saying that you know the the audience shouldn't be taken into consideration especially if you're trying to build a business I think that you know people are kind of putting the cart before the horse you know they want to create an audience for something that doesn't really deserve an audience if your work is not up to snuff even if you reach an audience it doesn't matter because they won't stick around you know you could have something go viral but it's kind of like a giant bait and switch you have this thing that suddenly makes you popular but if there's nothing to follow it up and nothing to back it up then you know you kind of kind of missed out on any of the benefits you would have had from all that exposure I I'm thinking about creativity as a concept right now I teach a lot at UCLA I teach courses in gerontology I have a lecture which is on creativity which is on how creativity is a healthy intervention if you will for PG edging and performance there's a lot of research showing that engaging in creative endeavors be it art or music or fear or whatever else dramatically reduces visits to the doctor pain mobility issues all kinds of broad-reaching things but we also go into this idea about little c vs big c creativity yeah we're little see creativity essentially is you know not quite too silly but macrame macking to Macaroni things on paper that you do for your mom let little see or even you know writing in a journal or things for yourself that aren't necessarily meant for public consumption or little C and the big magnum opus works that are really for public consumption or capital C they may have a large impact and during some of these guests you're describing something they started off with little C these seven links that were sent on to friends these are little C things but yeah then they became big C impactful sure you know artistic works in all people you've worked with are you seeing that transition you know is it organic to people as you mentioned earlier focus too much on the you know public facing aspect of creativity or our people is it more organic do they just get pulled into that because things go viral because they are creating so I think the the people who I've seen like truly outliers success like the the brain paintings of the world their stories are much more organic than the ones who are forced I feel like the ones that are forced they never quite they don't reach a true inflection point because the work is so forced you know it's hey I've got a all this 10 step formula that was given to me by some successful online marketer yeah and if I follow these steps I'm going to get the result and of course what that doesn't take into consideration is the most important variable which is them you know like you can't neglect the fact that you are a variable in this equation and to leave that out of the equation is is you know responsible and ludicrous and and makes it less likely that you're going to create something that stands out so I think I see a lot more people that are organic it as far as sort of just off the charts like you know really really big present success in my mind every one of those has been organic and I think part of the reason that it's organic is because those people they started out with this sort of burning desire to create something that they wanted to see exist in the world and they were going to create it whether there was an audience or not whereas you know some people basically say okay like I'm not going to do anything unless there's an audience for it it's one of those strange paradoxes right you create this thing without an audience for it and then you'll have an audience for it but if you're insistent that you're only going to step it up you know when you have millions of people then you're never going to have millions of people because if that's your excuse for mailing it in and creating lousy work then you're going to basically have an entire body of work that doesn't get any attention because it's lousy so underscores the idea that if you're only creating when there's a deadline when you have to produce something you know that's not when the when the best creativity shows up it shows up when creativity doesn't wait for inspiration or the right time when it's a yeah a work habit that diseases will work overtime right yeah yeah I mean I think the you know so I read a thousand words every single morning when I wake up it's something that I've done for the better part of five years and you know I learned that habit from a guy named Julian Smith who had one of the most popular blogs on the Internet at the time and you know when he told me that I was like okay well you're one of the most popular blogs on the internet you must be doing something right and that is a habit that I can model and nothing change has changed my life more I mean I can attribute everything that I've experienced in terms of success to that one habit whether it's the opportunity to write books but like you said if I only decided that you know what I'm going to have this daily writing habit when I have an opportunity write a book for a publisher by the time that I had the opportunity write a book for a publisher I wouldn't be in creative shape like my muscles would not be built for this you also might not have enough content or ideas fleshed out we talked about the creativity has many uses and high level output creativity happens when you have output right you can't have you know a higher increased amount of works out there means a likelihood of a better work because you see your work externalize because you can improve you know get ideas off your plate your mental plate and make room if you will for the next idea to come up so if you're only operating on a schedule or a deadline when you have demands or you know academics who only write you know for that one day they can clear every month and their schedule I think that's a you know probably getting into less of that creative muscle as you described yeah I'm slowly so so you told us about a couple books you have written one you've written one you're writing unmistakable why only is better than best that what is that what I mean only is that meaning that the only person that has the branding the product the creativity what's what's going on there yeah so you know the core message of you know unmistakable was this idea it was based on something based on you know personal experience when I started in 2009 the thing that prompted my start was I saw this girl named Jamie Barone who started this website called Twitter should hire me and Twitter should hire me by all accounts was incredibly successful you know led to national media attention multiple job offers and you know ton of demand for her work and of course it led to and spawn copycats me being one of them and I had a website called 100 reasons you should hire me and it was a total flop because not only could I not come up with a hundred reasons why somebody should hire me but I really what I had done is I look at something that somebody else did and tried to replicate that thing more or less and of course what I started to see over the better part of you know seven eight nine years of doing this was that pattern over and over over again you know people would see that some you know famous author would have their website or their branding designed a certain way and of course you'd see you know 20 people design their website that way you know the the probably the most hilarious example of this is Jon Stewart and Demetri Martin did a sketch about life coaching where a woman goes to a life coach and you know Demetri Martin asks her at the end of her session you know have you seeing a difference in your life going to life coach and she says yeah now I'm a life coach myself which is you know of course it's slapstick and funny but it's also a very appropriate comment on what is effectively an echo chamber right so like you get all these people suddenly writing about minimalism of course because one minimalism blog takes off and oh you know what minimalism is now the thing I'm going to write about because all these minimalists are you know having so many people read their work and you see this happen over and over again and what ends up happening of course is you create work that at best becomes a pale imitation of something that already exists and at worst gets completely ignored and so the sort of core message behind unmistakable was that if you could do something that is so distinctive that nobody else could have done it but you in the way that you do it and it's immediately recognized as your work being meaning that is you know the definition of unmistakable your competition basically becomes irrelevant because you're the only option you're not the best option for unmistakable you know work product but what about I mean in the startup world Silicon Valley silicon beach Denver you're in San Diego there's a huge number of tech companies that have maybe you know less fleshed out products and there's a big emphasis on presenting your product your pitch doing it like other products that have done it before you know I want to help start trubrain about four years ago four and a half years ago now big emphasis on well what should our website presence look like I don't know what is Warby Parker look like what is barkbox what is me undies what are all these runners startups are the same sort of strata what do they look like and we been asked in a true brains initial website was inspired by a few old Warby Parker's and that changed how we reviewed and it made us a player in that space it was signaling if you will social signaling to VCS and entrepreneurs and and angels who might want to get in bed with us so you know if you're producing amazing creative work that is unmistakable that is clearly no one else's but you're doing it on a mountaintop you know in the Himalayas and you can't engage with people to consume that work because your works too unusual or you haven't you know it's so unique that it hasn't that that maybe let's say the the corporate consumers wouldn't necessarily be able to justify it as a value I mean is there a risk for being too unique and to I'm take about two hours yeah of course there is I mean you know the thing is that you know you made a good point right if we're if you're you can't completely neglect the idea of the fact that if you want distribution audience the audience has to be taken into consideration it's a strange paradox right because you don't want to cater like pander to the audience and cater to the lowest common denominator because then you just keep watering down the work until it's you know not something even more thing attention to but yeah of course you know like I think Sonia Simone put it really well she said you know you might have a blog about naked mole-rats but the audience for the blog about naked mole-rats is pretty damn limited you know not many people are going to be like yeah okay I want to find out and you know you'd like you know spend money on you know learning about naked mole-rats like it's just you have to absolutely take those into consideration now to your point about that the website descriptions um here's what what I would say is that I think it's important to model what works I think the problem is that there's a big confusion between modeling and mimicking like I've seen people literally copy the the branding the design the logo the coloring all of it to the letter and in my mind you know you kind of deny you know what makes you so special when you do that you know you basically um it's you know you're almost a derivative at that point in something else and so what you've created really is a pale imitation now again you know like I said they're probably things that you should absolutely borrow from the design of the Warby Parker website in terms of layout but there are elements of it that you can bring to it that are absolutely your own that you should bring to it and that's where we tend to get into trouble is because people say okay oh this is exactly how this person did it so I'm going to do this almost our failure of the top of the bottom-up sort of internal driving out that thing this reminds me a lot of what happens in Hollywood these days which is oh that movie was successful and the next year there's ten movies that have the same type of character in the same setting and the same sci-fi genre and nine out of ten of them fail because there's nothing coming from within that's unique it's just trying to be the next avatar the next you know guardians of galaxies whatever so it's it's very derivative as you say you're clearly not doing that so you have so best or only is better than best so that's the only what else you telling people in these books what else what are unimportant messages um well I think that you know an unmistakeable in particular we use surfing as a metaphor for business because I'm an avid surfer and I think surfing either just the experience the ocean has so many parallels to life every every aspect of the ocean you know it's just it's this thing that's constantly changing its dynamic it requires you to be present it challenges you there are days when you just get the hell beat out of you and you have to come back every day you follow a lot you know I mean there's so many profound metaphors for life inside of an activity like surfing and so I think that you know the the metaphor of surfing was really kind of what became the overlying structure of the book and look at the core messages in it because each aspect of surfing in a lot of ways parallels creativity and parallels business and parallels life so basically grinding until you hit until everything lines up perfectly yeah that's one way to put it so I'm a I grew up in the on the ocean in the Northeast waters a little colder there and I grew up you know hauling lobster pots and fishing and doing that engines but I still have another spective the ocean to know how variable and changeable it is but don't have quite a sense of surfing I know we're in Southern California now I really should start surfing but I haven't yet has that had that enter my life what else you working on you you said this another book you're you're working on now at penguin what's that title so we don't have a title yet for the book but I can give you the subject matter it's largely about creative habits and you know how do you you know we're talking about creativity being a daily habit and that's what largely this book is about is how do you sustain and maintain creativity throughout your life on an ongoing basis right because I think that you know part of the challenge that we have is we don't necessarily like we have aspirations for what we want to do or what we want to create but we don't really have a structure or process for how to do that on a repeatable and consistent basis because you know you're making original work but the the process you can borrow from lots of other people and you can model some of it I mean of course you have to find elements of it that works for you but I think that you know you kind of have this we generally have this misperception about creativity is this you know weird sort of thing that people do they go sit in a room and they paint or write or whatever and then you know magic just happens and they come out with you know a book a year later or they a music album falls from the sky I think that what people don't often see is you know the labor that goes in to all this work because you know as you well know from from having built what you have any creative project whether it's a company whether it's a book whether it's a work of art all of those are you know require immense amounts of labor that nobody actually sees and nobody actually knows and I think that you know to emphasize the role of the process is really critical here because we're pretty obsessed with outcomes you know in particularly the Western world and you know in the United States but you know most of the outcomes are usually the result of following a process and and you know so what we've done really is dissect you know developing a daily process for how to produce creative work on a regular basis like to get into a sort of rhythm and flow on a consistent basis but how do you know if what you're doing is on point is creative I mean when I you know have one of my senior employees run through a bunch of you know activities he or she has a sense of what I'm looking for and what the outcome what success would be but I'm doing creative work I mean when I'm building a company which can be creative I mean I think it has been for me I'm making decisions and the only justification is well I think this is the right call and I trust my own vision and my own creative you know perspective on this but I thought it's not borne out until later until I determined was that decision I made to open an office here promote that person construct this you know marketing message I don't discover later until it's out there in the world if it was successful and that's not necessarily what creativity is in my perspective it's really this generative and refining process we get closer to producing things that are congruent with this internal maybe even a more fist vision when you're doing other creative things or or being or building companies how do you know if the effort you're putting is on tasks I don't think you do necessarily right I think that that's that's gonna you know you kind of hit the nail on the head is is that creativity by its very nature is uncertain and that's what makes it so interesting you know like if I knew exactly how everything was going to turn out every day if it was so predictable that would be pretty damn boring you know like part of the reason that you know I say say people surf is because every single time you go it's different every wave is different every surf day is different every surf spot is different and that's what makes it so appealing and I think that that is largely what makes creativity so appealing as well is that it is amorphous because if it was predictable repeatable and you know like yeah you're going to have a process that is repeatable but what you produce every day I mean that's half the fun right is the surprises that show up and the things that you didn't expect if you knew exactly how it was all going to turn out you know that that wouldn't be particularly interesting so you can't necessarily know if the work you're doing is is good until later until you're doing a lot of that work hopefully but how can you regularize the process maybe how can you mean you're doing a thousand other words every morning that's sounds like a great way to do it academics that are told to be productive academics usually spend the first two hours every day writing ninety percent of them don't and stress out in under produce and you know don't do their grant applications and don't submit papers but the ones that have a habit versus an inspiration for running seem to have a lot of productivity in and how do you how do you scaffold an octave and so you know I'm going to echo something that I said in one of my medium pieces that I wrote you know designing your life really begins with designing your days and you know for many people the design of their day isn't necessarily deliberate right like they get on on on you know they wake up in the morning they turn on a computer they check email check Facebook and then next thing you know two hours of gumball I and you know don't me wrong I have days like this I they're not as common as I think for many people but you know the idea isn't that you're like completely rigid in a robot but I think you know part of it is really having control over some schedule so I'll tell you a little bit about my sort of daily routine that I can hope for the most part you know I wake up in the morning the first thing I do is I write in a gratitude journal because I think that's a really sort of nice energetic shift right when you wake up like I literally have it on my nightstand then you know I brew some coffee I meditate for anywhere between 10 to 20 minutes I sit down and I read a physical book I try not to use technology early in the morning because I think your brain is in a very suggestive state super early in the morning I think that you know when you use technology when you do things like get on Facebook Instagram whatever check email you're getting the sort of surge of dopamine when your brain is in this highly suggestive state and so if you've ever done this you probably know like if you check your email at 7:30 in the morning you might have noticed that you spend all day checking your email whereas if you have a day where you don't do that and you don't go till you go till about noon without it like it's a very different sort of day you get these sort of you know deep sort of flow state levels of concentration after that I write in a physical physical notebooks you notice that the one of the big themes here is that I avoid technology for the hour of my day mainly because I you know I don't think we were ever evolutionarily meant to be this plugged in you know I mean you're a brain scientist so you probably know more about this than I do but I just know from my personal experience that you know like I I can tell on the days when I've had these kinds of days that I'm just not at the top of my game like I know this morning for example I went dealt with a bunch of administrative stuff when I woke up and right then in there I knew I was like all right I pretty much shot myself in the foot because I did that and I knew that you know like and I also knew that I was going to be screwed because I was on my phone late last night which I also don't do so so diet is another big one I spent a lot of time thinking about you know what you eat for optimal cognition you know like if you're heavily carb loaded or like eating stuff it's just for you that that's going to affect you know I mean my simple rule is if you put garbage into your body you're going to basically produce garbage in terms of creative output that's that's really the pay look at it and then you know I think of course you need exercise that's why surfing plays a big role like we need a disconnect of some sort you know one of my friends said water creates this beautiful sort of container for people who tend towards anxiety and for me you know it just calms my nerves it's a complete unplug because you can't really think about anything else when you're doing that I'm an avid snowboarder as well so you know and say I look for things that produce adrenaline and flow states because those are my sort of major disconnects and I mean they make me happy that's another thing you know is is that I think the reason a lot of people do these activities is not necessarily the exercise the exercise is always a convenient fringe benefit but you get you know like almost all my inspiration for my creative work comes from my time in the water and so it's a critical part of who I am so I think part of it more than anything what I would say is is you know how much of your day is actually scripted and deliberate and how much of it is you just reacting to stimulus you know and for so many people in the modern world a good amount of their day is you know literally stimulus response stimulus response stimulus response to the point where the stimulus controls their life not their decisions it's important to have intention not momentum yeah where you set your moments instead of react and also it says this but you're something you're setting reminds me of the cure for everything in salt water the ocean sweat or tears yeah and you still got the sweat on the ocean down in terms of disconnects and resets you know you know I wake up in the morning I'm usually up by about 5:00 I'm often a couple hours of yoga between you know five and seven and then starting at 7 a.m. I am responding to I have four or five different peak brain offices of student feedback and mindfulness training all throughout the country we have clients all over the world you know in different time zones so when I get up it's a never-ending stream of demands on my time so I would love to get up have a relaxing couple of hours make some coffee do some writing but it's it's the most I can do to carve out 90 minutes for yoga in the morning and justify that because it keeps me sane but the moment I'm not doing something they are in the studio without my phone and then reach I'm back on my phone I'm reacting to all the demands I have you know technicians who are in st. Louis technicians in San Diego technicians in you know of course LA and Portland all over the world and they're clamoring oh so-and-so is here we have this question here's here's a treatment requirement or treatment protocol so not everyone has a completely structural life or maybe like me they have structured their life in such a way that they are in this sort of skinner box of stimulus response all day long for those of us who've maybe slipped into that you know frenetic momentum driven reactive life any advice any ways to pull back into yeah I mean I think you kind of really hit the nail on the head is that at least one small part of your day is deliberate you know I get you know I'm in a unique position in that I don't have kids I'm not married you know I have a lot of flexibility over my schedule and I don't have you know crazy demands on my time being mainly because I've set it up that way but I think you know it really begins with even just taking the smallest part of your day like you said you know if you didn't make that 90 minutes for yoga you drive yourself nuts yeah and just having that one thing I think can make such a huge difference because it teaches you that you have control over your life you know like I started to realize just a few weeks ago I was thinking about this and I thought you know the the biggest benefit of developing any new but is not not even that habit itself but what comes from developing a new habit is the belief that you actually have control over your behavior and you have the capability to change it and that's the ultimate superpower you know once you realize that you kind of start to say okay where can I actually make changes so I think that you know it's taking one small part of it even if you can't you know make a huge day you know deliver it like you said you have tons of demands on your time which is appropriate given what you do but I think that you know having some boundaries and have you say okay you know what this 90 minutes in the morning is what I'm going to set aside for this time I think that you know it was a brian scott moore who's with the co-founder of 1-800 GOT JUNK with cameron harold he wrote a piece on medium titled what successful people spend ten hours a week just thinking which is definitely worth reading and it's a good point I mean you know we don't we don't set aside enough time you know to to just kind of be quiet and be mindful even if it's ten minutes a day I think it can make a huge difference so that's what I would say is you know if you can't stomach a huge part of your day and you've got so many demands at least take one small part of it and you know make it very sort of you know like cultivate solitude in one small part here yeah now I find a lot of the time that I'm trying to bring a lot of mental bandwidth to bear but in the environment of lots of things clamoring for my attention that might reduce my ability to focus on any one particular thing now I have a hunch I think you said something about this new book coming out will help us get rid of distractions if that is that accurate please lay down some wisdom about how to handle distractions so yeah the funny thing with distractions is so distractions are interesting in that you know what most people don't understand is almost everything that distracts us on a daily basis Facebook Twitter Instagram all these tools are designed to be habit-forming mmm they've studied how you know the brain works in order to make sure that you're addicted yeah and not only that if you think about it like Google makes more money every time you conduct a search Facebook makes more money every time you spend money on Facebook there's no incentive for them not to keep you there you know this is one of the things I was thinking to myself about online dating apps especially swiping apps right believe it or not the odd paradox of the online dating apps is that they're better off with you never meeting somebody because that means you'll still stay a user and keep swiping yeah which is a really strange paradox right because the moment you meet somebody I remember one of my friends who got engaged she said the first thing he was absolutely thrilled to do was delete all these stupid apps he was really hot that was one of the things they found to be you know the most relief and so you know I had a preface by saying you know all these things are designed to be habit-forming of course what's funny is that they're all set to the defaults right the default is you get notifications the default is you get an email every time somebody tweets you of course when you start to change the defaults you start to take control of how these things are so you know for example I use a tool called the Facebook newsfeed obliterator I don't see anything that anybody posts on Facebook so when I log in if I'm there to share something I go I share the thing that I want to share and I get out I might chat with friends you know whatever it is you know and if I want to see what other people are up to on Facebook once a week I'll get on my phone enable Safari and do that so I don't have social media apps on my phone because they're just distractions they're unnecessary otherwise you know you find yourself mindlessly checking when you're in line at the grocery store where you know you're just not present in your life yeah you know your head is buried in a screen I think that when you're with people that you care about you should turn off your phones when you're at dinner with friends when you're on dates whatever it is like I noticed a huge difference in the quality of my interaction when my phone is turned off yeah sorry so that's one you know the ultimate you know say you would be the best hack for you know not letting your phone become a distraction is to turn the damn thing off and leave it out of it oh that's that's really ultimately what it comes down to so that's a big one and then of course we have tools right like rescue time like hey focus that allows you to block distracting websites I mean I think rescue time in particular is really interesting because it gives you a sort of awareness for where you're spending your time like you know when you didn't do all day because it's staring you in the face how does your productivity pulse is 53% you're thinking okay that means I did absolutely nothing today that that was a value yeah um you know like that that it's a really good sign that you've been wasting a lot of time so so that's a big part of it and then of course I think that you know multitasking there's not a single study at this point that hasn't shown you know that were incredibly effective at multitasking you know like we we really really are I mean I'll give you an example for my own life so when I edit episodes of unmistakeable creative if I have Facebook and Twitter open or something else or slack or whatever it is and I'm editing an episode it will take me 90 minutes if I'm not doing anything else it'll take me 30 and that's that that's the difference you know I mean it's it's amazing how and yet somehow people think that they're effective multitaskers and yeah there's been studies done on like you know straight-a students I mean you know at places like Stanford that should they're not good multitaskers basically the human brain you you can't do more than one thing at once with it we're cognate yeah and then the other thing is that I think that we have a real sort of mental health epidemic potentially on our hands with all these devices and and the just endless stream of dopamine right because you've got not only all these strange things happening neurochemically in the brain as a result of these things but you also have this perpetual comparison of your life to everybody else's and of course there's nobody whose life doesn't look more amazing on Facebook than yours I mean I I remember thinking hey I got my book deal and then you know it's like dude this guy just sold a start-up for a hundred million dollars who gives a if I got a book deal ah you know and if you notice something about comparison one of the things that we do when we compare you never compare yourself to people who are worse off than you are you only tend to compare yourself to people who are better off than you are so I think part of it is learning to limit our use of these tools and also you know being deliberate about how we use them not letting them you know be the set to the default you know because ideally of course they want you to keep all the notifications on so that every time that you get a notification or a comment on Instagram or like you log in again right so you know I think it's understanding the design of these products and then going out of your way to design your use of them so that it's deliberate and not set to the default exactly when it comes down to that's really I think you're quite useful as you were saying these things are designed to a dick to you essentially just to back up and do some neuroscience like strings I can't help myself I sort of view the Internet like a like the world's best Skinner box Skinner BF Skinner or the father of behaviorism did conditioning work associative learning and Skinner unlike Pavlov Skinner ticks at behavior already do and reinforces it to do more Skinner's pigeons already know how to peck on bars but he got them to peck in certain ways or peck repetitively on a bar so they got a reinforcer a bubble of food or something this is different of course than Pavlov's dogs who took things that were not associated drooling and and Annabelle and associate and so in Skinner we're reinforcing behaviors that are already there and the internet it is a reinforcer in via Facebook or Twitter or whatever or you know dating apps the most critical piece of that is the intermittent reinforcement schedule when you're swiping for a dating app you don't get a match every time nor do you not get a match every time and so the uncertainty oh it's going to happen but when that's the most seductively sort of learning reinforcer the same thing happens with a facebook like or Instagram you know retweets or and Twitter or whatever else so like you say getting sort of sophisticated and realizing that the reinforcers that are turned on by default and all these tools are designed to pull you back in is probably a great bit of takeaway information for folks so so you're clearly a highly productive guy with a very structured day and you're in control of all your time but I'm guessing that a couple times a week an hits midday and things just haven't gone the way you want you're putting out fires all morning you haven't had enough caffeine that would be that would be today okay today is a perfect example that so you know perfect example I called my health insurance company and I'm trying to get them to reset my password and not only that for some reason our interview didn't show up on my calendar luckily I checked email right when when it you know when I around 10:00 I mean yeah of course there's nobody who has you know days when they're not like totally like nobody is a robot right I think part of it is understanding your personal operating rhythm and you know you got to realize you're going to hit diminishing returns on some days like I already know today a shot I am NOT going to try you know it's kind of like okay this morning kind of went to hell pretty fast between you know my health insurance thing and now that I have a friend coming by at noon and the fact that we're about to head out of town I was like alright today was just not meant to be I don't I don't not on it you know like I'm sitting in a chair that's broken and I'm waiting for a new chair to show up from Amazon and it won't be here till Thursday like you know that there's stuff that throws off the whole thing and so yeah like I happen to be in the business center in my apartment complex and I saw your email and I ran back to my apartment and I'm sitting in my broken chair you know which if I lean back I'll fall over alright there suddenly vanished from the from the screen we'll know what happened but yeah so this stuff happens and it probably happens more than once every few months I'm guessing for you yeah how do you how do you get control of it how do you notice and reset what tools do you use yes as far as a reset goes I think part of the reset is that you get to reset every day right like tomorrow becomes the reset like I've pretty much written today off now and this is what I always say about the thousand word habit right I said you know if you write a thousand words a day you're probably averaging about three hundred and sixty-five thousand words a year and so I tell people 90% of everything I write is complete crap sure it does but the thing is I don't need for more than 10% of it to be good because I'm doing so much you know like if I want a 50,000 word book I might have to have you know three to four good sentences or even you know two good paragraphs a day if that yeah because I do it so consistently and that's you know one of the things that's so profound about any habit that you do consistently right you mean you you know as a neuroscientist you have myelination that occurs when you do anything consistently inevitably you're going to get better so the fact that you're going to do this thing consistently makes it completely okay that you have a bad day practice for this writing habit the morning this is one of the most powerful things people can do but I'm curious how you do it are you sort of free writing for you know whatever a thousand words are are there writing prompts things you have to get done things you enjoy so I'll walk you through the process of how I developed the habit because I think that that in and of itself is incredibly important because I used a lot of tools from the world of brain science to actually cultivate the habit so you know I have to give credit where credit is due I mean shawn Achor book the happiness advantage i attribute directly to my ability to develop this habit so he talks about a few different things in happiness senators the first one being activation energy right the idea behind activation energy is that you reduce the activation energy for the things that you want to do you increase it for the things you want to avoid so one of the things I do is I put out a pen and a notebook the night before that way just the fact that I don't have to get it off of the shelf makes it much more likely that all right another thing that I'll do is I'll you know open up my writing software the night before and so right when I open the screen it's the first thing I see just the fact that I don't have to go click on it and these are all small seemingly inconsequential things but psychologically you've reduced the activation energy and they increase the likelihood that you'll do them of course distraction we talked about you know I think blocking distractions every day is critical for this you know period of time and then you know another concept that you know worked for Sean's book you know when people don't know what to write and tell them as like just put down a quote from something that you've read so I always read for 30 minutes before I write as well because it kind of Prime's the brain and it gets you sort of thinking many of my ideas for what I write about come from the things that I've been reading so I'll take just one sentence and the nice thing is you know if you look at the concept of success accelerants the idea that your brain makes progress towards a goal based on how close it thinks it is to that goal so let's say your goal is a thousand words but you've already got a hundred work quote there well now you only have 900 to go so suddenly it doesn't seem like that route right it's a total you know you're basically tricking your brain I mean it's a perception it's a glitch that is you know built into the human brain but you can use to your advantage which there are many of these glitches that I keep finding rate I mean you as a neuroscientist probably are aware of many more of them than I am but that was those are the big ones and so as far as the content yeah it largely is free writing but what happens is when you're doing free writing for a thousand words you will get to a point where suddenly you find yourself in a flow state and when you're in that flow State ideas just start to come and you'll go from a thousand to three thousand words I mean there when I can hit a flow state I'll go from a thousand to three thousand words in the next 2,000 words will take me 30 minutes to write and the first two thousand may take you know an hour right yeah so you're not sort of limiting okay I get my thousand words and I'm done it's more like seeing what you can accomplish in the first hour 2:00 in the morning well these are all wonderful tools you've dropped a little hints of we'll put these in the show notes and give people some links to follow up but where else can they track you down and find more of the things we're working on course the unmistakable creative podcast is a wonderful show I may be biased cuz I think I was on it but it's a great show so folks should definitely check that out but where else can they find the things you're doing where can they pick on folks you're working on sustainable creative is the main place but I also have a substantial presence on medium I think my school I think my user name for some reason is still my old Twitter handle it's medium calm slash at school of life s Kol of life and if you do a search for unmistakeable CEO medium you'll find me there okay so our guest today was srini rao thanks so much for calling in and giving a little bit of a hint into all the different ways you hack your productivity and how you view creativity has been really informative for our viewers and we hope to have you back at some point so folks this has been another episode of headfirst dr. Hill take care of those brains [Music]