THE SYNCREATE PODCAST: EMPOWERING CREATIVITY
HOSTED BY MELINDA ROTHOUSE, PHD
WELCOME TO SYNCREATE, A SHOW FOR CREATIVE SEEKERS. WE EXPLORE THE DEEP HUMAN STORIES OF CREATIVITY, PSYCHOLOGY, AND SPIRITUALITY. OUR GOAL IS TO DEMYSTIFY THE CREATIVE PROCESS,
AND EXPAND THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE CREATIVE.
SUBSCRIBE / FOLLOW US ON SPOTIFY, APPLE PODCASTS, YOUTUBE
OR WHEREVER YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS
HOSTED BY MELINDA ROTHOUSE, PHD
WELCOME TO SYNCREATE, A SHOW FOR CREATIVE SEEKERS. WE EXPLORE THE DEEP HUMAN STORIES OF CREATIVITY, PSYCHOLOGY, AND SPIRITUALITY. OUR GOAL IS TO DEMYSTIFY THE CREATIVE PROCESS,
AND EXPAND THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE CREATIVE.
SUBSCRIBE / FOLLOW US ON SPOTIFY, APPLE PODCASTS, YOUTUBE
OR WHEREVER YOU GET YOUR PODCASTS
EPISODE 128: CREATIVE FLOW AND FOCUS - ADVICE FROM A HOLLYWOOD
STUDIO PRO WITH SUKHA FOUNDER STEVEN PURI
LISTEN TO THE FULL AUDIO EPISODE HERE:
WATCH THE FULL VIDEO VERSION HERE:
Following a successful career as a Hollywood visual effects designer and studio executive, Steven Puri pivoted to start The Sukha Company, a flow state platform that helps creative professionals work more effectively, more productively, and with more joy. As a studio executive at Dreamworks and 20th Century Fox, and producer on films from Die Hard 5 to The Wolverine, he learned how to inspire a broad range of teams. Our conversation includes insights from Steven’s experiences working with creative teams, as well as his entrepreneurial shift to becoming the Founder and CEO of Sukha, and the science and psychology of flow states.
For our Creativity Pro-Tip, Steven says: Tomorrow, when you wake up, think of the one thing you could do that would move your life forward before you touch your phone. Don't go to sleep until that's done. If you repeat that for 30 days, your life will be different.”
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced at Record ATX studios with in collaboration Michael Osborne and 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Syncreate logo design by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode and want to learn more about the creative process in a variety of contexts, you might also like our conversations in
Episode 123: The Surface Area of Serendipity with with Tech Entrepreneur Charles Cadbury
Episode 125: Figuring it Out with Film Producer & Entrepreneur Marco de Molina
Episode 127: The Power of Silence with Olga Lehmann, PhD
At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or a new venture, and you’re not sure how to get it off the ground, find us at syncreate.org. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals. We also offer resources, creative process tools, and coaching to help you bring your work to the world. You can find more information on our website, where you can also find all of our podcast episodes.
Find and connect with us on social media and YouTube under Syncreate.
If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review!
We’d love to hear your feedback as well, so drop us a line at [email protected].
For our Creativity Pro-Tip, Steven says: Tomorrow, when you wake up, think of the one thing you could do that would move your life forward before you touch your phone. Don't go to sleep until that's done. If you repeat that for 30 days, your life will be different.”
Credits: The Syncreate podcast is created and hosted by Melinda Rothouse, and produced at Record ATX studios with in collaboration Michael Osborne and 14th Street Studios in Austin, Texas. Syncreate logo design by Dreux Carpenter.
If you enjoy this episode and want to learn more about the creative process in a variety of contexts, you might also like our conversations in
Episode 123: The Surface Area of Serendipity with with Tech Entrepreneur Charles Cadbury
Episode 125: Figuring it Out with Film Producer & Entrepreneur Marco de Molina
Episode 127: The Power of Silence with Olga Lehmann, PhD
At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or a new venture, and you’re not sure how to get it off the ground, find us at syncreate.org. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your creative goals. We also offer resources, creative process tools, and coaching to help you bring your work to the world. You can find more information on our website, where you can also find all of our podcast episodes.
Find and connect with us on social media and YouTube under Syncreate.
If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review!
We’d love to hear your feedback as well, so drop us a line at [email protected].
EPISODE-SPECIFIC HYPERLINKS
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Melinda: Welcome to Syncreate, a show for creative seekers. We explore the deep human stories of creativity, psychology, and spirituality. We believe everyone has the capacity to create. Our goal is to demystify the process and expand the boundaries of what it means to be creative. What holds us back, why do we get stuck, and how can we fully embrace our creativity? We talk with visionaries and change makers and everyday creatives, working in a wide range of fields and media - from the arts to science, technology, and business.
We aim to illuminate the creative process, from imagination to innovation and everything in between. I'm Melinda Rothhouse, and I help individuals and organizations bring their dreams and visions to life. At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or a new venture and you're not quite sure how to get it off the ground, find us at syncreate.org. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your goals. We also offer resources, creative process tools, and coaching to help you bring your work to the world.
One of our favorite creativity tools is Sukha, a flow state website that helps people find their focus and finish their work faster. Unlike other websites that offer a single feature, Sukha offers everything you need to get into flow: scientifically designed focus music, distraction blocking on desktop and phone, Pomodoro timers, help breaking down tasks, and a fun community. I've tried it myself, and it really works. Transform your life in just 1 hour. You can try it for 3 days free, and if you enjoy it, receive a 20% discount on membership with the discount code SYNCREATE. That's all caps: S-Y-N-C-R-E-A-T-E.
My guest today is Steven Puri. He's a former Hollywood video effects producer and studio executive at DreamWorks and 20th Century Fox, turned tech entrepreneur. From working on blockbuster films like Independence Day and Star Trek, he now helps people maximize their creative flow and focus with the Sukha app. Welcome, Steven.
Steven: Well, it's good to be here.
Melinda: Yeah!
Steven: This is one of your more engaging and helpful episodes.
Melinda: I hope so too.
Steven: The bar is high.
Melinda: Oh, yes, definitely. But so glad to have you, and so glad you reached out. We've been chatting for a while now.
Steven: Through a lot of your travels.
Melinda: Yes. And your adventures as well.
Steven: We both get around, yes.
Melinda: Yeah. Exactly. But the fact that we could both be here in person, I think, is awesome.
Steven: Yes.
Melinda: Very special. So let's kind of dive into it. I think, kind of one of the first things I wanted to ask you is, you know… I know you've got a lot of stories. You've been doing a lot of different shows, so maybe bringing out something that's a little different here today. Stories from the, you know, Hollywood studio scene.
Steven: I've heard about that. Murky.
Melinda: Yes.
Steven: Murky at best.
Melinda: A murky space, right? So I'm curious - because we'll get to talking about your app and your work around productivity - you know, any instances particularly come to mind where there was a particular creative challenge in a studio environment (of which I'm sure there are plenty), and kind of how a particular team was able to work through that? A particular, like, block or an obstacle. And how you and they found their way through.
Steven: Well, it's a good question. And let me lay out that my experience in film, you know… because I began in tech and I'm back in tech. But my time in film was really divided between producing visual effects, digital visual effects, stuff like that. And I did about 14 movies there, and titles and all that. So that was the True Lies, Independence Day 7, Braveheart kind of era. And then -
Melinda: A few little films. (Laughter)
Steven: Some, you know… everyone tries to make a good film, but it's hard.
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: So some are worth mentioning, some are like, “I hope that doesn't come up.”
Melinda: Right. (Laughter)
Steven: So then, you know, in my producing and studio executive career, you know, that's pretty much straight-up action movies. That's like, the Die Hards, Wolverines, and then, you know, the DreamWorks years and the Star Treks and the Transformers, and all that stuff. So what I want to say with that preface is every production has, like you said, obstacles and blocks. There are common threads. They're like, “Oh, it's this thing again.” So there are things that I've seen that work repeatedly, and there are things that sort of come out of, like, the spirit of the team.
Like, there's a fundamental belief in how and why we're doing this. That generally informs that technique, okay? So sometimes, especially when I speak to live audiences, there are a lot of writers who want to ask questions about, like, “How do I use my screenplay in this and writing?” And blah, blah, blah, right? And how do I preserve my vision? And my answer is usually, “Write a novel.” (Laughter) “You're going to have a lot more control.”
Melinda: Yeah. Don't try to make a film.
Steven: Right. If you are going to be precious about this, that's your… go win a Pulitzer. God bless. Right? But when you say, “Hey, these 120 pages, we kind of need like, $120 million to make them real…”, there are going to be a lot of people with opinions. On what that's going to look like, right? So don't go into this if you are not ready to collaborate. Write a book. Write a haiku. (Laughter) Anything. Just write something on your own, okay? Now, that said, if you are hell-bent on becoming a screenwriter and you want to do this, you are going to be one of the inputs into this final product, right? And there are many inputs. There's, you know, costumers, there are production designers, there are set designers, there's obviously the director, cinematographer. Like, there's a lot. And actors and the whole thing.
And then, you know, eventually editors and post-production people. So, the thing that I've seen is this: yes, you very often end up with two people who have a vision of what the thing should be, and those two visions are incompatible. Not shades of the same thing, but two distinctly different choices. The score, the character's hair, the costume, the, you know, whether this line of dialogue is better or worse than the dialogue that's written. Like that sort of thing, right? And what I've seen is this: when the approach is not, “This is what I wrote, I am right,” but when the approach is, “What's the best idea?” And you sort of divorce yourself or divorce the room of any sort of proprietary nature of, like, “Well, that's what it was. That's how she wrote it. That's what it was in the prequel.” You know?
And you just go, “What's the best here?” It does free you up, but it means you have to give up some of your proprietary feelings of this. When you have slaved over a screenplay, let's not joke, it's like your baby. I mean, you have those pages, you have gotten notes from everybody under the sun (and hopefully eventually studio executives and financiers), and your movie's going to be made. And, like, there are a lot… it's not just, like, “My mom read it.” It is, like, “People who read hundreds of scripts a month have given me notes, and I've done rewrites till I'm… you know, my fingers are red.” Right?
So toward that end, that's really what I think is true across many circumstances. I can give you one specific example that's kind of fun, and I'm going to falsify the details a bit out of respect. But this is one. After I had done a bunch of stuff in, you know, digital effects m, and was then an executive vice president at DreamWorks for Kurtzman Orci, right? For Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci there. And in that period of time, you know, I felt confident around talented people. I had worked with Jim Cameron, Mel Gibson doing Braveheart, you know. Like, Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch, you know, lots of people, right? You know, like, these are really great filmmakers.
These are people at the top of their craft. I will tell you the project that I brought in. The first time we had a meeting in Steven’s private conference room office office, we were… we had a bungalow in the little Amblin, you know, compound. It's all like, Adobe Southwestern, you know, thing with the… you know, Navajo rugs on the whole Steven thing. It looks production design. It's beautiful, the Amblin compound, right?
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: So I remember the first time having a meeting. It was, like, Steven, Stacey (who was the chairman), the president of DreamWorks, some more DreamWorks executives, the writers, producers. Like, I had a pinch-me moment. It was, like, no matter where I had been, I was still like, “Wow, my career’s ended up that I'm sitting in a story meeting with Steven Spielberg.”
Melinda: Pretty cool. (Laughter)
Steven: Like, he's right there.
Melinda: Yeah. Right!
Steven: And we're debating story points, right? I was like, “Wow.” Got to meet him. Of course, externally, you have to be like, "I'm totally cool. I belong here.” You know, you got to play cool, right?
Melinda: “It's normal. It's fine.”
Steven: So the funny thing is this: the project involved an alien, and Steven has done some alien movies of note, right? He knows a bit.
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: You're not going to teach Steven a lot about World War II. (Laughter)
Melinda: Right.
Steven: Or alien movies. He's like, “I got you.”
Melinda: Right.
Steven: Right? So… and I'm going to falsify these details a bit, but we were on a story point, and Stephen said something akin to, “Okay, so that's when the alien, you know, comes through the wall, and we discover that it's allergic or it's weak. It's Achilles' heel is water or something…” Right? And at the time he was presenting this, there was someone coming through the room that I shall refer to as Coffee Boy, okay? And Coffee Boy says, without being prompted, “I feel like we saw that last year in so-and-so's movie where they did that. What if it weren't coming through the wall? It was coming through the window, and it wasn't really, like, water. It was something else.” Right? And I thought to myself, “Oh, that's so adorable. Like, that's the last time we see Coffee Boy.” (Laughter)
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: He'll be dismembered and put in the trash out back. (Laughter)
Melinda: Right.
Steven: It was like, remember him? I know the Mercer dies, right? And Steven, to his credit, thought about it for a second and said, "Yeah, that's better. We should go with that." And the meeting just moved forward.
Melinda: Wow. Wow.
Steven: It wasn't like Coffee Boy said something about Steven’s idea. (Laughter)
Melinda: Right.
Steven: It was just totally normal. Like, “Yeah, that's actually better than that. Let’s go with that.” And the meeting went on. And that was emblematic or symptomatic of the kind of confidence when you're like, “It's not about my idea. I said water going through the wall. It just has to be that beat where the alien's Achilles' heel is revealed, and whatever the coolest detail is, that's a cooler detail. Go with it.” Right?
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: That's all it was about. Not like, “I am Steven Spielberg. Thou shalt bow down.” Right?
Melinda: Right.
Steven: And you do see sometimes in people's careers where, you know, there are a lot of egos involved. I've had an ego, and I've fallen victim to it too, so I'm not immune to this. But you do have a hit, and then right after that, you think that you're Zeus (laughter) and, you know, you're omniscient and omnipotent. And sometimes you don't take the notes that you would have taken before. Like, when you were going through the process of the thing that made you successful. Your big hit, often it's a creatively fraught process with tension and, you know, division, and you have to prove things.
And then right as soon as you've had this hit, everyone's like, “Oh, my goodness. I mean, you're a genius. Like, who am I to give you a note? Let's just shoot.” And I've seen that where this next one is, like, not as good. And you're like, “What happened? Everyone told me I was a genius.” And it's like -
Melinda: They went back to a formula.
Steven: Right. And hopefully you migrate to best idea wins. So a long story for you, but I think it's spiritually that thing of not being possessive, proprietary. But saying, like, the material itself deserves the best. Who can contribute the best thing in this moment? The line, the hairstyle, the costume, whatever.
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah. And there's a few things I really love about that because, you know, connected with creativity and what we know about the creative process, you have to be flexible.
Steven: Mm-hmm. True.
Melinda: You know, you can't be so tied to your one idea. You have to kind of park your ego at the door. Especially if you're going to be collaborating. Right? And you have to be open to other ideas.
Steven: You have to be. And there are… this is not to say there aren't very talented, skilled people who are experts. And when they say, "Actually, this thing should be blue…”, they're correct.
Melinda: Right.
Steven: They know what they're talking about. So there's a bit of when you are in that position, you have to know when to sort of put your foot down. If that's your decision as the director. You can listen to everyone. But if you're like, “No, it absolutely should be this. Trust me on this one.” Maybe in that instance, you're right. Like, I've worked with Fincher. We did 7 with, like, the visual effects and the titles and the whole thing, and Cameron with True Lies. And very, like, hard to work for, difficult people, but they know the craft underneath them. Like, if they want to have a conversation about color timing, they can speak to the color timer in color timer language.
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: And that I have great respect for that.
Melinda: Sure.
Steven: As long as you don't bully someone, right?
Melinda: Of course. Of course.
Steven: So you do have to know sometimes it's not about, like, “Hey. You know, we're all just loosey-goosey, like, taking everyone's input.” These are things that are really important, but if a better idea comes along, I can recognize that. You know?
Melinda: Absolutely. It's a fine line, I'm sure. But actually, this makes me wonder because, you know, I've talked to creatives in all different fields and media -
Steven: I've seen that. Yeah.
Melinda: - and leaders in, you know, different business contexts. And so… and some of my own research has been on sort of team creativity and collaboration. And obviously, we know some teams work really well and others do not. So what are the sort of ingredients of a great production team? (Laughter)
Steven: Well, this is not something I speak about very frequently, but I'll give you my opinion.
Melinda: Okay. Good. We got something novel.
Steven: And let me always say, like, there are some things I'm like, “Water's wet. The sun is hot…” Right? And I'm like, “Just don't argue with me about this. They're right.” And there are things like this where I have an opinion.
Melinda: Sure.
Steven: Is it better than yours? Don't know, but I'll share my opinion since you asked.
Melinda: Please. Yeah.
Steven: Okay. So I do think that on the creative teams, you need to have a mediator, if you will. You need to have someone who, when there is that, “No, her hairstyle should be a bob.” “No, it should be down…” Just, they're two incompatible things, right? That does have the final say. You can't have decisions by committee. On something like that, or you end up with, I mean, name the movie. It just feels like, I don't know… I don't want to be mean. You know what I'm talking about, right?
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: So I think that's really important that you have someone who knows how to mediate creative conflict. But also has final approval to go, “No, you know what? It's going to be a bob. Let's move on. We don't need to revisit this, right? And everyone just be adults. Let's go to the next, you know, hair and makeup test.” So there is that. And then, again, when you have department heads that are very talented, you know, they're going to have opinions. You know, some of them have awards on their mantle. (Laughter)
You know, they're like, “You're a great, you know, costumer. You're a great…” You know. So with people like that, you do need to cast them, not to misappropriate the term, but you sort of cast your crew to make sure that they're bringing what they can bring in a way that is compatible with the other people there, you know?
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: And it is true. Sometimes the difficulties you have on set are because it was just like, “Oh, we have to have exactly this DP.” But the DP does not, you know, get along with this particular talent or something. You know, sometimes you have the talent feel… like, you really just want a robot that comes and hits your mark here and goes over there and says a line, and then hits the mark over there. That's what you want.
And the DP is like, “Kind of, yeah. I just want to set up these exact shots this way that have no flexibility for you to have any interaction, you know, spontaneous with another actor because I need to know you're always, like, pulled focus.” And you're like, “That's great in certain movies with certain directors. That's great.” I mean, we've all seen the jokes of how many actors have to, you know, act to a hanging tennis ball.
Melinda: Yeah. (Laughter) Right. Right.
Steven: Over a process screen, you know? But if you're trying to get a great performance, you may need - and you hire someone who's a great actor, but has a point of view on this - you may need to look out for those sort of incompatibilities, shall we say, where it's like, “Yeah, I know this is an effect scene, but we're going to have to give them the leeway to walk into the other character's space or something to really emphasize it.” Like, we can't just lock them off four feet from each other and pretend they're having an argument, you know? Something like that.
Melinda: Right. Right. Yeah. Okay.
Steven: Where do you want to go next?
Melinda: Interesting - the secrets of a good team. Well -
Steven: These are opinions. They're not just secrets. They're opinions.
Melinda: Well, according to someone who has some experience in the matter. So. I'm curious, you know, on this show, we're often looking at sort of people's creative trajectories. And, you know, for those out there who are maybe just at the beginning of a creative career, like, how do you get from A to Z? There's no clear roadmap most -
Steven: True.
Melinda: - of the time. So you mentioned that you started out in tech. You came into Hollywood.
Steven: Yep.
Melinda: Like, did you imagine that you would end up being a studio executive?
Steven: No.
Melinda: Or, like, how did that come together?
Steven: I am the son of two engineers at IBM, okay? (Laughter) To be super clear, mom and dad were engineers. There was no amount of, "Let's go to the movies and dissect them on Friday night…” Right? There was like, “How's your math homework?” So I learned, you know, as one does, if your parents are great ice skaters, you probably osmotically learned how to ice skate when you're little just because that's what your parents did, right? Okay. So I knew how to code, right? I was a little code monkey. I loved it. I loved hacking. I loved… we used to pirate video games and try and understand how they were encoded and decoded. You know, that whole… that was super fun, right?
So that said, when I went to USC, which is, if not the best, one of the best cinema TV schools in the world, right? I was not in the cinema TV school. It was not my interest. I was studying business and journalism on the side, because I was a Watson scholar, I got to work for IBM as a junior software engineer making cash. Cash money to spend on school, right? Which was fun. So I'm doing that. You know, a lot of your friends in the dorm are cinema TV students, you know, aspiring Spielbergs and Lucases and Scorseses and all that, right? So you do end up Tuesday night going to see some weird art film with them at the, you know, Doheny, whatever, and going to a diner late night and debating, you know, black and white film, whatever, right?
So you do some of that and get some exposure. My entrée into film, as many things in my life have been… as you said, like, it's not a linear path. Even most of my friends have followed. It's a lot of, like, Forrest Gump-like, “I was there for that, and I just happened to be…” Right? So I happen to be with this experience somewhat, you know, exposed to creative conversation and also exposed to engineering and technical conversation. I was there in LA when film went digital. There was a great demand for people who could speak those two languages. I was in that small subset. “Hey, kid, do you want to come here and start making digital effects?” “Sure. How does it pay?” You know? (Laughter)
Started doing that, and it worked out really well. I happened to be around really smart people. Like, the industry, the digital visual effects industry was relatively small because it had been done optically before, right? So I got to work with people that were incredibly generous with their knowledge. You know, it was a very young field. And I mean, not, like, young, young, like, that year, but in terms of exploding, it was like -
Melinda: Early days, yeah.
Steven: - you had access, yeah, to the people whose names like, John Knoll, who wrote Photoshop. Like, today, you don't get access to people like that very often, right? And there, they're just, like, writing the next version. You're like, "Yeah, I have some improvements…” You know? So this was how I got into film. And that was, for me, a great exposure because, like, when I worked on those films, even doing, like, Jim Jarmusch's film, Dead Man, the one with with Johnny Depp, like, you wouldn't traditionally think of that as an effects film. Like, why do you need digital effects for that?
Melinda: Right.
Steven: But there were some things… there are effects in the movie. You just hopefully don't see because we did our job well.
Melinda: Because they're so seamless. (Laughter)
Steven: Right. Let's pray, right? And it's a weird, grainy, black-and-white, you know, kind of movie. And at the same time, I’m working with these people, I'm deepening my understanding of their filmography to really appreciate them. It'd be different than a cinema TV student being like, “Jim, I've seen all 7,000 of your films. Twice, forwards and backwards, with and without subtitles.” And I'm more like, “Oh, before we got this gig, like, I watched two of his films to get his vibe…” You know?
And then, as you're working together, you sort of go, “Oh, I get now, like, why he's the guy that does this.” So that said, that, of course, led to, “Okay, I think I want to go upstream. I want to work with writers actually getting movies made as opposed to someone else gets it green-lit, and they hire me to be making part of the film," right? That was a big… that was the next big transition.
Melinda: Yeah. Like, a bigger part.
Steven: Yeah. So, that was kind of my sort of weird thing of, like, USC led to digital film, which led to film, and a lot of luck in there. Like, let's let us not underestimate the power of just, like, being in the right spot.
Melinda: At the right time.
Steven: Being in the chorus line. And someone's like, “Hey, you! Kid in the back. You sing. You dance. Come here.” You know? So, if I bring that back to your question about how to get into the business today, like, what is the career path for someone who is a young writer, a young filmmaker? Acting is a whole other ball of wax, right? But now there are so many tools available, and there are so many ways to prove out your ideas. Like, it's amazing to think you could make a movie that looks like $100 million on screen if you just buckle down, learn the tools, you know, the clings and all that.
And the editing. And just did it. Just devoted a lot of time each week to doing it, you could kind of make that. It may not be good. Your first movie, your first screenplay generally isn't, but wow, what an opportunity because all of film… like, the joke about writing is rewriting. All of film is getting experience and improving the next round. It's just iterating, you know?
Melinda: Of course.
Steven: So that is the advice I would give - is you don't necessarily need to focus on, “Oh, I have to go get this sold. I have to go get an agent.” As opposed to develop your craft a bit to the point where you attract interest. And your network will become important.
Melinda: Yeah. Absolutely.
Steven: It is a business of no one knows empirical truth. You know what I mean? Like, two plus two is not always equal to four in film. Sometimes two plus two equals, "Oh, that failed." And then two months later, two plus two is a billion dollars. You know what I mean? There's a lot of variability in there. There's a very complex equation of what becomes a commercially hit or an artistic hit. So because of that, relationships are really important because no one really knows anything, as Bill Goldman said, you know?
Like, you have to have those relationships that allow you to get into the doors once you have something good. But the thing is, if you have the network and you get in the doors ,and what you have is not good, you’ve just made your friends look bad for getting you in the room, right? You got to do one before the other.
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah. And I've heard this before, you know, and I've practiced it myself, actually. It's, you know, like, don't wait for somebody else to come along and tap you on the head. It's like, make your own work and put it out there. And, you know, that’s -
Steven: So true. Like, if you're a TV writer or even if you're writing in film, there are so many opportunities for you to say, “Oh, I love this current TV or YouTube series. Let me write a spec episode.” The characters are kind of laid out for you. There's a great template. And then you can demonstrate, "Oh, I can write to that template. I could be a staff writer on this show or on this YouTube series or whatever.” You know what I mean?
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah.
Steven: So that's available for free! Sit down, spend a couple hours, write it, rewrite it, you know?
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So fast forward a little bit. You're at, like, what sounds like the pinnacle of a Hollywood career. (Laughter) Why did you pivot?
Steven: (Laughter) Dreamworks or Fox?
Melinda: Yeah. Well, why did you pivot and to do what you're doing now, which is back to tech and a productivity and focus app?
Steven: We're in flow states. Flow states are really, really interesting to me.
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah.
Steven: And the thing that struck me is when I first experienced a flow state. And I know some people are like, "I know what that is…” and others are like, "I don’t." We'll define it in a moment, okay? So don't be worried, right? But when I first experienced that, it was kind of by accident. And then I was having dinner with a friend who was like, "Oh, dude. You know, it was a flow state. Have you never experienced that?" And I was like, "I wish I knew about this in college.” (Laughter) Though it had changed my college career.
It would have changed a lot. And it was weird because I was flying from here, (laughter) which I can say with you, flying from here to San Francisco. And the next day, I had a meeting with my team. And I thought, on the flight, Alaska runs the nonstop from here to SF.
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah.
Steven: On the flight, I'm going to mock up this idea with my hack-y little Figma skills enough that we can talk it through. And if everyone likes it, designers can make it real and engineers can make… you know, pretty it up, right? Get on the flight. Captain's like, “Hey, kid. Sorry, Wi-Fi's out.” Right? “Okay.” Start working. 15 minutes later, we start descending. And I was like, “Oh, we're at DFW. Like, something's wrong with this airframe. They're going to tell us when we're safely on the ground.” Like, “Oh, the hydraulics are not working right. We're going to get a new aircraft and fly to San Francisco.” We were in San Francisco.
Melinda: Wow.
Steven: I had no idea. I didn't know if the drink cart had come down the aisle. I didn't know the people in my row. I knew nothing. And I was like, “What just happened?” And my designs were done.
Melinda: Time disappears, yeah.
Steven: And I liked them. So maybe you've done this. I had, in my mind, prepped myself for getting the Uber, grab a sandwich in the hotel lobby, go up to the room, sit at the ugly little desk, and try and finish this and pass out for the morning, right?
Melinda: Right.
Steven: I got in the Uber. I called a buddy of mine. I was like, “Hey, man. I have a free night in SF. Do you want to have dinner?” And I told him, like, I was on the flight. I'm like, “My designs are done. I feel good about them. Like, I thought I'd be working all night on this stuff.” And he was like, “You're in a flow state.” And I was like, “Huh?”
Melinda: "What?” (Laughter)
Steven: And then yeah, exactly. And then when he was like, “How do you not…” Again, he's in SF, so there's a biohacking culture. There's a more early awareness of things like this. I probably should have been microdosing, you know, psilocybin at the same time.
Melinda: Yeah. (Laughter) Exactly. Exactly.
Steven: He's like, "You're still behind the times.” But that led me to start understanding more about that and that, like, I have a son now, whom I'm going to pick up after this. And see his little cheeks.
Melinda: Aww.
Steven: Pinch his little cheeks. And that really led me to think about even the contemplation of doing that with my wife of, like, “Okay, we're going to have a child. We're going to… this is the world we want to bring a little soul into.” Right? Thinking a lot about, what is my generation, our generation, giving to the next one? The ones who are coming up now. And I want to believe it's something more meaningful than how to scroll and double tap. “Oh, you want to waste your life? We made some great tools for you. (Laughter) All of them basically involve you scrolling and double tapping.” You're like, “Ah.” And waste your life. That's cool. Is that good?
So I think that's criminal. I mean, it's so icky that Zuck has casino game designers on staff just to go like, “Hey, man. We made a generation of gambling addicts. Can we make this that addictive and have that many people lose, you know, their futures?” Right? So those things sort of came together, the idea of, like, “Wow, flow states are kind of amazing.” They do help me because I procrastinate. I do get distracted. I found as an adult, I have ADHD.
I got medically diagnosed because in the Sukha community, there's an ADHD coach with whom I've become friendly over the past couple of years. And she was like, “Have you ever been diagnosed?” (Laughter) And I was like, “No.” “Have you ever been tested?” “No." She's like, “Just check.”
Melinda: You want to check it out? (Laughter)
Steven: That was pretty much what she DM'd me. She's like, “You might want to go check that out.” Boom. She was right. She's an ADHD coach, and I love her very much. And she's in Costa Rica, maybe watching this. So, the fact that flow states really helped me made it less of a coincidence for me that I was like, “Oh, this is what we should create because I procrastinate. I do get distracted.” You know, I have a child now, so time is even more precious. There's less time that I want to spend like, “Oh, yeah. I did spend 30 minutes watching that other YouTube video after I watched the one that I should have.”
You know what I mean, that thing? And then you have this whole world of the billionaires who make these apps to steal your life.
Melinda: And the infinite distractions.
Steven: Infinite. Life is designed to distract. I mean, that's the thing is… do you remember, like, 10 years ago, Zuck would have to go and testify in Congress? And they'd be like, you know, some old congressman, “All you have to do is… oh, we make, you know, an app so grandmothers can see their grandkids' videos.”
Melinda: Yeah. That’s sweet. (Laughter)
Steven: You know, like, this little “aw, shucks” thing. Like, “Oh, Senator. Hahaha.” We're just… you know, you listen to the shareholder calls now. There is no “aw, shucks” about it. It is… we deployed these techniques that we found from casino gaming. We have behavioral economists on this to steal more people's time. Which, by the way, we call shareholder value. And this is how much of it we got. So our revenues went up. We showed more ads. And next quarter, we have new techniques to steal more people's lives and make them more addicted.
And by the way, if they're four years old, six years old, we don't care. There's no “We'll tell you we care about if your children are addicted.” “We don't care. We want their eyeballs. We sell ads.” Right?
Melinda: Hence the lawsuits we see about in the headlines currently.
Steven: I know. Exactly. Yeah. So that to me, those two forces, this one I consider to be criminal, not just in the legal sense, in the spiritual sense, where the contempt you have to have for humankind to say, “I am making something and doing everything I can to make sure you don't do anything with your life. My tool makes you waste your life.” That's a tremendous amount of contempt.
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: And if you believe, which I do, that we all have something great inside us -
Melinda: Absolutely.
Steven: It may be the next great American novel. It may be a restaurant you're going to start. It may be an app you're going to create. It may be raising a child to start one, whatever it is. But you have some greatness. And the question for life is not, “Do you have it?” The question is, “Are you going to get it out?” Or are you going to be one of those people that go to your grave with like -
Melinda: It was such a great idea. (Laughter)
Steven: Exactly. You know, “I was going to write that movie. I just, yeah, I scrolled a lot. I liked a lot. I sent some DMs on Instagram. I'm really proud of that.” You know what I mean?
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: So that's what got me super excited about this.
Melinda: How do you induce a flow state?
Steven: Ooh, there's a lot of research on that. Yeah. And let me say, anything really smart that I say is because some really smart people have spent their lives studying this. So it is not like, “I am the person who did this.” I am luckily the person who has read and watched and learned a lot about it and want to share it and took a lot of this knowledge. That's why I made the website because I'm lazy. And I was like, “I don't want to have all these different pieces.” In the morning when I start work, I just want a website. There's a play button right in the middle. I hit play. It does everything for me. I just start my little work, get in my flow state, right? So -
Melinda: But if you are curious to learn more about flow states, there's a researcher, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Steven: Yes.
Melinda: Who has written extensively about this topic and kind of the parameters of what is a flow state.
Steven: This is true. So, let's define that just for those playing along at home or in the car. So Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, as you said, was a Hungarian-American psychologist who had a thesis. He said - and I'm being somewhat, you know, funny about this - but he said, you know, “Isn't it weird the way when you talk to high performers in different disciplines, athletes, artists, scientists, and they talk about the highly concentrated state where they do the thing that makes them famous, they talk about it in very similar terms.” Even though what they're doing is very different. And he's like, “There's something to that. There's something there.”
So, you know, he did the research and the interviews and all that. And at the end of it, he wrote the book Flow, which is the seminal work. It's why we call it a flow state. And he said the greatest thing. I love this. He's like, "Many of the people with whom I spoke, they have their own, you know, words for it. Michael Jordan's in the zone. It's just him and the ball. You know, Picasso has his muses. Einstein has his thought experiments. These jazz musicians had the…”
He’s like, “I chose flow because it was the most beautiful metaphor for what I found. We are all on the river paddling to move ourselves forward. But when we align our boat with the current, it carries us.” It magnifies our efforts to go further and faster. And that is what these people have figured out how to do and do it repeatably.
Melinda: And as you described, you sort of lose track of time.
Steven: Yeah!
Melinda: You’re completely absorbed in the task.
Steven: See, you know about this.
Melinda: It feels effortless. You know?
Steven: You become one with the work.
Melinda: Yeah. I feel that often when I'm writing or playing music. But one of the most notable times… I used to do some stained glass work. And it's very manual work. And you have to cut the glass and polish it, and solder it all together. And I would just lose hours. And it was that same kind of thing.
Steven: Yeah. It was stained glass.
Melinda: Like, “Where did the time go?” I didn't even notice it.
Steven: So, this is for those listening, this is one of the characteristics. You lose track of time. You're not staring at the clock like, "Oh, when's lunch?” You know, you generally do your best work faster than you thought possible. Like, you become one with the work. You become immersed in it. Distractions become uninteresting because you're actually into what you're doing. And often at the end of it, you can feel a sense of uplift or joy as opposed to a sense of depletion like, “Oh, I'm so tired.” You actually feel like, “That was great. Like, where do I go from here?”
And Mihaly, you know, wrote about there seems to be some conditions precedent that help you get there. And he said, “All the people with whom I spoke, you have to believe what you're doing is meaningful.” Like, if you think you're doing something stupid, like, you're not going to get into flow. He said, “You have to have skills that apply.” So, like the joke goes, you know, it's not Michael Jordan painting or Picasso playing a you know, throwing a basketball around, right? And doing the thing, you have to be doing it at a level that challenges you. Like, you have skills, and you're not just half-assing it.
You're actually like, “I want to write something great today.” You know, just blog post. Right? It doesn't have to be like, game seven of the NBA Finals. It can be, “I just want to write a beautiful haiku.” But your goal is to, like, challenge yourself to do something great, right? And, you know, there are other - obviously, this is a little reductive - but there's other sort of characteristics to it, conditions, you know, to get you in. And he said, and he wrote about this subsequently that it is not a woo-woo, like you imagine this state.
Charles Lim at Johns Hopkins, you ever read about his stuff? Like, there was for a while that feeling of like, “Oh, yeah, flow state. Oh, sure. You're just concentrating really hard. You have another name for concentration.” Right? No, not really. “Okay, so some of Mihaly real inspirations were like, freestyle rappers, jazz musicians that report… like, you get to a place where you're like in the music.
Melinda: You're in it. It's like, coming through you, not from you. Right. Right.
Steven: Right. Exactly. Yes. Right. So he said, “Okay, I have access to an fMRI machine.”
Melinda: Yeah. What's going on in there? (Laughter)
Steven: There's a neurological, you know, neurochemical sort of association. And what's interesting is the before and after with like, a jazz musician, before and after they reported… and this is where I was just like, the trio became one. We became one with the music. It was not the three of us playing. It was the music coming through us, like you said. Prefrontal cortex, like behind your forehead, that has a lot of that second-guessing, self-judgment, self-aware, like the… fell off a cliff. It was a measurable, “Oh, so you're not thinking about that.” Which you can imagine a freestyle rapper at speed.
Melinda: The moment you get self-conscious, forget it.
Steven: You're going to trip over your words. Yeah. You got to be like, “The beats don't stop just because you're second-guessing yourself.” Right?
Melinda: Right. Right. Right.
Steven: So that was fascinating where he was like, “Actually, there is evidence that this is a, you know, a neurological state you actually can go into.” And that is super cool to see someone say, “Okay, now we've established it's not just woo-woo. How do you get there?”
Melinda: Exactly.
Steven: And we can talk about that if you want.
Melinda: Let's do.
Steven: Okay. So we spent a bunch of time reading about this. There are some conditions that help you get in. Like we talked about with Mihaly, you have to have something that you're focused on that you think is meaningful. Like, when we were designing Sukha, there were like, kind of five components. And I was like, “How do we put these together?” Because I just want one play button. I'm lazy. I'm not going to open five things in the morning, right? So there was this sense of like, you have to be focused on your task.
So we only allow you, you know, clear visibility into your top task. You can have two additional ones for the session. And then we do recommend you take a break, stand up, go get some water, do something.
Melinda: You’ve got to take breaks.
Steven: So we have a Pomodoro timer. When you hit play, the timer starts. You can customize it. You know, Pomodoros come from Francesco Cirillo, who said - he's an Italian - said, “I think there's something to working 25 minutes, taking a five-minute break, repeating that cadence, and then taking a longer break after like two hours or so.” So, right? And he used a tomato kitchen timer, which is why it's Pomodoro technique, right? Okay. So those, again, playing along at home can be like, “What? Let's Google it.” So there's a Pomodoro timer to say, “Hey, there's a healthy cadence of when you should stretch or you should, you know, do something rather than just sit here and grind it out.”
And it will actually rejuvenate you for the next sprint. Right? And you can customize it in Sukha. You can click it and change it like, "Oh, no. I want to do a 45-minute sprint right now.” And that's the time I have, right? So your task stays visible. And we show you progress as you work. You know, the background of your little taskbar goes green to yellow as you approach your time box and then red if you go over. So you can just glance up and go like, “Okay, how am I doing?” And one of the coolest things is… and a lot of people are very into music. Like, people have, you know… the research shows that there's a sweet spot for flow music, okay? This is most people. We all have the outlier who's like -
Melinda: Of course.
Steven: - “I can only listen to '80s gangster rap.” You know. Or “Show Tunes” or “Classical," whatever.
Melinda: Right.
Steven: We all have that friend who's like, “Dre”. You know, right? (Laughter)
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Steven: “I can't do that because then I want to sing along and I'm lost.” And that's the funny thing about flow music… is it can't be music you love because then you're listening to the music.
Melinda: You're too distracted by it, right?
Steven: And it can't be music you hate because then you're like, “I hate this. I have to change it.” It's that weird middle band of like, it's sort of okay, but it lulls your brain into the work. And, you know, long melodic stretches that repeat 60 to 90 beats per minute, some key signatures like D minor more than others seem to work. And also a non-vocal, you know? So you're not singing along. Again, some people can do it. I can’t. You know, most of the music that we present - because having a bunch of friends who are film composers - with time on their hands.
Melinda: Nice.
Steven: I could go to them. We were setting this up and be like, “Hey, here are kind of the parameters. Can you write 60, 90 beats per minute, these key signatures, this kind of music, blah, blah, blah?” And got like, a thousand hours of, you know, tracks that are 20, 30 minutes long. Like, long tracks that lull you in, right? And initially thought, I mean, this is a little… hey, me being kind of foolish here, but initially thought, “Okay, we got it. Check. We got that covered. I press my button, music starts, timer starts, blah, blah, blah.” You know, distractions are blocked. We can just help you with your websites and apps and phone. Like, all the usual stuff.
We can basically turn that off for you. So if you pick up something, your little assistant goes, “Do you really need to be on Instagram right now?” And you're like, “Actually, no. I want to finish and go see my son…” Right? But here’s… I’m going to tell you a funny learning I learned. So a thousand hours of original music by, you know, film composers with time available. So, a buddy of mine, Julian, mixes Star Wars games for… he’s up from Ronin for LucasArts, right? Calls me up. He goes, “Hey, man. You working on that flow state thing still?” I was like, “Yes, I am.” He goes, “So I just got back from Nepal. Apparently, son did well.”
And that was their like, father-son graduation from high school, got in a good college trip because he wanted to go with his dad to Nepal. He's like, “I just got back from Nepal. One day we were there, it rained so hard in Kathmandu, we couldn't go out.” So I had some of my recording equipment. So, I recorded like, two hours of this lush, warm, delicious rain.
Melinda: Ambient sounds. Yes.
Steven: Right? Okay,. But wait, this doesn't go where you think it's going to go. So he was like, “I got back. I'm never going to use this in a Star Wars game. I don't know what I was thinking, but I remember you doing that app. Do you want it for the app?” And I was like, “Why not throw it up as its own playlist?” A two-hour loop of this rain. We called it Himalayan Dream Rain. It became our third most popular playlist.
Melinda: Interesting.
Steven: More than stuff that a lot of human energy went into.
Melinda: Spent a lot of time. Yeah. Yeah.
Steven: Okay. So I, being somewhat curious by nature and also running the platform, so I know everyone's email addresses. Chose some people listening to it and emailed them and said, “Could you speak to me for five minutes? Because I'd love to understand. Like, we paid a ton of money and put a ton of effort into these bespoke musical compositions. And you're listening to rain, which we got for free because Julian was trapped in his, you know, little bungalow, right?” (Laughter) So, if you were to reduce down everything they said, the people who said, “Oh, yeah, Charlotte's going to give her five minutes…”, it came down to this: “Rain reminds me of a time when I had to study really hard and it would pour. I was raised in Georgia. Around finals, it would always be those early summer storms. Our family had a lake house in Michigan.”
And it was always this thing of like, “It just triggers my brain back to, okay, there's nothing to do outside. It's raining out. I'm cloistered here doing my thing.” Right? So what does Steven do? Being an idiot, I was like, “Nature escapes.” (Laughter) We should have a category called Nature Escapes, right? So went and found recordings people had made of streams in Japan, the surf in Cyprus. Ooh, how exotic, right? You know, like the Emerald Lake up in Canada, some indigenous bird in Tony… my partner's up in Canada. So, I was like, "He'll love this," right? Put him up.” Flat line. (Laughter) No one cared.
Melinda: Okay. That’s interesting.
Steven: Zero. Nobody cared, right?
Melinda: Sure. Particular kinds of sounds.
Steven: But rain, huge hit. So funny thing comes out of this. So, I throw these up there. I kind of look at the metrics a little bit. I'm like, “Okay. You know, we did a rewrite. It wasn't a big hit. We're going to rewrite again.” Get a DM in the app from a blogger in the UK, whom I had seen her sign up, but I'd never reached out to be like, a fanboy. I was just like, “Oh, it's super cool. She gets in your writing.” First time ever, she DMs me. She goes, “Hey, Steven, I noticed you've been experimenting with non-musical playlists.” (Laughter) I’m like, “Yes, I have.”
Melinda: Oh, interesting.
Steven: Right. Some more than others. And she's like, “So everyone knows me as this blogger who goes to this cool…” (she’s just outside London), “…to this cool cafe. I'm like, the coffee shop writer, cafe writer. It's like, no one really knows. I had a child during COVID, and I can't really go to the coffee shop now with like, a two-year-old on my, you know, knee and be the cool artist-writer.”
Melinda: I know where you're going! Cafe background sounds.
Steven: Yes. She asked for that. She's like, “Any chance you could find this?” Some dude on the interwebs posted he had recorded at his local coffee shop in Vienna, Austria. I reached out to him. I was like, “Hey, man. Can we use this?” He's like, “You really want that?” (Laughter) I was like, “I do. Can I have it?” He's like, “Okay, cool.” Huge hit with writers.
Melinda: Wow. Yeah. Because it takes you to that place. And it's interesting how much the environment, you know, has to do with the kind of sounds that are around. And all those people that go to coffee shops to work, they're hearing those sounds.
Steven: That was it? So that, like, rain… huge hit. For the sum total effort of, “Hey, can I put that .WAV file up?”
Melinda: Interesting.
Steven: So, yeah, there have been a lot of learnings along those lines. And, you know, the basic components we put together, you know, were about, “Okay, let's block your distractions. Let's give you a nice timer. Let's make sure you stay on task. You know, let's give you beautiful music.” And then the final thing that came together (which is not necessarily a flow state thing, but it's actually a thing that I personally connect with the most), is I, at a certain point, maybe two years ago, I realized in kind of a hub-and-spoke way, I knew lots of members, but none of them knew each other. None of them even have a sense of anyone else in there. It was almost like a single… it’s like you're playing Pac-Man or something where it's like in the old days. Like, you're just there alone, right?
And I was like, “But the whole arcade is filled. You don't realize everyone's playing Pac-Man.” Right? So I had this idea. I was like, “What if people could share? What if people could get a sense of like, there's a community of people here?” Because let's be honest, this is not like Twitter or X or something, where people just flame each other and they tell each other stupid stuff. The people who come here and pay, you know, 10/15 bucks, whatever, a month, they're here because they're writers, they're designers, they're engineers.
They're generally nice people who want to do something, right? I don't have to worry about a lot of like, sex trolls trying to find like, 12-year-olds. (Laughter) So I thought, “What if there were like, a group chat or some ability to DM people and set up like, you know… like co-working sessions, like body doubling?”
Melinda: Yeah. Community space. Yeah.
Steven: I was like, “I want to do that.” So what did I do? You know me now. I reached out to a couple of members. “Can I kind of bounce some ideas off you? Can we Zoom for like five, ten minutes?” Right? One woman I spoke to made up my mind. I didn't need to talk to anyone else after that.
Melinda: Wow.
Steven: And I started describing this through intended turns. Like, “Imagine you had other people that were there, sort of in general sense of support.” You know, this whole… and I'm going to my preamble where I think I'm being very eloquent. And she just cuts me off. She goes, “Steven, let me tell you something. I can go to the Nike store and buy a pair of shoes. They will sell me a left shoe and a right shoe. I put them on my feet. I run. They work great. There's a reason why a hundred million people belong to the Nike Run Club. Because you run further, you run faster. The days you suck and your friends come by and like, get you off the sofa and you go run, it feels great to be part of something."
Melinda: Absolutely.
Steven: And when you do that for someone else, it feels even better. She's like, “You should do it.”
Melinda: Accountability and mutual support.
Steven: It is my favorite thing in the entire platform. More than the music, more than the little voice that's like, “Do you really need to be on Instagram?” You know, whatever. I go in there in the morning and you can see when people are proud of something. They can post one time a day something they finish.
Melinda: Oh, cool.
Steven: And you can ask them about it. Like, if a designer is like, “Oh, I just redesigned this website.” You're like, “Drop the URL.” Like, “Let's see what you did.” And it's just, it feels like I'm not alone.
Melinda: That's lovely. I was going to ask you, so what makes this app different from all the other focus and productivity apps out there?
Steven: There are a ton of apps that do one thing. Like, there are some very good music players like Focus@Will, Brain.fm, Endel. Like, they're very good music players. They are, you know. There are some really good like, distraction blockers - Cold Turkey, Freedom. If you just want to have like, your phone bricked, you can buy a… I think it's a device called a brick. It just bricks your phone. There are a bunch of single feature things that are very good. I just didn't want to have five things to start in the morning.
I wanted to have one play button. Like, literally open that window, hit play, start work. I didn't want to mess with all these. So that's what makes it different. And then, you know, in between sessions, like, you drop into the group chat and, you know, you see like, the same people and it's just -
Melinda: Yeah. You start to connect.
Steven: It's human. It's just something… there’s something about that that makes me happy. My proudest moment in doing Sukha is not, “Oh, I launched this feature. Oh my goodness, this was so cool.” No. Once a day… I mentioned, when you finish a task, once a day, you can post it to the group chat. So you can't spam it with like, every stupid thing you did.
Melinda: One time a day.
Steven: Yeah. One time a day, you go, “This is my most important task.” And it'll say, “Oh, you know, Steven finished launching his website in two hours and 50 minutes. Congratulations, Steven!” Right? Okay. So this guy, Roy King, posts, “Finished my dissertation.””
Melinda: Amazing. That's a big task.
Steven: So someone in there essentially wrote back like, “Hey, man. That’s kind of like, a mic drop. That's kind of…” (Laughter) Sort of casual. Where like, "Finished my dissertation. Okay, we'll off to dinner.” You know? We're like, “That's kind of a big deal.” So this guy writes back (Roy King, he writes back and he says, “Thanks for noticing that. I am an assistant vice principal of a high school in Missouri. And I'm also a dad and a husband.”
He said, “I've been working on my PhD in engineering. And what I find is I have an hour each day in between high school and being a good dad. I have an hour each day that I can move that forward and sometimes a little time on weekends. So I dive into Sukha because it really helps me maximize how much I get done in that time.” You get into a flow state, right? So he said, “But don't get too excited because I still have to defend it.” Right? Like, two weeks from Monday. I still have to go into the thing. So he's like, “Don't celebrate yet.”
So, I was like, “Okay, cool. That's really great.” The weekend before that Monday, people in the group chat that I know… I run the platform, I know that guy in Japan and the woman in Argentina and that couple in Spain, they do not know him. They remembered and they posted it in the group chat. “Hey, you know, you got this, Roy. Good luck on Monday, Roy.” You know, “I'm pulling for you, Roy.” And I was like, “That's really nice.” And on Monday, nothing from Roy. And someone posted like -
Melinda: What up?
Steven: Yeah. “Anyone hear from Roy King today?” You know? And nada. And Tuesday morning, Roy logged in and posted, “You may now call me Dr. King.”
Melinda: Aww. That's so sweet.
Steven: People went apeshit.
Melinda: I bet. I bet.
Steven: That's why Tony and I do this. He had the great thing. And he's like, “I'm not going to my grave without doing it. I'm going to get my PhD.” I think he was moving on from being a high school vice principal now and he's like, become an engineer. Like, he's making his dream real as opposed to being the guy who sits on the sofa going like, “Oh yeah, I could have gotten a PhD in engineering. I never got around to that.”
Melinda: And I think that story speaks to so many of us who have so much on our plate in this busy world. Between work and family and a million other things. And it can be so difficult to find the time. The time's there. We could be scrolling. Or we could be focused in this way.
Steven: It is true.
Melinda: That's beautiful.
Steven: Yeah.
Melinda: Well, our time has flown by.
Steven: I know.
Melinda: It's been so much fun. So -
Steven: Thank you for having me.
Melinda: Of course. Thank you for coming in in person today. It's been fantastic. So, I usually like to end with what I call a Creativity Pro Tip, which is something that people can take and try out on their own. I think obviously there's a lot that we've discussed today. So what would you suggest?
Steven: I knew this was coming. Ooh, excuse me. We'll edit that out.
Melinda: No worries.
Steven: I knew this was coming. I do have a Pro Tip that is very simple because there are a lot of actionable things you could do around developing a flow practice, but it is this simple bit of intentionality, let's say, or mindfulness, which is we agree that there is value in your phone. Like, you get to email people you don't see, you get your app, there's emergency, your parents can call you, you know, there's a lot. But there's also a huge black hole of your attention.
Melinda: Of course.
Steven: Right? So my Pro Tip is this: tomorrow, before you touch your phone, when you wake up, think of the one thing you could do that would move your life forward that you could do tomorrow before you touch your phone. Don't go to sleep until that's done. If you repeat that for 30 days, your life will be different.
Melinda: Amazing. Absolutely. And incidentally, it's so funny to me how many people are working in cutting-edge technology and AI who say, like, “Put down the technology. Go for a run.” You know?
Steven: Yes. It's true.
Melinda: Because it can consume us. It is very useful and very helpful.
Steven: I think there's a Japanese expression that translates as a forest bathing. Right?
Melinda: Yes. Yes. That's a big thing.
Steven: Which is so beautiful. Yeah. Like, just the -
Melinda: Get outside in nature.
Steven: - metaphor of that. Or the figurative nature of that. It's just like forest bathing. Just like, let it wash over and just be like, "Oh, that's right. We came from here.” We didn't actually come from staring at a screen.
Melinda: Exactly.
Steven: Yeah. As beautiful as some screens are. Look at that.
Melinda: Oh, what a lovely logo. So what are the best ways for people to find Sukha, to connect with you?
Steven: Oh, anyone who wants to try, it is free for three days. We made this so you can see if you can get your flow on and if it works for you and if you feel better. It is easy to find. Sukha, as you know, Sukha means happiness in Sanskrit. That's why it's called the Sukha Company. The website is shockingly the Sukha, T-H-E, S-U-K-H-A, dot C-O for company (not com, but dot C-O). The Sukha Company.
And if you are a particular, you know, genre of knowledge worker, if you're a writer or an engineer or designer, at the bottom of the page, there are some little things you can click that talk specifically to, “Oh, here's how writers use this. Here's how developers use this that may be interesting to you.”
But the main website, main webpage is very honest. It's me talking about why I developed this and, you know, why Tony and I care about this. And it should give you a good sense of like, if that's something you want to try. If you try it, drop it in the group chat. Say hi. So, like, “Hey, Steven. Heard you on Syncreate. Here I am. You know, trying it out. It's working or it's not.”
Melinda: Yeah. Beautiful. Well, thank you. Again, I'm so glad you reached out.
Steven: Thank you for having me.
Melinda: And that we connected and let's keep in contact.
Steven: Thanks to everyone who's still watching and listening.
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Find and connect with us on YouTube and social media under Syncreate. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review. We're recording today at Record ATX Studios in Austin, with Steven right here in the studio, live. The podcast is produced in collaboration with Mike Osborne at 14th Street Studios. Thanks so much for being with us and see you next time.
We aim to illuminate the creative process, from imagination to innovation and everything in between. I'm Melinda Rothhouse, and I help individuals and organizations bring their dreams and visions to life. At Syncreate, we're here to support your creative endeavors. If you have an idea for a project or a new venture and you're not quite sure how to get it off the ground, find us at syncreate.org. Our book, also called Syncreate, walks you through the stages of the creative process so you can take action on your goals. We also offer resources, creative process tools, and coaching to help you bring your work to the world.
One of our favorite creativity tools is Sukha, a flow state website that helps people find their focus and finish their work faster. Unlike other websites that offer a single feature, Sukha offers everything you need to get into flow: scientifically designed focus music, distraction blocking on desktop and phone, Pomodoro timers, help breaking down tasks, and a fun community. I've tried it myself, and it really works. Transform your life in just 1 hour. You can try it for 3 days free, and if you enjoy it, receive a 20% discount on membership with the discount code SYNCREATE. That's all caps: S-Y-N-C-R-E-A-T-E.
My guest today is Steven Puri. He's a former Hollywood video effects producer and studio executive at DreamWorks and 20th Century Fox, turned tech entrepreneur. From working on blockbuster films like Independence Day and Star Trek, he now helps people maximize their creative flow and focus with the Sukha app. Welcome, Steven.
Steven: Well, it's good to be here.
Melinda: Yeah!
Steven: This is one of your more engaging and helpful episodes.
Melinda: I hope so too.
Steven: The bar is high.
Melinda: Oh, yes, definitely. But so glad to have you, and so glad you reached out. We've been chatting for a while now.
Steven: Through a lot of your travels.
Melinda: Yes. And your adventures as well.
Steven: We both get around, yes.
Melinda: Yeah. Exactly. But the fact that we could both be here in person, I think, is awesome.
Steven: Yes.
Melinda: Very special. So let's kind of dive into it. I think, kind of one of the first things I wanted to ask you is, you know… I know you've got a lot of stories. You've been doing a lot of different shows, so maybe bringing out something that's a little different here today. Stories from the, you know, Hollywood studio scene.
Steven: I've heard about that. Murky.
Melinda: Yes.
Steven: Murky at best.
Melinda: A murky space, right? So I'm curious - because we'll get to talking about your app and your work around productivity - you know, any instances particularly come to mind where there was a particular creative challenge in a studio environment (of which I'm sure there are plenty), and kind of how a particular team was able to work through that? A particular, like, block or an obstacle. And how you and they found their way through.
Steven: Well, it's a good question. And let me lay out that my experience in film, you know… because I began in tech and I'm back in tech. But my time in film was really divided between producing visual effects, digital visual effects, stuff like that. And I did about 14 movies there, and titles and all that. So that was the True Lies, Independence Day 7, Braveheart kind of era. And then -
Melinda: A few little films. (Laughter)
Steven: Some, you know… everyone tries to make a good film, but it's hard.
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: So some are worth mentioning, some are like, “I hope that doesn't come up.”
Melinda: Right. (Laughter)
Steven: So then, you know, in my producing and studio executive career, you know, that's pretty much straight-up action movies. That's like, the Die Hards, Wolverines, and then, you know, the DreamWorks years and the Star Treks and the Transformers, and all that stuff. So what I want to say with that preface is every production has, like you said, obstacles and blocks. There are common threads. They're like, “Oh, it's this thing again.” So there are things that I've seen that work repeatedly, and there are things that sort of come out of, like, the spirit of the team.
Like, there's a fundamental belief in how and why we're doing this. That generally informs that technique, okay? So sometimes, especially when I speak to live audiences, there are a lot of writers who want to ask questions about, like, “How do I use my screenplay in this and writing?” And blah, blah, blah, right? And how do I preserve my vision? And my answer is usually, “Write a novel.” (Laughter) “You're going to have a lot more control.”
Melinda: Yeah. Don't try to make a film.
Steven: Right. If you are going to be precious about this, that's your… go win a Pulitzer. God bless. Right? But when you say, “Hey, these 120 pages, we kind of need like, $120 million to make them real…”, there are going to be a lot of people with opinions. On what that's going to look like, right? So don't go into this if you are not ready to collaborate. Write a book. Write a haiku. (Laughter) Anything. Just write something on your own, okay? Now, that said, if you are hell-bent on becoming a screenwriter and you want to do this, you are going to be one of the inputs into this final product, right? And there are many inputs. There's, you know, costumers, there are production designers, there are set designers, there's obviously the director, cinematographer. Like, there's a lot. And actors and the whole thing.
And then, you know, eventually editors and post-production people. So, the thing that I've seen is this: yes, you very often end up with two people who have a vision of what the thing should be, and those two visions are incompatible. Not shades of the same thing, but two distinctly different choices. The score, the character's hair, the costume, the, you know, whether this line of dialogue is better or worse than the dialogue that's written. Like that sort of thing, right? And what I've seen is this: when the approach is not, “This is what I wrote, I am right,” but when the approach is, “What's the best idea?” And you sort of divorce yourself or divorce the room of any sort of proprietary nature of, like, “Well, that's what it was. That's how she wrote it. That's what it was in the prequel.” You know?
And you just go, “What's the best here?” It does free you up, but it means you have to give up some of your proprietary feelings of this. When you have slaved over a screenplay, let's not joke, it's like your baby. I mean, you have those pages, you have gotten notes from everybody under the sun (and hopefully eventually studio executives and financiers), and your movie's going to be made. And, like, there are a lot… it's not just, like, “My mom read it.” It is, like, “People who read hundreds of scripts a month have given me notes, and I've done rewrites till I'm… you know, my fingers are red.” Right?
So toward that end, that's really what I think is true across many circumstances. I can give you one specific example that's kind of fun, and I'm going to falsify the details a bit out of respect. But this is one. After I had done a bunch of stuff in, you know, digital effects m, and was then an executive vice president at DreamWorks for Kurtzman Orci, right? For Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci there. And in that period of time, you know, I felt confident around talented people. I had worked with Jim Cameron, Mel Gibson doing Braveheart, you know. Like, Woody Allen, Jim Jarmusch, you know, lots of people, right? You know, like, these are really great filmmakers.
These are people at the top of their craft. I will tell you the project that I brought in. The first time we had a meeting in Steven’s private conference room office office, we were… we had a bungalow in the little Amblin, you know, compound. It's all like, Adobe Southwestern, you know, thing with the… you know, Navajo rugs on the whole Steven thing. It looks production design. It's beautiful, the Amblin compound, right?
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: So I remember the first time having a meeting. It was, like, Steven, Stacey (who was the chairman), the president of DreamWorks, some more DreamWorks executives, the writers, producers. Like, I had a pinch-me moment. It was, like, no matter where I had been, I was still like, “Wow, my career’s ended up that I'm sitting in a story meeting with Steven Spielberg.”
Melinda: Pretty cool. (Laughter)
Steven: Like, he's right there.
Melinda: Yeah. Right!
Steven: And we're debating story points, right? I was like, “Wow.” Got to meet him. Of course, externally, you have to be like, "I'm totally cool. I belong here.” You know, you got to play cool, right?
Melinda: “It's normal. It's fine.”
Steven: So the funny thing is this: the project involved an alien, and Steven has done some alien movies of note, right? He knows a bit.
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: You're not going to teach Steven a lot about World War II. (Laughter)
Melinda: Right.
Steven: Or alien movies. He's like, “I got you.”
Melinda: Right.
Steven: Right? So… and I'm going to falsify these details a bit, but we were on a story point, and Stephen said something akin to, “Okay, so that's when the alien, you know, comes through the wall, and we discover that it's allergic or it's weak. It's Achilles' heel is water or something…” Right? And at the time he was presenting this, there was someone coming through the room that I shall refer to as Coffee Boy, okay? And Coffee Boy says, without being prompted, “I feel like we saw that last year in so-and-so's movie where they did that. What if it weren't coming through the wall? It was coming through the window, and it wasn't really, like, water. It was something else.” Right? And I thought to myself, “Oh, that's so adorable. Like, that's the last time we see Coffee Boy.” (Laughter)
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: He'll be dismembered and put in the trash out back. (Laughter)
Melinda: Right.
Steven: It was like, remember him? I know the Mercer dies, right? And Steven, to his credit, thought about it for a second and said, "Yeah, that's better. We should go with that." And the meeting just moved forward.
Melinda: Wow. Wow.
Steven: It wasn't like Coffee Boy said something about Steven’s idea. (Laughter)
Melinda: Right.
Steven: It was just totally normal. Like, “Yeah, that's actually better than that. Let’s go with that.” And the meeting went on. And that was emblematic or symptomatic of the kind of confidence when you're like, “It's not about my idea. I said water going through the wall. It just has to be that beat where the alien's Achilles' heel is revealed, and whatever the coolest detail is, that's a cooler detail. Go with it.” Right?
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: That's all it was about. Not like, “I am Steven Spielberg. Thou shalt bow down.” Right?
Melinda: Right.
Steven: And you do see sometimes in people's careers where, you know, there are a lot of egos involved. I've had an ego, and I've fallen victim to it too, so I'm not immune to this. But you do have a hit, and then right after that, you think that you're Zeus (laughter) and, you know, you're omniscient and omnipotent. And sometimes you don't take the notes that you would have taken before. Like, when you were going through the process of the thing that made you successful. Your big hit, often it's a creatively fraught process with tension and, you know, division, and you have to prove things.
And then right as soon as you've had this hit, everyone's like, “Oh, my goodness. I mean, you're a genius. Like, who am I to give you a note? Let's just shoot.” And I've seen that where this next one is, like, not as good. And you're like, “What happened? Everyone told me I was a genius.” And it's like -
Melinda: They went back to a formula.
Steven: Right. And hopefully you migrate to best idea wins. So a long story for you, but I think it's spiritually that thing of not being possessive, proprietary. But saying, like, the material itself deserves the best. Who can contribute the best thing in this moment? The line, the hairstyle, the costume, whatever.
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah. And there's a few things I really love about that because, you know, connected with creativity and what we know about the creative process, you have to be flexible.
Steven: Mm-hmm. True.
Melinda: You know, you can't be so tied to your one idea. You have to kind of park your ego at the door. Especially if you're going to be collaborating. Right? And you have to be open to other ideas.
Steven: You have to be. And there are… this is not to say there aren't very talented, skilled people who are experts. And when they say, "Actually, this thing should be blue…”, they're correct.
Melinda: Right.
Steven: They know what they're talking about. So there's a bit of when you are in that position, you have to know when to sort of put your foot down. If that's your decision as the director. You can listen to everyone. But if you're like, “No, it absolutely should be this. Trust me on this one.” Maybe in that instance, you're right. Like, I've worked with Fincher. We did 7 with, like, the visual effects and the titles and the whole thing, and Cameron with True Lies. And very, like, hard to work for, difficult people, but they know the craft underneath them. Like, if they want to have a conversation about color timing, they can speak to the color timer in color timer language.
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: And that I have great respect for that.
Melinda: Sure.
Steven: As long as you don't bully someone, right?
Melinda: Of course. Of course.
Steven: So you do have to know sometimes it's not about, like, “Hey. You know, we're all just loosey-goosey, like, taking everyone's input.” These are things that are really important, but if a better idea comes along, I can recognize that. You know?
Melinda: Absolutely. It's a fine line, I'm sure. But actually, this makes me wonder because, you know, I've talked to creatives in all different fields and media -
Steven: I've seen that. Yeah.
Melinda: - and leaders in, you know, different business contexts. And so… and some of my own research has been on sort of team creativity and collaboration. And obviously, we know some teams work really well and others do not. So what are the sort of ingredients of a great production team? (Laughter)
Steven: Well, this is not something I speak about very frequently, but I'll give you my opinion.
Melinda: Okay. Good. We got something novel.
Steven: And let me always say, like, there are some things I'm like, “Water's wet. The sun is hot…” Right? And I'm like, “Just don't argue with me about this. They're right.” And there are things like this where I have an opinion.
Melinda: Sure.
Steven: Is it better than yours? Don't know, but I'll share my opinion since you asked.
Melinda: Please. Yeah.
Steven: Okay. So I do think that on the creative teams, you need to have a mediator, if you will. You need to have someone who, when there is that, “No, her hairstyle should be a bob.” “No, it should be down…” Just, they're two incompatible things, right? That does have the final say. You can't have decisions by committee. On something like that, or you end up with, I mean, name the movie. It just feels like, I don't know… I don't want to be mean. You know what I'm talking about, right?
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: So I think that's really important that you have someone who knows how to mediate creative conflict. But also has final approval to go, “No, you know what? It's going to be a bob. Let's move on. We don't need to revisit this, right? And everyone just be adults. Let's go to the next, you know, hair and makeup test.” So there is that. And then, again, when you have department heads that are very talented, you know, they're going to have opinions. You know, some of them have awards on their mantle. (Laughter)
You know, they're like, “You're a great, you know, costumer. You're a great…” You know. So with people like that, you do need to cast them, not to misappropriate the term, but you sort of cast your crew to make sure that they're bringing what they can bring in a way that is compatible with the other people there, you know?
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: And it is true. Sometimes the difficulties you have on set are because it was just like, “Oh, we have to have exactly this DP.” But the DP does not, you know, get along with this particular talent or something. You know, sometimes you have the talent feel… like, you really just want a robot that comes and hits your mark here and goes over there and says a line, and then hits the mark over there. That's what you want.
And the DP is like, “Kind of, yeah. I just want to set up these exact shots this way that have no flexibility for you to have any interaction, you know, spontaneous with another actor because I need to know you're always, like, pulled focus.” And you're like, “That's great in certain movies with certain directors. That's great.” I mean, we've all seen the jokes of how many actors have to, you know, act to a hanging tennis ball.
Melinda: Yeah. (Laughter) Right. Right.
Steven: Over a process screen, you know? But if you're trying to get a great performance, you may need - and you hire someone who's a great actor, but has a point of view on this - you may need to look out for those sort of incompatibilities, shall we say, where it's like, “Yeah, I know this is an effect scene, but we're going to have to give them the leeway to walk into the other character's space or something to really emphasize it.” Like, we can't just lock them off four feet from each other and pretend they're having an argument, you know? Something like that.
Melinda: Right. Right. Yeah. Okay.
Steven: Where do you want to go next?
Melinda: Interesting - the secrets of a good team. Well -
Steven: These are opinions. They're not just secrets. They're opinions.
Melinda: Well, according to someone who has some experience in the matter. So. I'm curious, you know, on this show, we're often looking at sort of people's creative trajectories. And, you know, for those out there who are maybe just at the beginning of a creative career, like, how do you get from A to Z? There's no clear roadmap most -
Steven: True.
Melinda: - of the time. So you mentioned that you started out in tech. You came into Hollywood.
Steven: Yep.
Melinda: Like, did you imagine that you would end up being a studio executive?
Steven: No.
Melinda: Or, like, how did that come together?
Steven: I am the son of two engineers at IBM, okay? (Laughter) To be super clear, mom and dad were engineers. There was no amount of, "Let's go to the movies and dissect them on Friday night…” Right? There was like, “How's your math homework?” So I learned, you know, as one does, if your parents are great ice skaters, you probably osmotically learned how to ice skate when you're little just because that's what your parents did, right? Okay. So I knew how to code, right? I was a little code monkey. I loved it. I loved hacking. I loved… we used to pirate video games and try and understand how they were encoded and decoded. You know, that whole… that was super fun, right?
So that said, when I went to USC, which is, if not the best, one of the best cinema TV schools in the world, right? I was not in the cinema TV school. It was not my interest. I was studying business and journalism on the side, because I was a Watson scholar, I got to work for IBM as a junior software engineer making cash. Cash money to spend on school, right? Which was fun. So I'm doing that. You know, a lot of your friends in the dorm are cinema TV students, you know, aspiring Spielbergs and Lucases and Scorseses and all that, right? So you do end up Tuesday night going to see some weird art film with them at the, you know, Doheny, whatever, and going to a diner late night and debating, you know, black and white film, whatever, right?
So you do some of that and get some exposure. My entrée into film, as many things in my life have been… as you said, like, it's not a linear path. Even most of my friends have followed. It's a lot of, like, Forrest Gump-like, “I was there for that, and I just happened to be…” Right? So I happen to be with this experience somewhat, you know, exposed to creative conversation and also exposed to engineering and technical conversation. I was there in LA when film went digital. There was a great demand for people who could speak those two languages. I was in that small subset. “Hey, kid, do you want to come here and start making digital effects?” “Sure. How does it pay?” You know? (Laughter)
Started doing that, and it worked out really well. I happened to be around really smart people. Like, the industry, the digital visual effects industry was relatively small because it had been done optically before, right? So I got to work with people that were incredibly generous with their knowledge. You know, it was a very young field. And I mean, not, like, young, young, like, that year, but in terms of exploding, it was like -
Melinda: Early days, yeah.
Steven: - you had access, yeah, to the people whose names like, John Knoll, who wrote Photoshop. Like, today, you don't get access to people like that very often, right? And there, they're just, like, writing the next version. You're like, "Yeah, I have some improvements…” You know? So this was how I got into film. And that was, for me, a great exposure because, like, when I worked on those films, even doing, like, Jim Jarmusch's film, Dead Man, the one with with Johnny Depp, like, you wouldn't traditionally think of that as an effects film. Like, why do you need digital effects for that?
Melinda: Right.
Steven: But there were some things… there are effects in the movie. You just hopefully don't see because we did our job well.
Melinda: Because they're so seamless. (Laughter)
Steven: Right. Let's pray, right? And it's a weird, grainy, black-and-white, you know, kind of movie. And at the same time, I’m working with these people, I'm deepening my understanding of their filmography to really appreciate them. It'd be different than a cinema TV student being like, “Jim, I've seen all 7,000 of your films. Twice, forwards and backwards, with and without subtitles.” And I'm more like, “Oh, before we got this gig, like, I watched two of his films to get his vibe…” You know?
And then, as you're working together, you sort of go, “Oh, I get now, like, why he's the guy that does this.” So that said, that, of course, led to, “Okay, I think I want to go upstream. I want to work with writers actually getting movies made as opposed to someone else gets it green-lit, and they hire me to be making part of the film," right? That was a big… that was the next big transition.
Melinda: Yeah. Like, a bigger part.
Steven: Yeah. So, that was kind of my sort of weird thing of, like, USC led to digital film, which led to film, and a lot of luck in there. Like, let's let us not underestimate the power of just, like, being in the right spot.
Melinda: At the right time.
Steven: Being in the chorus line. And someone's like, “Hey, you! Kid in the back. You sing. You dance. Come here.” You know? So, if I bring that back to your question about how to get into the business today, like, what is the career path for someone who is a young writer, a young filmmaker? Acting is a whole other ball of wax, right? But now there are so many tools available, and there are so many ways to prove out your ideas. Like, it's amazing to think you could make a movie that looks like $100 million on screen if you just buckle down, learn the tools, you know, the clings and all that.
And the editing. And just did it. Just devoted a lot of time each week to doing it, you could kind of make that. It may not be good. Your first movie, your first screenplay generally isn't, but wow, what an opportunity because all of film… like, the joke about writing is rewriting. All of film is getting experience and improving the next round. It's just iterating, you know?
Melinda: Of course.
Steven: So that is the advice I would give - is you don't necessarily need to focus on, “Oh, I have to go get this sold. I have to go get an agent.” As opposed to develop your craft a bit to the point where you attract interest. And your network will become important.
Melinda: Yeah. Absolutely.
Steven: It is a business of no one knows empirical truth. You know what I mean? Like, two plus two is not always equal to four in film. Sometimes two plus two equals, "Oh, that failed." And then two months later, two plus two is a billion dollars. You know what I mean? There's a lot of variability in there. There's a very complex equation of what becomes a commercially hit or an artistic hit. So because of that, relationships are really important because no one really knows anything, as Bill Goldman said, you know?
Like, you have to have those relationships that allow you to get into the doors once you have something good. But the thing is, if you have the network and you get in the doors ,and what you have is not good, you’ve just made your friends look bad for getting you in the room, right? You got to do one before the other.
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah. And I've heard this before, you know, and I've practiced it myself, actually. It's, you know, like, don't wait for somebody else to come along and tap you on the head. It's like, make your own work and put it out there. And, you know, that’s -
Steven: So true. Like, if you're a TV writer or even if you're writing in film, there are so many opportunities for you to say, “Oh, I love this current TV or YouTube series. Let me write a spec episode.” The characters are kind of laid out for you. There's a great template. And then you can demonstrate, "Oh, I can write to that template. I could be a staff writer on this show or on this YouTube series or whatever.” You know what I mean?
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah.
Steven: So that's available for free! Sit down, spend a couple hours, write it, rewrite it, you know?
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So fast forward a little bit. You're at, like, what sounds like the pinnacle of a Hollywood career. (Laughter) Why did you pivot?
Steven: (Laughter) Dreamworks or Fox?
Melinda: Yeah. Well, why did you pivot and to do what you're doing now, which is back to tech and a productivity and focus app?
Steven: We're in flow states. Flow states are really, really interesting to me.
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah.
Steven: And the thing that struck me is when I first experienced a flow state. And I know some people are like, "I know what that is…” and others are like, "I don’t." We'll define it in a moment, okay? So don't be worried, right? But when I first experienced that, it was kind of by accident. And then I was having dinner with a friend who was like, "Oh, dude. You know, it was a flow state. Have you never experienced that?" And I was like, "I wish I knew about this in college.” (Laughter) Though it had changed my college career.
It would have changed a lot. And it was weird because I was flying from here, (laughter) which I can say with you, flying from here to San Francisco. And the next day, I had a meeting with my team. And I thought, on the flight, Alaska runs the nonstop from here to SF.
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah.
Steven: On the flight, I'm going to mock up this idea with my hack-y little Figma skills enough that we can talk it through. And if everyone likes it, designers can make it real and engineers can make… you know, pretty it up, right? Get on the flight. Captain's like, “Hey, kid. Sorry, Wi-Fi's out.” Right? “Okay.” Start working. 15 minutes later, we start descending. And I was like, “Oh, we're at DFW. Like, something's wrong with this airframe. They're going to tell us when we're safely on the ground.” Like, “Oh, the hydraulics are not working right. We're going to get a new aircraft and fly to San Francisco.” We were in San Francisco.
Melinda: Wow.
Steven: I had no idea. I didn't know if the drink cart had come down the aisle. I didn't know the people in my row. I knew nothing. And I was like, “What just happened?” And my designs were done.
Melinda: Time disappears, yeah.
Steven: And I liked them. So maybe you've done this. I had, in my mind, prepped myself for getting the Uber, grab a sandwich in the hotel lobby, go up to the room, sit at the ugly little desk, and try and finish this and pass out for the morning, right?
Melinda: Right.
Steven: I got in the Uber. I called a buddy of mine. I was like, “Hey, man. I have a free night in SF. Do you want to have dinner?” And I told him, like, I was on the flight. I'm like, “My designs are done. I feel good about them. Like, I thought I'd be working all night on this stuff.” And he was like, “You're in a flow state.” And I was like, “Huh?”
Melinda: "What?” (Laughter)
Steven: And then yeah, exactly. And then when he was like, “How do you not…” Again, he's in SF, so there's a biohacking culture. There's a more early awareness of things like this. I probably should have been microdosing, you know, psilocybin at the same time.
Melinda: Yeah. (Laughter) Exactly. Exactly.
Steven: He's like, "You're still behind the times.” But that led me to start understanding more about that and that, like, I have a son now, whom I'm going to pick up after this. And see his little cheeks.
Melinda: Aww.
Steven: Pinch his little cheeks. And that really led me to think about even the contemplation of doing that with my wife of, like, “Okay, we're going to have a child. We're going to… this is the world we want to bring a little soul into.” Right? Thinking a lot about, what is my generation, our generation, giving to the next one? The ones who are coming up now. And I want to believe it's something more meaningful than how to scroll and double tap. “Oh, you want to waste your life? We made some great tools for you. (Laughter) All of them basically involve you scrolling and double tapping.” You're like, “Ah.” And waste your life. That's cool. Is that good?
So I think that's criminal. I mean, it's so icky that Zuck has casino game designers on staff just to go like, “Hey, man. We made a generation of gambling addicts. Can we make this that addictive and have that many people lose, you know, their futures?” Right? So those things sort of came together, the idea of, like, “Wow, flow states are kind of amazing.” They do help me because I procrastinate. I do get distracted. I found as an adult, I have ADHD.
I got medically diagnosed because in the Sukha community, there's an ADHD coach with whom I've become friendly over the past couple of years. And she was like, “Have you ever been diagnosed?” (Laughter) And I was like, “No.” “Have you ever been tested?” “No." She's like, “Just check.”
Melinda: You want to check it out? (Laughter)
Steven: That was pretty much what she DM'd me. She's like, “You might want to go check that out.” Boom. She was right. She's an ADHD coach, and I love her very much. And she's in Costa Rica, maybe watching this. So, the fact that flow states really helped me made it less of a coincidence for me that I was like, “Oh, this is what we should create because I procrastinate. I do get distracted.” You know, I have a child now, so time is even more precious. There's less time that I want to spend like, “Oh, yeah. I did spend 30 minutes watching that other YouTube video after I watched the one that I should have.”
You know what I mean, that thing? And then you have this whole world of the billionaires who make these apps to steal your life.
Melinda: And the infinite distractions.
Steven: Infinite. Life is designed to distract. I mean, that's the thing is… do you remember, like, 10 years ago, Zuck would have to go and testify in Congress? And they'd be like, you know, some old congressman, “All you have to do is… oh, we make, you know, an app so grandmothers can see their grandkids' videos.”
Melinda: Yeah. That’s sweet. (Laughter)
Steven: You know, like, this little “aw, shucks” thing. Like, “Oh, Senator. Hahaha.” We're just… you know, you listen to the shareholder calls now. There is no “aw, shucks” about it. It is… we deployed these techniques that we found from casino gaming. We have behavioral economists on this to steal more people's time. Which, by the way, we call shareholder value. And this is how much of it we got. So our revenues went up. We showed more ads. And next quarter, we have new techniques to steal more people's lives and make them more addicted.
And by the way, if they're four years old, six years old, we don't care. There's no “We'll tell you we care about if your children are addicted.” “We don't care. We want their eyeballs. We sell ads.” Right?
Melinda: Hence the lawsuits we see about in the headlines currently.
Steven: I know. Exactly. Yeah. So that to me, those two forces, this one I consider to be criminal, not just in the legal sense, in the spiritual sense, where the contempt you have to have for humankind to say, “I am making something and doing everything I can to make sure you don't do anything with your life. My tool makes you waste your life.” That's a tremendous amount of contempt.
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: And if you believe, which I do, that we all have something great inside us -
Melinda: Absolutely.
Steven: It may be the next great American novel. It may be a restaurant you're going to start. It may be an app you're going to create. It may be raising a child to start one, whatever it is. But you have some greatness. And the question for life is not, “Do you have it?” The question is, “Are you going to get it out?” Or are you going to be one of those people that go to your grave with like -
Melinda: It was such a great idea. (Laughter)
Steven: Exactly. You know, “I was going to write that movie. I just, yeah, I scrolled a lot. I liked a lot. I sent some DMs on Instagram. I'm really proud of that.” You know what I mean?
Melinda: Yeah.
Steven: So that's what got me super excited about this.
Melinda: How do you induce a flow state?
Steven: Ooh, there's a lot of research on that. Yeah. And let me say, anything really smart that I say is because some really smart people have spent their lives studying this. So it is not like, “I am the person who did this.” I am luckily the person who has read and watched and learned a lot about it and want to share it and took a lot of this knowledge. That's why I made the website because I'm lazy. And I was like, “I don't want to have all these different pieces.” In the morning when I start work, I just want a website. There's a play button right in the middle. I hit play. It does everything for me. I just start my little work, get in my flow state, right? So -
Melinda: But if you are curious to learn more about flow states, there's a researcher, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Steven: Yes.
Melinda: Who has written extensively about this topic and kind of the parameters of what is a flow state.
Steven: This is true. So, let's define that just for those playing along at home or in the car. So Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, as you said, was a Hungarian-American psychologist who had a thesis. He said - and I'm being somewhat, you know, funny about this - but he said, you know, “Isn't it weird the way when you talk to high performers in different disciplines, athletes, artists, scientists, and they talk about the highly concentrated state where they do the thing that makes them famous, they talk about it in very similar terms.” Even though what they're doing is very different. And he's like, “There's something to that. There's something there.”
So, you know, he did the research and the interviews and all that. And at the end of it, he wrote the book Flow, which is the seminal work. It's why we call it a flow state. And he said the greatest thing. I love this. He's like, "Many of the people with whom I spoke, they have their own, you know, words for it. Michael Jordan's in the zone. It's just him and the ball. You know, Picasso has his muses. Einstein has his thought experiments. These jazz musicians had the…”
He’s like, “I chose flow because it was the most beautiful metaphor for what I found. We are all on the river paddling to move ourselves forward. But when we align our boat with the current, it carries us.” It magnifies our efforts to go further and faster. And that is what these people have figured out how to do and do it repeatably.
Melinda: And as you described, you sort of lose track of time.
Steven: Yeah!
Melinda: You’re completely absorbed in the task.
Steven: See, you know about this.
Melinda: It feels effortless. You know?
Steven: You become one with the work.
Melinda: Yeah. I feel that often when I'm writing or playing music. But one of the most notable times… I used to do some stained glass work. And it's very manual work. And you have to cut the glass and polish it, and solder it all together. And I would just lose hours. And it was that same kind of thing.
Steven: Yeah. It was stained glass.
Melinda: Like, “Where did the time go?” I didn't even notice it.
Steven: So, this is for those listening, this is one of the characteristics. You lose track of time. You're not staring at the clock like, "Oh, when's lunch?” You know, you generally do your best work faster than you thought possible. Like, you become one with the work. You become immersed in it. Distractions become uninteresting because you're actually into what you're doing. And often at the end of it, you can feel a sense of uplift or joy as opposed to a sense of depletion like, “Oh, I'm so tired.” You actually feel like, “That was great. Like, where do I go from here?”
And Mihaly, you know, wrote about there seems to be some conditions precedent that help you get there. And he said, “All the people with whom I spoke, you have to believe what you're doing is meaningful.” Like, if you think you're doing something stupid, like, you're not going to get into flow. He said, “You have to have skills that apply.” So, like the joke goes, you know, it's not Michael Jordan painting or Picasso playing a you know, throwing a basketball around, right? And doing the thing, you have to be doing it at a level that challenges you. Like, you have skills, and you're not just half-assing it.
You're actually like, “I want to write something great today.” You know, just blog post. Right? It doesn't have to be like, game seven of the NBA Finals. It can be, “I just want to write a beautiful haiku.” But your goal is to, like, challenge yourself to do something great, right? And, you know, there are other - obviously, this is a little reductive - but there's other sort of characteristics to it, conditions, you know, to get you in. And he said, and he wrote about this subsequently that it is not a woo-woo, like you imagine this state.
Charles Lim at Johns Hopkins, you ever read about his stuff? Like, there was for a while that feeling of like, “Oh, yeah, flow state. Oh, sure. You're just concentrating really hard. You have another name for concentration.” Right? No, not really. “Okay, so some of Mihaly real inspirations were like, freestyle rappers, jazz musicians that report… like, you get to a place where you're like in the music.
Melinda: You're in it. It's like, coming through you, not from you. Right. Right.
Steven: Right. Exactly. Yes. Right. So he said, “Okay, I have access to an fMRI machine.”
Melinda: Yeah. What's going on in there? (Laughter)
Steven: There's a neurological, you know, neurochemical sort of association. And what's interesting is the before and after with like, a jazz musician, before and after they reported… and this is where I was just like, the trio became one. We became one with the music. It was not the three of us playing. It was the music coming through us, like you said. Prefrontal cortex, like behind your forehead, that has a lot of that second-guessing, self-judgment, self-aware, like the… fell off a cliff. It was a measurable, “Oh, so you're not thinking about that.” Which you can imagine a freestyle rapper at speed.
Melinda: The moment you get self-conscious, forget it.
Steven: You're going to trip over your words. Yeah. You got to be like, “The beats don't stop just because you're second-guessing yourself.” Right?
Melinda: Right. Right. Right.
Steven: So that was fascinating where he was like, “Actually, there is evidence that this is a, you know, a neurological state you actually can go into.” And that is super cool to see someone say, “Okay, now we've established it's not just woo-woo. How do you get there?”
Melinda: Exactly.
Steven: And we can talk about that if you want.
Melinda: Let's do.
Steven: Okay. So we spent a bunch of time reading about this. There are some conditions that help you get in. Like we talked about with Mihaly, you have to have something that you're focused on that you think is meaningful. Like, when we were designing Sukha, there were like, kind of five components. And I was like, “How do we put these together?” Because I just want one play button. I'm lazy. I'm not going to open five things in the morning, right? So there was this sense of like, you have to be focused on your task.
So we only allow you, you know, clear visibility into your top task. You can have two additional ones for the session. And then we do recommend you take a break, stand up, go get some water, do something.
Melinda: You’ve got to take breaks.
Steven: So we have a Pomodoro timer. When you hit play, the timer starts. You can customize it. You know, Pomodoros come from Francesco Cirillo, who said - he's an Italian - said, “I think there's something to working 25 minutes, taking a five-minute break, repeating that cadence, and then taking a longer break after like two hours or so.” So, right? And he used a tomato kitchen timer, which is why it's Pomodoro technique, right? Okay. So those, again, playing along at home can be like, “What? Let's Google it.” So there's a Pomodoro timer to say, “Hey, there's a healthy cadence of when you should stretch or you should, you know, do something rather than just sit here and grind it out.”
And it will actually rejuvenate you for the next sprint. Right? And you can customize it in Sukha. You can click it and change it like, "Oh, no. I want to do a 45-minute sprint right now.” And that's the time I have, right? So your task stays visible. And we show you progress as you work. You know, the background of your little taskbar goes green to yellow as you approach your time box and then red if you go over. So you can just glance up and go like, “Okay, how am I doing?” And one of the coolest things is… and a lot of people are very into music. Like, people have, you know… the research shows that there's a sweet spot for flow music, okay? This is most people. We all have the outlier who's like -
Melinda: Of course.
Steven: - “I can only listen to '80s gangster rap.” You know. Or “Show Tunes” or “Classical," whatever.
Melinda: Right.
Steven: We all have that friend who's like, “Dre”. You know, right? (Laughter)
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Steven: “I can't do that because then I want to sing along and I'm lost.” And that's the funny thing about flow music… is it can't be music you love because then you're listening to the music.
Melinda: You're too distracted by it, right?
Steven: And it can't be music you hate because then you're like, “I hate this. I have to change it.” It's that weird middle band of like, it's sort of okay, but it lulls your brain into the work. And, you know, long melodic stretches that repeat 60 to 90 beats per minute, some key signatures like D minor more than others seem to work. And also a non-vocal, you know? So you're not singing along. Again, some people can do it. I can’t. You know, most of the music that we present - because having a bunch of friends who are film composers - with time on their hands.
Melinda: Nice.
Steven: I could go to them. We were setting this up and be like, “Hey, here are kind of the parameters. Can you write 60, 90 beats per minute, these key signatures, this kind of music, blah, blah, blah?” And got like, a thousand hours of, you know, tracks that are 20, 30 minutes long. Like, long tracks that lull you in, right? And initially thought, I mean, this is a little… hey, me being kind of foolish here, but initially thought, “Okay, we got it. Check. We got that covered. I press my button, music starts, timer starts, blah, blah, blah.” You know, distractions are blocked. We can just help you with your websites and apps and phone. Like, all the usual stuff.
We can basically turn that off for you. So if you pick up something, your little assistant goes, “Do you really need to be on Instagram right now?” And you're like, “Actually, no. I want to finish and go see my son…” Right? But here’s… I’m going to tell you a funny learning I learned. So a thousand hours of original music by, you know, film composers with time available. So, a buddy of mine, Julian, mixes Star Wars games for… he’s up from Ronin for LucasArts, right? Calls me up. He goes, “Hey, man. You working on that flow state thing still?” I was like, “Yes, I am.” He goes, “So I just got back from Nepal. Apparently, son did well.”
And that was their like, father-son graduation from high school, got in a good college trip because he wanted to go with his dad to Nepal. He's like, “I just got back from Nepal. One day we were there, it rained so hard in Kathmandu, we couldn't go out.” So I had some of my recording equipment. So, I recorded like, two hours of this lush, warm, delicious rain.
Melinda: Ambient sounds. Yes.
Steven: Right? Okay,. But wait, this doesn't go where you think it's going to go. So he was like, “I got back. I'm never going to use this in a Star Wars game. I don't know what I was thinking, but I remember you doing that app. Do you want it for the app?” And I was like, “Why not throw it up as its own playlist?” A two-hour loop of this rain. We called it Himalayan Dream Rain. It became our third most popular playlist.
Melinda: Interesting.
Steven: More than stuff that a lot of human energy went into.
Melinda: Spent a lot of time. Yeah. Yeah.
Steven: Okay. So I, being somewhat curious by nature and also running the platform, so I know everyone's email addresses. Chose some people listening to it and emailed them and said, “Could you speak to me for five minutes? Because I'd love to understand. Like, we paid a ton of money and put a ton of effort into these bespoke musical compositions. And you're listening to rain, which we got for free because Julian was trapped in his, you know, little bungalow, right?” (Laughter) So, if you were to reduce down everything they said, the people who said, “Oh, yeah, Charlotte's going to give her five minutes…”, it came down to this: “Rain reminds me of a time when I had to study really hard and it would pour. I was raised in Georgia. Around finals, it would always be those early summer storms. Our family had a lake house in Michigan.”
And it was always this thing of like, “It just triggers my brain back to, okay, there's nothing to do outside. It's raining out. I'm cloistered here doing my thing.” Right? So what does Steven do? Being an idiot, I was like, “Nature escapes.” (Laughter) We should have a category called Nature Escapes, right? So went and found recordings people had made of streams in Japan, the surf in Cyprus. Ooh, how exotic, right? You know, like the Emerald Lake up in Canada, some indigenous bird in Tony… my partner's up in Canada. So, I was like, "He'll love this," right? Put him up.” Flat line. (Laughter) No one cared.
Melinda: Okay. That’s interesting.
Steven: Zero. Nobody cared, right?
Melinda: Sure. Particular kinds of sounds.
Steven: But rain, huge hit. So funny thing comes out of this. So, I throw these up there. I kind of look at the metrics a little bit. I'm like, “Okay. You know, we did a rewrite. It wasn't a big hit. We're going to rewrite again.” Get a DM in the app from a blogger in the UK, whom I had seen her sign up, but I'd never reached out to be like, a fanboy. I was just like, “Oh, it's super cool. She gets in your writing.” First time ever, she DMs me. She goes, “Hey, Steven, I noticed you've been experimenting with non-musical playlists.” (Laughter) I’m like, “Yes, I have.”
Melinda: Oh, interesting.
Steven: Right. Some more than others. And she's like, “So everyone knows me as this blogger who goes to this cool…” (she’s just outside London), “…to this cool cafe. I'm like, the coffee shop writer, cafe writer. It's like, no one really knows. I had a child during COVID, and I can't really go to the coffee shop now with like, a two-year-old on my, you know, knee and be the cool artist-writer.”
Melinda: I know where you're going! Cafe background sounds.
Steven: Yes. She asked for that. She's like, “Any chance you could find this?” Some dude on the interwebs posted he had recorded at his local coffee shop in Vienna, Austria. I reached out to him. I was like, “Hey, man. Can we use this?” He's like, “You really want that?” (Laughter) I was like, “I do. Can I have it?” He's like, “Okay, cool.” Huge hit with writers.
Melinda: Wow. Yeah. Because it takes you to that place. And it's interesting how much the environment, you know, has to do with the kind of sounds that are around. And all those people that go to coffee shops to work, they're hearing those sounds.
Steven: That was it? So that, like, rain… huge hit. For the sum total effort of, “Hey, can I put that .WAV file up?”
Melinda: Interesting.
Steven: So, yeah, there have been a lot of learnings along those lines. And, you know, the basic components we put together, you know, were about, “Okay, let's block your distractions. Let's give you a nice timer. Let's make sure you stay on task. You know, let's give you beautiful music.” And then the final thing that came together (which is not necessarily a flow state thing, but it's actually a thing that I personally connect with the most), is I, at a certain point, maybe two years ago, I realized in kind of a hub-and-spoke way, I knew lots of members, but none of them knew each other. None of them even have a sense of anyone else in there. It was almost like a single… it’s like you're playing Pac-Man or something where it's like in the old days. Like, you're just there alone, right?
And I was like, “But the whole arcade is filled. You don't realize everyone's playing Pac-Man.” Right? So I had this idea. I was like, “What if people could share? What if people could get a sense of like, there's a community of people here?” Because let's be honest, this is not like Twitter or X or something, where people just flame each other and they tell each other stupid stuff. The people who come here and pay, you know, 10/15 bucks, whatever, a month, they're here because they're writers, they're designers, they're engineers.
They're generally nice people who want to do something, right? I don't have to worry about a lot of like, sex trolls trying to find like, 12-year-olds. (Laughter) So I thought, “What if there were like, a group chat or some ability to DM people and set up like, you know… like co-working sessions, like body doubling?”
Melinda: Yeah. Community space. Yeah.
Steven: I was like, “I want to do that.” So what did I do? You know me now. I reached out to a couple of members. “Can I kind of bounce some ideas off you? Can we Zoom for like five, ten minutes?” Right? One woman I spoke to made up my mind. I didn't need to talk to anyone else after that.
Melinda: Wow.
Steven: And I started describing this through intended turns. Like, “Imagine you had other people that were there, sort of in general sense of support.” You know, this whole… and I'm going to my preamble where I think I'm being very eloquent. And she just cuts me off. She goes, “Steven, let me tell you something. I can go to the Nike store and buy a pair of shoes. They will sell me a left shoe and a right shoe. I put them on my feet. I run. They work great. There's a reason why a hundred million people belong to the Nike Run Club. Because you run further, you run faster. The days you suck and your friends come by and like, get you off the sofa and you go run, it feels great to be part of something."
Melinda: Absolutely.
Steven: And when you do that for someone else, it feels even better. She's like, “You should do it.”
Melinda: Accountability and mutual support.
Steven: It is my favorite thing in the entire platform. More than the music, more than the little voice that's like, “Do you really need to be on Instagram?” You know, whatever. I go in there in the morning and you can see when people are proud of something. They can post one time a day something they finish.
Melinda: Oh, cool.
Steven: And you can ask them about it. Like, if a designer is like, “Oh, I just redesigned this website.” You're like, “Drop the URL.” Like, “Let's see what you did.” And it's just, it feels like I'm not alone.
Melinda: That's lovely. I was going to ask you, so what makes this app different from all the other focus and productivity apps out there?
Steven: There are a ton of apps that do one thing. Like, there are some very good music players like Focus@Will, Brain.fm, Endel. Like, they're very good music players. They are, you know. There are some really good like, distraction blockers - Cold Turkey, Freedom. If you just want to have like, your phone bricked, you can buy a… I think it's a device called a brick. It just bricks your phone. There are a bunch of single feature things that are very good. I just didn't want to have five things to start in the morning.
I wanted to have one play button. Like, literally open that window, hit play, start work. I didn't want to mess with all these. So that's what makes it different. And then, you know, in between sessions, like, you drop into the group chat and, you know, you see like, the same people and it's just -
Melinda: Yeah. You start to connect.
Steven: It's human. It's just something… there’s something about that that makes me happy. My proudest moment in doing Sukha is not, “Oh, I launched this feature. Oh my goodness, this was so cool.” No. Once a day… I mentioned, when you finish a task, once a day, you can post it to the group chat. So you can't spam it with like, every stupid thing you did.
Melinda: One time a day.
Steven: Yeah. One time a day, you go, “This is my most important task.” And it'll say, “Oh, you know, Steven finished launching his website in two hours and 50 minutes. Congratulations, Steven!” Right? Okay. So this guy, Roy King, posts, “Finished my dissertation.””
Melinda: Amazing. That's a big task.
Steven: So someone in there essentially wrote back like, “Hey, man. That’s kind of like, a mic drop. That's kind of…” (Laughter) Sort of casual. Where like, "Finished my dissertation. Okay, we'll off to dinner.” You know? We're like, “That's kind of a big deal.” So this guy writes back (Roy King, he writes back and he says, “Thanks for noticing that. I am an assistant vice principal of a high school in Missouri. And I'm also a dad and a husband.”
He said, “I've been working on my PhD in engineering. And what I find is I have an hour each day in between high school and being a good dad. I have an hour each day that I can move that forward and sometimes a little time on weekends. So I dive into Sukha because it really helps me maximize how much I get done in that time.” You get into a flow state, right? So he said, “But don't get too excited because I still have to defend it.” Right? Like, two weeks from Monday. I still have to go into the thing. So he's like, “Don't celebrate yet.”
So, I was like, “Okay, cool. That's really great.” The weekend before that Monday, people in the group chat that I know… I run the platform, I know that guy in Japan and the woman in Argentina and that couple in Spain, they do not know him. They remembered and they posted it in the group chat. “Hey, you know, you got this, Roy. Good luck on Monday, Roy.” You know, “I'm pulling for you, Roy.” And I was like, “That's really nice.” And on Monday, nothing from Roy. And someone posted like -
Melinda: What up?
Steven: Yeah. “Anyone hear from Roy King today?” You know? And nada. And Tuesday morning, Roy logged in and posted, “You may now call me Dr. King.”
Melinda: Aww. That's so sweet.
Steven: People went apeshit.
Melinda: I bet. I bet.
Steven: That's why Tony and I do this. He had the great thing. And he's like, “I'm not going to my grave without doing it. I'm going to get my PhD.” I think he was moving on from being a high school vice principal now and he's like, become an engineer. Like, he's making his dream real as opposed to being the guy who sits on the sofa going like, “Oh yeah, I could have gotten a PhD in engineering. I never got around to that.”
Melinda: And I think that story speaks to so many of us who have so much on our plate in this busy world. Between work and family and a million other things. And it can be so difficult to find the time. The time's there. We could be scrolling. Or we could be focused in this way.
Steven: It is true.
Melinda: That's beautiful.
Steven: Yeah.
Melinda: Well, our time has flown by.
Steven: I know.
Melinda: It's been so much fun. So -
Steven: Thank you for having me.
Melinda: Of course. Thank you for coming in in person today. It's been fantastic. So, I usually like to end with what I call a Creativity Pro Tip, which is something that people can take and try out on their own. I think obviously there's a lot that we've discussed today. So what would you suggest?
Steven: I knew this was coming. Ooh, excuse me. We'll edit that out.
Melinda: No worries.
Steven: I knew this was coming. I do have a Pro Tip that is very simple because there are a lot of actionable things you could do around developing a flow practice, but it is this simple bit of intentionality, let's say, or mindfulness, which is we agree that there is value in your phone. Like, you get to email people you don't see, you get your app, there's emergency, your parents can call you, you know, there's a lot. But there's also a huge black hole of your attention.
Melinda: Of course.
Steven: Right? So my Pro Tip is this: tomorrow, before you touch your phone, when you wake up, think of the one thing you could do that would move your life forward that you could do tomorrow before you touch your phone. Don't go to sleep until that's done. If you repeat that for 30 days, your life will be different.
Melinda: Amazing. Absolutely. And incidentally, it's so funny to me how many people are working in cutting-edge technology and AI who say, like, “Put down the technology. Go for a run.” You know?
Steven: Yes. It's true.
Melinda: Because it can consume us. It is very useful and very helpful.
Steven: I think there's a Japanese expression that translates as a forest bathing. Right?
Melinda: Yes. Yes. That's a big thing.
Steven: Which is so beautiful. Yeah. Like, just the -
Melinda: Get outside in nature.
Steven: - metaphor of that. Or the figurative nature of that. It's just like forest bathing. Just like, let it wash over and just be like, "Oh, that's right. We came from here.” We didn't actually come from staring at a screen.
Melinda: Exactly.
Steven: Yeah. As beautiful as some screens are. Look at that.
Melinda: Oh, what a lovely logo. So what are the best ways for people to find Sukha, to connect with you?
Steven: Oh, anyone who wants to try, it is free for three days. We made this so you can see if you can get your flow on and if it works for you and if you feel better. It is easy to find. Sukha, as you know, Sukha means happiness in Sanskrit. That's why it's called the Sukha Company. The website is shockingly the Sukha, T-H-E, S-U-K-H-A, dot C-O for company (not com, but dot C-O). The Sukha Company.
And if you are a particular, you know, genre of knowledge worker, if you're a writer or an engineer or designer, at the bottom of the page, there are some little things you can click that talk specifically to, “Oh, here's how writers use this. Here's how developers use this that may be interesting to you.”
But the main website, main webpage is very honest. It's me talking about why I developed this and, you know, why Tony and I care about this. And it should give you a good sense of like, if that's something you want to try. If you try it, drop it in the group chat. Say hi. So, like, “Hey, Steven. Heard you on Syncreate. Here I am. You know, trying it out. It's working or it's not.”
Melinda: Yeah. Beautiful. Well, thank you. Again, I'm so glad you reached out.
Steven: Thank you for having me.
Melinda: And that we connected and let's keep in contact.
Steven: Thanks to everyone who's still watching and listening.
Melinda: Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Find and connect with us on YouTube and social media under Syncreate. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and leave us a review. We're recording today at Record ATX Studios in Austin, with Steven right here in the studio, live. The podcast is produced in collaboration with Mike Osborne at 14th Street Studios. Thanks so much for being with us and see you next time.
