Perfecting a creative flow as a freelancer – with Steven Puri

Rachel Smith: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel Smith, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives. 

Lynne Testoni: I’m Lynne Testoni! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business.

Hey Rach, one of the things I find, and I wonder if you are the same – I keep finding that I get more and more distracted. I know I do. I can blame social media or the 24-hour news cycle, or even just the busyness of my day-to-day life. But I’m finding it harder and harder to do creative work. What about you?

Rachel: Well, funny you should mention that because I just got back from a week in Bali without anyone around. Yes, and it was like a very strategic, remove all the distractions and finish a project that I hadn’t been able to finish for three to four months, and I completely nailed it in five days and that was great, but the biggest epiphany to come out of that is wow, look at what we can actually achieve when those distractions are gone or when we learn to manage life with those distractions. So, it’s very apt that our guest today is going to talk to us about this, because I think it’s huge, if we can somehow learn how to do it. You know, it is really hard. We’re on all the time. We’ve got everything flying at it. 

Lynne: It’s so interesting. Our guest today is Steven and he’s the founder and CEO of The Sukha Company. And Steven’s career is so interesting.

Rachel: Yes. We’ve been chatting to him off air and then we thought, oh, we better hit record actually. 

Lynne: We should. I’ll tell you a little bit about his bio. He started as an interviewer for a TV youth news show. We’ve got a few friends who’ve done that. Started here, and then as a junior software engineer at IBM and after university began working film production and he produced some computer-generated visual effects for fourteen movies including Independence Day. 

Rachel: That was one of my favourites. 

Lynne: Blockbuster, which won the Academy Award for visual effects. Steven’s first tech company was called Centropolis Effects, and that produced those CGI effects of Independence Day, and he eventually sold it to the German media conglomerate Das Werk when he was twenty-eight. Then Steven went studio side to develop and produce live action features as a VP of development and production at 20th Century Fox. I think most Australians have worked somewhere within the Murdoch Empire at some time. 

Steven Puri: Somewhere at NewsCorp. 

Lynne: Exactly. That’s the thing. Running the Die Hard and Wolverine franchises and as an EVP at DreamWorks Pictures for Kurtzman Orci Productions, where we worked on Star Trek, Transformers and more. After Fox, Steven returned to tech companies founding The Sukha Company, which is developing a focus app that bundles tools to have a focused experience and a healthy, productive workday.

Welcome Steven!

Rachel: Welcome. 

Steven: What a lovely overview of my life. Some sort of a golden cup at the end. 

Rachel: I think people get very overwhelmed when their bio is read out on the podcast, don’t they? They just think, wow, I’ve actually done a lot more than I thought I have. 

Steven: You know, I’ll tell you what goes through my mind, actually, this is probably the result of working in film, a very structured format of writing is concision. I was thinking, how would I say that in twenty words? And probably what I’d say is Steven’s one of the few people who’s been a senior executive at two motion picture studios and also raised twenty two million of venture and run some startups. 

Rachel: Good elevator pitch.

Lynne: See, I should have done that because I did edit it a little bit already.

Steven: There you go. Happy to be here! I hope this is a fun, engaging and also actionable and helpful episode. 

Lynne: Yes. Oh, fantastic. That’s what we want. 

Rachel: Very exciting. I mean, it’s great to have you. We’ve just heard a lot about your actual career, but what’s brought you to this point to doing the app? That’s what I’d love to know. 

Steven: There’s probably a deeper answer that will make this more interesting. I have a thesis that we all have something great inside us, and the question of this lifetime is, are you going to get it out or not? 

There are a lot of forces in this world to make sure that you don’t. There are most, you mentioned social media, Lynne. It is interesting that we live in a world where it’s not like the biggest companies manufacture things. The biggest companies in the world, their business model is steal your life – straight up. And they put it in their quarterly filings. They’re not embarrassed like they were ten years ago. Now Mark Zuckerberg’s in front of Congress going and next quarter we’re going to use these tools to steal more people’s lives. It’s a very hard proposition in my mind, as I think you guys know, I’m going to have a son in five weeks. Right? 

Rachel: Oh, wow. 

Steven: So, we’re excited. I’m going to, for the first time, be thinking a lot, and I’ve been thinking a lot about, what is it we put into the world that that generation is going to inherit? And there was a time when the social media guys, who ran it presented the presenting reason was like, oh no, we make this so grandmothers can see their grandkids photos and now they’re straight up like, no, we’re just trying to steal everyone’s life and sell it to advertisers. That is our business model, and they’re worth a trillion dollars because of that. Right? 

So, the answer to your question about why this. So, at Fox from the outside, awesome job, senior executive at the studio, there are six of them at that studio. I was one of them. Fifty films on my slate, my development slate to get made, including studio franchises that have a lot of back pressure. If you’re on the Die Hard franchise, that movie’s going to get made. The studio knows how to project the box office grosses for that. So, it’s going to be boarded, it’s going to be scheduled and boarded, right? So, Wolverine, same thing. And I definitely reached a point at Fox where I realised my boss, who was the chairman of Fox filmed entertainment. So, two steps beneath Rupert. Rupert, then Chase Carey, then my boss and he was a businessman for better or worse. And we did a terrible script on Die Hard. I came to Fox, and when I was at DreamWorks, he made a very attractive offer to me, you know, deal with the devil. He’s like, if you come here and help us make better movies, like DreamWorks makes, I’ll double your salary. I’ll give you the Die Hard franchise to run. You probably grew up watching the Die Hard movies and I’m like, I did. Oh my God.

Lynne: Yay. 

Rachel: Every Christmas.

Steven: I’ll give you the franchise. Stuff like that. Exactly. So I went there with this belief, oh, we’re going to try and make best versions of things, because at DreamWorks there’s definitely an ethos with Steven and Stacey, who was the chairperson at the time I was there, of go home tonight, try and make your projects 1% better. And I got to Fox NewsCorp, and I realised there’s more an ethos of go home tonight, try and make your projects 1% cheaper. 

Lynne: I think that – I’ve worked on the print side – sounds familiar.

Steven: It’s less inspiring, let’s just say, to be polite, right? 

Lynne: Yes. 

Steven: And I realised that my boss did not care the quality of the Die Hard script. What he cared about was, there was a window of time when Bruce was available to shoot it. And he’s like, just make it for less than this number – he spelled out the number. I was talking to him one day, we were walking after a meeting, we were walking together back to his office, and I said, listen, I feel like I’m failing you. You recruited me because you wanted to have projects with Billy Ray, whom I work with, David Ayer, Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci, Damon Lindelof – all these guys that I was friends with from doing projects at DreamWorks, and I’ve brought most of them here. But you seem more interested in making Die Hard than any of the original projects that we are passionate about.

He said in one of his real bursts of candor, he said, listen, the other end of the hallway, there are accountants who can tell me how much money by Sunday night, a poster, that says the words Die Hard on it will make, doesn’t even matter if there’s a film in a can, I can tell you it’ll make X amount. So, if you make the movie for less than that, I keep my job. If you make the movie for more than that, you put my job at risk. I’m not going to have you endanger my job. So just make it cheaply. And I was like, I need to get out of here. I’m not going to wake up at forty, fifty years old, be like, Daddy’s making Die Hard nine to pay for me to go to college. You know what I mean? That in a very roundabout way. But I hope it gives some interesting context. That was how I segued from my film career, which I’d worked with some amazing writers and directors. But writers I love more than anything because it’s the act of creation there to something from nothing. Amazing. It’s a miracle. I got to work with largely, I want to say guys, it’s largely guys who are at the big action movies, right? So, when I say guys, I don’t mean as like a gender-neutral term. I mean, most of the people I work with guys, and you worked with the guys who wrote from an understanding of character. They wrote from understanding life. Whereas most of the writers in Hollywood write because they’ve seen movies. And you can feel it, you can taste it, oh, this is that scene from, right and you’re doing it here with the gender flip. Oh, okay. Gotcha. Oh, this is that scene but you’re going to do it in sci-fi instead of period. Okay. Right. You know what I mean? They’re all of things you’ve seen as opposed to sometimes you genuinely have a scene and you’re like, wow, that’s like my mum. I’ve lived that reality not; I saw that in a movie that you copied. Fair?

I realised at Fox that was my future. It was, hey man, if you are fine, shutting up and just making cheap sequels and prequels like you have a career here and I hated my boss for that. I was like, you lured me over here with this. Talk about, let’s get Damon here, let’s get Alex and Bob. Let’s get Billy Ray and Chris McQuarrie. Like Chris McQuarrie wrote the Wolverine sequel for me and now he’s gone on to do every one of Tom Cruise’s, movies, sins and all that. He is an amazing, wonderful guy, but would that have happened at Fox five years earlier? I don’t think so. So, I thought, you know what? The only other thing I know how to do is engineering. Let me see what I’ve learned on my path and how to create something that is helpful. And I had two failed companies which I know you glossed over. That was very kind of you to gloss over. Because I sold a company in my twenties back when you think you’re better looking than you are and more successful than you are and funnier than you are. And then you live a little more and you’re like, oh wow, that was luck. 

We sold this company and there were a lot of factors that were not how smart I am that made that happen. So, I left Fox, and I had two companies that failed, two small startups, raised about three million for each. And then I hit upon this where I said, you know what? The thing I’ve seen and lived is some really high performers, especially writers because that’s mainly what I did in film – mental tips and techniques and tricks that they used to write at that level and not burn out. Be able to crank out scripts. And you know, this is the guys who are working at the one, two million dollars a script level. These are the pros. Most of the studio movies got made had their fingerprints on it, either as the original or as the rewrite. And that’s why I was like, I want to create something that helps people do the great thing in which they’re capable. Right? If I believe this, we’re all capable of something. How do I give people the tool to go, I’m ready to do that thing. Whether it’s write the great American novel or it could be, create a great company or do whatever, but just do the thing. Don’t be the person who dies going, I could have. So, there you go. Long answer, but you were trapped. 

Lynne: That’s good. 

Steven: It’s good. This is a water. This is not a beer that you’re about to hear open. I’m thirsty. 

Lynne: So, it’s all about combining technology and creative into creativity into one career. Is that what attracted you? 

Steven: I would like to say it was that premeditated, but I would be lying to you. I know. I’m serious. I think sometimes the most interesting things are not the obvious explanation when you go, oh, well, one plus two, three, right? In my case, it was actually slightly different in that I had a friend who was an engineer at Groupon, this group coupon thing, right? Okay. Groupon. And he’d asked me to co-found a company with him to make a mindful to-do list and I said, I don’t think so. I don’t have some secret insight into how to make a to-do list platform work. It’s just, I’ve tried so many, I’ve abandoned them. They never work. They’re fun for a week, and then I don’t use them anymore. I don’t have some stunning insight out how we make it work is this and one of you too loves gamification. Who is that? 

Lynne: Oh, Rachel. She loves the gamification. 

Rachel: I’m obsessed with gamification and that helps. That’s a little tactic, isn’t it? 

Steven: It is. We’re come back and talk about gamification, and if you guys are smart, you’re going to ask me about Bali because I have a good Bali story for you. 

Lynne: Okay. We’ll come back. 

Steven: So that process of, oh, okay, you know what? I love you. I will help you. I don’t want to be the co-founder of this company and commit to it that way, but I will do everything I can to help you with content to help me move this forward. Right? So, we did that. He had a baby, and he is like, I have to tap out. I’ve got to go get a real job, make real money, not do startup stuff, right? So, here’s the experience that actually affected me. This is my, you could almost say it’s like the inciting incident of this journey, right? I’m in Austin, Texas, sort of the middle of America. I was flying to San Francisco because the next day I was going to meet with my team and I wanted to illustrate this idea and I had an idea for a feature and I thought, you know what? I’ll go mock it up on the flight tomorrow. Sort of say, hey, what do you think? If you like it, designers take this, make this amazing, right? Okay. So, I get on a flight – Alaska runs a nonstop on that route. Captain comes on, hey, WiFi’s out. Sorry kids, okay. We take off fifteen minutes later, we are descending, and I was like, oh man, something bad happened. Like the engine fell off and we’re landing in Dallas. We didn’t even leave Texas, and they don’t want to scare us by telling us what happened until we’re on the ground safely. So, I was like, oh boy and I looked down and two hours and forty minutes had gone by since I looked at the clock. My sense of time was completely off. 

Lynne: Wow. 

Steven: And my designs were done, and I liked them, and they were good. And I had prepared myself for a race through SFO, get to the airport, grab a sandwich to the lobby, go upstairs in my room and try and finish the stuff for the morning. In reality, I was done. I called a buddy of mine, I was like, hey, I have a free night in SF, you want to have dinner and that felt really nice to be ahead of my day, like in control of my day. I didn’t know the term flow state at that time. All I knew was somehow I lost track of time because of the WiFi, I wasn’t checking my WhatsApp or my email. There was nothing to check and I just got lost at work and I did really good work really quickly. And I was like, if you could bottle that and that was a really important turning point because then that led me to go, oh, smart people have written about flow states. There’s a practice here, there’s science. How do you offer this in a reasonable way? And that’s how I started The Sukha Company.

Rachel: I think people are obsessed with this because we’ve talked about it before. We talked about it earlier, about losing that ability to really think deeply and creatively and it seems like it’s getting worse, so it’s how do we get into that state? How do we harness that state? I was reading something yesterday called The Alone Zone, where people, they get up, they try and create this alone zone. Oh, Lynne, you do it so much better than me. Lynne is great at getting up at five am and doing all the things she needs to do and going to Pilates. 

Steven: Go Lynne! Okay, good.

Rachel: And I’m getting up at eight am because someone said, I need my lunchbox now and get out of bed. We all have different ways of harnessing that time. But it’s interesting. Do you feel like it’s getting worse and so that’s why we need things like that?

Steven: It’s absolutely getting worse. But let me ask you guys a couple questions. When you have something to do, for example, Rachel, you talked about your experience in Bali, which we’re going to come back to, right? The way in which I was able to manage my brain, my spirit, channel it. I produced those five days, what I needed to produce like that was a win. 

So, here’s my question. When you guys have something, you need to do, what are the biggest obstacles in terms of it – is it procrastination? Is it distraction? What is it? What are the things that make it hard?

Lynne: I find its distraction. That’s me. 

Steven: What kind of distractions?

Lynne: Oh, just the house, but mostly, the internet really. 

Steven: Internet. Like particular social media apps? Emails?

Lynne: Emails coming through, all that sort of stuff for me. What about you Rach? 

Steven: I’m sorry that I emailed you, but okay. 

Rachel: That’s good. I’m the same, but a little bit different because I share an office with my husband and he’s in it.

Steven: Oh, nice.

Rachel: It’s not nice. He’s constantly on back-to-back meetings constantly. It’s bad for him too, because he never gets any work done because people are constantly putting him in another meeting and then he works until midnight trying to get his actual work done. But sitting next to someone like that, when you’re a writer and you need no distractions to get stuff done is really hard.

Steven: Why don’t you move. 

Rachel: We are in the process of putting a desk in one of the bedrooms that can just be a temporary desk that you flip up and one of us can go there with a laptop. We’re doing that because other things we’ve tried have just been too annoying. You’ve got to get a desk out and set it up and blah.

Steven: Let me tell you a story. I was going to talk a bit about flow states and distraction. But let’s put a pin in that for a minute. I’m just say an interesting story that goes back to Independence Day and about what you were just describing about like certain places where you have to like commit to your mind being in a certain state.

When I met Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, they had traditionally rented a villa in Puerto Vallarta, which is where they wrote. And I’d asked Dean about this once, so I was like, why do you guys go down there? There’s this thing in the office, people talk about it. He’s like, there is a room – it’s a white marble villa and in the morning the light comes in over the pool and in that room, we don’t think about our agents, we don’t think about casting problems, we don’t think about studio budgets. We just think about what’s the movie we’d want to see, and we write from that. 

So, when they’re going off to write, Roland told his assistant, and I cannot do a good German accent, but he tells assistant, Joy, rent the villa. Joy comes back and keep in mind this was like an Airbnb pre-Airbnb. She’s like, it’s rented, someone has it. The next month, Roland called his entertainment attorney, John Demers – amazing attorney – John buy the villa. By Monday, Roland owned a five-million-dollar villa in the hills of Puerto Vallarta. Where those renters went, I do not know. I’m sure they’re paid handsomely to go find somewhere else. 

Lynne: Wow.

Steven: The guys went down there and wrote for the next six weeks when they came back, it was with the script that became the third highest grossing movie in film history.

Lynne: Wow. 

Steven: They understood there was something about that process where they fell into that thing. This is not a story to say, oh my God, if you want to be a writer, you need to have five-million-dollar villa. Because I’ll tell you, later in my film career, when I was an executive vice president with Kurtzmann Orci at DreamWorks. Alex Kurtzman, Bob Orci, this was the era when they were writing Star Trek 11, Transformers One and Two, Eagle Eye, like tonnes of stuff. They had done Mission Impossible 3 and Zoro and The Island. There are amazing guys. When they got in a crunch, oh, we have to deliver Transformers Two in the next three weeks would’ve been procrastinating. They had their assistant rent a hotel room. We were on the little Amblin area of the Universal Studios side in Hollywood. Across Lankershim Boulevard, there’s the Universal Hilton. It is by no measure a glamorous property. It’s where you go with your three kids the night before you go to Universal Studios and that’s the only reason to be there. 

They would rent that for two or three weeks at a time. I thought to myself, they’re pulling down one to two million a script. They could go somewhere nice, and I realised for them they had met back in high school college days. That experience of Kurtzman sitting on his MacBook on the edge of the bed and Bob at the little desk on his MacBook – that evoked that we were back in a dorm room where scrappy writers who have to prove and we have to produce to prove that we’re good. And that was their mental trick around space to say, okay, this is where we need to do what you did in Bali.

Rachel: This is what works for you. I know, I remember we did something on the podcast years ago, Lynne, I don’t know if you remember, we talked about, is it Bill Gates who does think weeks? He does a think week, once a year where he just goes and thinks in a cabin. 

Steven: It’s amazing. 

Rachel: It’s finding what works for you. But if you can’t do that, if you can’t go to Bali, you can’t go to a cabin or even a hotel and you’ve got other commitments, what can you do? 

Steven: Well, here’s the thing, it’s a great question, Rachel, right? You just opened this can of worms because you’re saying, hey, you know what? Right now, the experience of where I am is hard. Husband’s next to me, here are the symptoms of this pain, right? But then there’s the, oh, if I go to the garage, I go to the roof, I go to the front lawn there, you know? I learned this by trial and error because when I started working remotely, I did the thing that I realised a lot of people do, which is, oh, in the morning I’m in the kitchen for obvious reasons. I have a laptop; the light is beautiful. I’ll work from the kitchen for a couple hours, then I’ll come upstairs to my office here and then the afternoon, maybe I’ll go to the sofa in the living room and be down there with Laura or something and I realised I was confusing my brain because I never let it have that thing of like, oh, we’re in this space, this is what we do here, and everything falls away. I’m in the breakfast space where we make food and go to the fridge and do the thing, dah, dah. And I’ve trained myself the past couple of years to say, oh, you know what? I need to go write a blog post; I need to go write some code. I come here and I close the door and my brain instantly goes, oh, okay, I get it, we’re here for a reason. So, it’s free. You just need to find that place. I realise it’s challenging as you laid out sometimes with the family and the whole thing. But if you make a sincere effort to go, how do I train my brain that in this place I do this thing, you will start to feel the rewards. 

Lynne: That’s a good point, isn’t it? Because I am an early morning person, nobody else is awake, so that’s how I beat the email challenges because I hardly ever get any emails early in the morning. And so, I come in, I clear the emails, and then I have two hours of free time. I usually turn off notifications. 

Steven: Okay, do you know what screenwriter was famous for the five am work? 

Lynne: Oh no. 

Steven: Ron Bass, who wrote My Best Friend’s Wedding, who wrote Rain Man. He was famous, infamous, if you will. He would not talk to his family in the morning. 

Lynne: My family is still asleep, so it’s the same. 

Steven: But he would not say good morning to his wife. He’s like, I’m not the dad who’s going to make pancakes, and who needs a ride to school? He said, when I start talking to you, I can’t hear my characters in my head anymore. Need that early morning time completely alone and that really opens up a conversation here about chronotype. Which for those at home who are playing along, or in their cars, chronotype is the concept that there are certain times of day that you’re more adept to doing certain kinds of things. And Ron Bass was famous for being very aware of his chronotype, where he said that five to nine am, I’m not going to talk to my agent. I’m not returning an email, I’m not doing anything because that’s when I hear the words that will get a Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise, or Dustin Hoffman to say yes to this script over the twenty other scripts with cheques stapled to the front that are sitting on their desk. It would say these words – by spring, I want to play this character with these words. That’s an astounding feat when you think about it. That number of offers that they had because that was truly like back in the star era, when stars open movies. Right now, it’s pretty much Tom Cruise and nobody, right? 

Lynne: It’s IP.

Steven: It’s IP as you said.

Rachel: That’s an interesting point that you bring up. So, it’s a specific time and you have to figure out when that time is that you can block it off, get into the flow state and are going to be the most productive. I don’t know if I want to tell you this, Steven, but for me, before I had kids, it was kind of midnight to two am. 

Steven: Okay. That’s awesome! Thank you for sharing your dirty secret with me. I’ll not talk anyone except people on this public podcast. 

Lynne: I could never do that.

Rachel: It was such a good writing time, you know? And my brain would be firing and actually, when I was in Bali, I was with a friend, but she was at a conference, and most of the time I would be yakking to her at eleven o’clock. Lynne’s laughing because she gets all the emails and the texts from me at eleven o’clock. And my friend said, oh, I’ve just realised that your brain wakes up at like eleven, twelve o’clock at night. I hadn’t actually thought that, but it does. So, I’m firing.

Steven: That speaks to an understanding of your chronotype, and I’ll tell you something. For me, when I got back into coding, because I hadn’t been doing a lot of that in my film career and then it was like, okay, I have to dust off those skills, learn the modern languages and all that. I was in SF; Lauren and I were there, and a lot of our friends are part of that culture. Of great engineers write stuff from midnight to four am – it’s like in the dark night, right? And I bought into that. I just was like, oh, I should match that pattern. We’re going to stay up all night and write code. And what I realised was that it’s maybe true for some people, but it wasn’t true for me because I could do that. I could stay until four am my code. But it was often that code that the next day I would be rewriting, I’d be optimising. I’d be like, oh, there’s actually a better way to do that. It works, but not great as opposed to when I would get up, and I’m just going to say it, Lynne, when I start getting up at five am. At five to nine in the morning, I write my best blog posts. I write my cleanest code. 

Rachel: I want to be like you guys. 

Lynne: It is what it is. 

Steven: Get in the water, it’s warm. 

Rachel: Join the five am club. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. Oh God. 

Lynne: Oh, but then at the same time, when you send me emails like at eleven o’clock, I need to see them and, and if I did, my replies would be rubbish.

Rachel: I know that you’re not going to see them until seven or eight. But if you don’t have a kid, you can write till two in the morning and then get up at ten am and start your day. Everything just moves forward. But I only do it very rarely now, and when I’m absolutely desperate or I’m on deadline.

Steven: Or you go to Bali.

Rachel: Or I go to Bali. 

Steven: I have to write this blog post, honey, I’m going to Bali, 

Rachel: See you in a week.

Steven: If you could pull that one off, I would love to know how you did it. 

Lynne: Sounds good doesn’t it.

Steven: So anyway, I just bring these up as a couple of mental tricks, techniques, whatever you want to call them that I’ve seen great writers do. They associate a place with a kind of thing they do. I’m going to write in this place and going to that place and tells their mind, let’s drop in and write. Understand times of day. Very easy way to figure it out. You don’t need my app. You don’t need anybody’s app. Take a piece of paper, divide it up into five days – Monday morning and afternoon and just jot down roughly what you did. Oh, this morning I worked on blog posts. How’d you feel? Pretty good. Oh, this afternoon I worked on my newsletter. How do you feel? Not so great. I’m telling you; you do this for five days or ten days, look at it, you will see the pattern – I should not be writing creative stuff in the afternoon, I should be returning emails or working on the business. I should not be doing this at this time. I should do this time. It will stand out in high relief to you if you just log it for a week or two.

Rachel: That is a great strategy that I think most people would not have ever done, really. We’re just winging it. 

Steven: You could do it for free if you have a piece of paper and a pencil. 

Rachel: Exactly. That is a really good idea. I love that. I’m going to do that. 

Lynne: So, you think there are some common things that you see over and over that stops us from being creative? Is it carving out that time? Or is it a mindset thing? 

Steven: Well, you put the word in there, being creative, which is a very specific kind of productivity. As you know, in my platform, the three biggest cohorts of members are writers, software engineers and designers, right? All knowledge workers who are like, if I could focus, I could do my best work faster and have more time for me.

I spent a lot of time talking about healthy productivity, flow states, things like that. However, when you bring up creativity, I’m going to draw upon my past, back in the film days because that to some extent, UI, UX designers, there’s some creativity in designing apps, but it’s not the same as staring in a blank sheet of paper and trying to write Avatar or trying write Casablanca, Citizen Kane or something. So, speaking to creativity, I have found for myself and as well as a bunch of writers I work with, there is something true. I believe it was Hemingway who said, stop writing before you’re out of things to write. Always leave a little bit of juice in the tank for the next day because that hardest thing is the first couple of words, the first couple of sentences to get going. So, if you leave yourself that thing going, oh, you know what? I know the next thing has, Jack has to go do this and find the clue that that’s why, Jennifer did the with it – don’t write it. Hold it for tomorrow, because once you start writing that tomorrow, then you get back into flow. So, in terms of writing, that was something I saw used frequently and just an easy thing to do again, free. 

Lynne: That is a good thing to do. 

Steven: Just don’t run the tank dry.

Rachel: I’m really interested because you’ve obviously known a lot of, script writers, people writing movies. Perhaps in the writer’s room and that sort of thing. And a lot of people listening would be writing alone a lot of the time. And I think that presents really different challenges because what if you are in a writer’s room and you’re having to come up with ideas and come up with and be firing at a certain time when it’s not really your time to be creative or be as productive as you could be. But then you’re working alone as well. Do you see that there would be specific challenges there? For both of those people.

Steven: Well, you know, talk about Ron Bass again for a moment. As clear as he was with his chronotype, in the morning, not talking until I get my dialogue out. He booked his afternoons with collaborative work. He’s like studio meetings, notes meetings, working with other writers. He had stable of writers. He’s like, that’s perfect for me in the afternoon. So, as you develop a sense of your chronotype, it’s not that the only point of doing a chronotype is when should I be alone writing? But it’s also that feeling of, when is it a great time to be collaborative? Rachel, thank you for reading my draft, I would love your thoughts on it. Can we talk for half an hour about what you thought and know what time of day you’re the most receptive to that sort of interactive experience? And also, you’re emotionally receptive to it. I will tell you a story and I’m going to falsify the details a little bit out of respect. 

When I went to DreamWorks. I remember very clearly the first meeting I had in Steven’s private conference room. Right off his office he had that whole Adobe beautiful southwestern, sort of Amblin complex, right? The particular conference room, all rough-hewn wood and stuff. And as much as I’d done a bunch of stuff my career and worked on the Academy Award opening movies and all that, I’m not going to lie, there was a moment of that first meeting where I’m like, OMFG, I’m in Steven’s conference room in a meeting where he’s treating me like a peer. We’re all trying to do this development together. Stacey’s sitting there, the chairman Holly, the president of DreamWorks, another executive myself, two writer’s producers, like, wow, okay. So, I’m watching, how does this go down? Because he’s probably the most impressive director that I’d worked with and I’d worked with Cameron, I’d worked with David Fincher, I’d worked with Brian De Palma, Jim Jarmusch, Woody Allen, Mel Gibson. I’d done Braveheart, a lot of stuff and I’m sitting here with Steven Spielberg, right? And this thing happened. We were discussing – I’m going to falsify the details just out of respect – an alien movie, right? And Steven has done some big alien movies. He knows, he’s thought through how do you do aliens on screen, right? And he brings up something akin to, well, this is where the alien should just come through the wall and then we discover that their weakness is this thing because we sort of tip the audience off. Within two minutes, someone who’s coming through the room, I’m going to call him the Coffee Boy, said, I think we just saw that last summer in this other movie. What if it were more – he comes to the wall in this, and I thought to myself, oh, that’s the last time we see Coffee Boy alive. You’ll be in small pieces in the dumpster behind Universal and Steven paused for half a beat and said, oh, that’s good we should do that. And the conversation moved forward, and I was like, wow you play the game at that level where you’re not precious with your ideas. It is truly about best idea wins and I noticed that with some of the best directors I worked with and some of the best writers is that there wasn’t that thing of my idea must survive this draft. Was cut, it was, oh, you have something better. I want to make something great. I want this to be a movie for the ages. And when I watched that, I was so taken aback of like, man, that was smooth. Noone in the meeting treated it as odd. It was just like, oh, okay, you scribbled that. Okay, aliens should probably do this. I offer that because we talk about chronotypes and how do you interact as a writer, is that when you do get to a certain point of being confident, which artists are often not, yes, it’s a lot of insecurity, right? It is a subjective business. There is no empirical. It is not like math. Two plus two will always be four, pretty much. So that means there’s a lot of fear and insecurity because you’re like, I don’t know if this is better or worse, what people tell me, right?

For that reason, it’s very easy to be insecure, understandable. But when you reach a certain point of confidence, it really opens up creative sort of conversations that are much more interesting when you’re like, I’m okay for my ideas to be shut down if you have a better idea. That’s why I asked you to read this.

Lynne: There’s a real confidence in being prepared to be wrong.  

Steven: Yes, Lynne, that is a much more succinct way of saying what I said in thirty minutes. Thank you. 

Lynne: One of the things I’m hearing from you is about developing a routine for creative work. And I think sometimes writers or creative people generally are scared by routines because I think it’s going to hamper them. But from what I’m hearing from you about getting a spot and a time or whatever, that actually helps create more. Gives you more creativity by having a template. Do you think that’s true? How can we do that? 

Rachel: Or more productivity? 

Steven: Let me just say this, which is I worked with professional writers who were working in a very rigid business. These are not the writers. This is not Hemingway, where it’s like, I’m going to go get wasted on a bender in Cuba and try and write some great novel. This is not that. This is, hey, The Writers Guild is giving you eight weeks to write this many pages, and you have studio notes, and your agent will be checking with you every two or three days. This is not something where you get the same creativity as writing novels or going off to the coffee shop in Prague and coming up with the next Harry Potter or something. 

Rachel: It’s kind of structured. 

Steven: I can only speak to my experience, which is these are people who are like, man, this is how I pay my kids college. You better have a practice. It’s more akin to Michael Jordan saying, I’m going to throw 3000 baskets in practice today because we have a game than it is I’m just good at improvising. They don’t go very far. Sometimes in comedy scripts, I did not do any comedies. There is some of that with comedians where they’re just in the moment I’ll just come up with something and sometimes it’s fresh and wonderful. But I did mainly action movies, like big summer movies. 

Rachel: Tell us about the app and how it helps people that we talked about off air, about people who tend to procrastinate, how they can focus and minimise distractions.

Steven: Of course, we love to talk about this and the flow state conversation we had before is germane to this. Which is when I discovered and I know part of your audience is probably flow master’s and they do this all the time, and some part maybe has a passing understanding of it. Would it be fair if I explained flow states in thirty seconds? 

Rachel: For sure. 

Steven: Okay. Just so everyone’s on equal footing. There was a Hungarian American psychologist, this guy Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and he had a thesis, which is these high performers in different disciplines – artists, athletes, scientists, inventors – they go in these concentrated states where they do the thing that makes them famous. I think it changes the world and they describe it in very similar ways. And he was like, what’s up with that? Well, like Prometheus going up and stealing from Festus on Mt Olympus, he’s like, I’m bringing down fire for the rest of us. Let me see what this is. He did his research. At the end of it, he wrote the book Flow, which is from which we get the name Flow State. It is the seminal work on this, and he said, I think such a great thing. He said, I chose this word flow because it was the most beautiful metaphor, I could find for what I discovered, which is we are all on the river paddling to move ourselves forward. But if you align your boat with the current, it carries you, it magnifies your effort. You go further and faster. And that’s what these people have figured out to do and how to do it reliably. 

So, whether you’re talking about, Michael Jordan has that famous quote about, when I’m in the zone, it’s me in the ball. He’s like, you can call it the zone, you can call it flow, you can call it whatever you want, but I want to teach you what this is and how they get into it. So, he said the characteristics, which are going to sound very familiar, I think, to you guys, and obviously to me, after that flight. You lose track of time. You’re not watching the clock, distractions fall away. You’re doing meaningful work. You’re doing it well. If you’re doing something where you have some feedback, you can skip back and reread some paragraphs, go, how is this working? Or, if you’re playing a game, you look at the scoreboard or if you’re Picasso painting Guernica – you can stand back and go, is this starting to represent the horror of war? And he said at the end of it, because you feel in control and you’re doing great work, it gives you energy as opposed to depletes you of energy. Once you’ve done this, it’s kind of a magical experience. That is the website I created to say, if someone wants to experiment to get into their first flow state, or to do it repeatedly, how do you take the research that so many people have done now, the giants standing on the shoulders of giants, sort of research around, hey man, music helps.

There’s a tonne of research on sixty to ninety beats per minute, certain key signatures, ambient, non-vocal music. For most people, it’s a sweet spot. We all have the friend who’s the outlier, who listens to Tchaikovsky or eighties gangster rap or something. We all have that friend that’s like, this is how I get.  But for most people, there’s a lot where it helps your brain just fall in and then you have that experience of looking up two hours later, you’re like, oh wow, I’m done, and it feels great. So the end of the answer to your question is – I really set out to say, how do we take these five components that they write about saying these will help you get into a flow state and just make it really simple where you open a website, there’s a big play button in the centre, you click it when you start writing. There’s a Pomodoro timer to remind you to do some healthy things because you do need to drink water. You do need to stand up every now and then. You need some cadence of respecting the fact that you do have a body, you have a manifestation or something, human. There’s music, there’s a smart assistant, and I’ll tell you, okay for you guys. I appreciate you answering my question. I’ll tell you for me, here are my big bad things. 

When I hit a point and I have writer’s block, or I’m reading what I wrote, I’m like, ah, it’s just the muses are not singing. My hand without my thinking will reach from my phone, get that little dopamine and be like, let me see WhatsApp. Maybe you know Rachel’s up, and she sent me something and I’ll open it and it’s never one minute because then it’s WhatsApp and I check WhatsApp and then it turns to my email and then I’m in TikTok and I lose. And that turns into the end of the day, I’m frustrated. So, I was like, okay, Steven, you need to be honest with yourself. You need something that just nudges you and go do you want to be in your phone? So, we built that. When you hit play, you get a QR code that pops up for a minute, tablet your phone, put your phone down. If I pick up my phone, my little laptop, my smart assistant, and Sukha says, hey, I see you on your phone. Do you need to be on there? Just friend sitting next to me and it gives me that one moment. It gives me that one moment to go, who do I want to be? Do I want to be the person who wrote this blog post? Or I do I want to be the person who’s like, oh, I could have gotten that done today, but just busy all day, but I didn’t get it done. 

Rachel: The fake busy. 

Steven: You know what it’s like with the websites that Lynne you were talking about. We built the exact same thing. So, you can say, here are the sites that get me, and I’ll tell you, I know what people declare so its really interesting seasonally, which sports people are like, keep me off nfl.com, keep me off ESPN. Or keep me off Etsy or Amazon, right? So, you can say, these are the websites that grab me. If you open one on that list, it waits like four seconds just in case you’re surfing around looking for a tab. It doesn’t jump around on you, but if you’re on it like five seconds, same thing, hey, is Amazon helping you right now? You just get a nudge.

Rachel: It guilt trips you.

Steven: I’m telling you, it’s just like a friend sitting next to you going, who do you want to be? No. I will tell you something. You brought up Bali and I’m going to close this with a story that you may appreciate, which is Lynne, before we began, you graciously asked, am I pronouncing your company correct? The Sukha Company. It’s a weird name. Why is this? People ask me all the time, what is it? I will tell you. So, Laura – wifey, whom I adore, we met in yoga ten years ago. 

Lynne: Ah, lovely. 

Steven: We have a daily yoga practice, right? So that is a part of our day is for an hour we sweat together. It’s kind of like a spiritual and physical kind of like moment. Just like being together without talking. Really love it. So, when we got married a couple years ago, I had a working version of this with no name and early members, they were trying, like beta testers, they were trying it out. Right. And we felt like, oh, we’re onto something people are renewing month over month. They’re keeping this membership. So, we were flying to Bali, which is where when you have a honeymoon, you do a lot of yoga, you go to Bali, right? There are some awesome yoga places there, like Yoga Barn and, right. So, we were going there, and I said to Laura, you know what, the next ten days, no one from the office is going to bug me. They’re like, Steven’s on his honeymoon, don’t ask him to approve the stapler purchase. I said, Amazon is such a great name. It’s not like called like online bookstore. You know, Nike is not called like Shoe Place, it’s like Winged Goddess of Victory. What an interesting name for a shoe company. I want to have something that’s kind of like that when people ask me what it is, and it represents something. So, she’s like, I wish that for you. Good luck. We have ten days, see if the muses sing. 

So, we got there, we landed, and I said, I think someone helped me. Do you mind if I speak to maybe two or three current members just for ten minutes and say, can you tell me what feature, what is that works for you and maybe over ten days that’ll bubble up into a name, right? So, she’s like, go for it. I’m going to the pool. I’ll see you at dinner. Goodbye. I posted in the group chat. I was like, who has ten minutes? Three people said, I’ll talk. Ask that question, hey, do you love the music? Do you love the smart assistant? Keeps you off your phone or your websites, do you love the task list to see what you’re doing here? Third guy was going to the wrap up. I’m very respectful of time. I was like, hey, I think his name’s Jeff. Jeff, I really appreciate the time. It’s coming up on ten minutes. I promised I’d let you, thank you and he stopped me, and he said, Steven, you asked the wrong questions. And I was kind of like, okay guy that I don’t know that well, what was the right question? And he said, you should have asked me why I pay you. And I was like, we charge like ten dollars a month. I don’t collect a paycheck for this. I do it because I think it’s cool. Tony, my partner, we do it because it’s fun. We don’t make money off this. I was like, charge like ten dollars just to pay the server bill, but okay, I’ll take the bait. Why do you pay me? He said, I found the last year or two and I have two kinds of days. At three o’clock I can be playing with my kids, they’re two and four right now. Or at six o’clock I can be down on myself and be like, wow, I was busy all day, but I didn’t get this thing done. I suck. I’ll have to get up early tomorrow and try and finish this or I’ll come back after dinner and finish it. He said, I realised the difference is did I hit play on your website when I started work that morning. So, I pay you because my kids are not going to be two and four forever. 

Rachel: Wow. 

Steven: I was like, okay, you won that round. I go to dinner with Laura, and I was like, I spoke to this dude. He’s more articulate about what I’m doing than I am. And I told her what he said. She’s like, that’s really good. So, we were going to bed as one does on the first night of their little honeymoon, in our little spa robes, you know, thinking we’re all cute, brushing our teeth and Laura looked at me, she said, you wanted the universe to speak to you. It did. Through that guy in yoga, we hear all these terms around karma and prana, and dharma. He described Sukha. That feeling, being in control where you’re in your lane doing the thing you’re meant to do and you’re good at it. You’re in control of your life. That’s what he wants. He doesn’t want a distraction blocker; he doesn’t want music. Those are features, those are like describing the path by the road. No, he wants to go to that feeling of being controlled. She’s like, that’s where you should call your company, and I looked up on my phone. The website, The Sukha Company was available for fourteen dollars. I bought it when we went to bed. 

Lynne: Fantastic. Successful honeymoon. 

Steven: We had a fantastic honeymoon and that is why I do what I do. It’s probably the best thing I’ve done in my life, better than any movie I’ve worked on, any company I’ve sold is people had a tool to do the great thing that they’re capable of. Fewer people will die with it inside them because it’s hard. Social media companies are very smart. They pay the best designers, the best engineers. They behavioural economists and psychologists on staff to make sure you give up your life. And I want to give anyone who wants to do something with their life, a tool to say, I refuse. I’m not going to die with this inside me. 

Lynne: That’s so important.

Rachel: And I think we’ve all hit six o’clock and well every night. Phil got home last night, and he said, how was your day? And I just thought, I said I didn’t actually really achieve anything because it’s school holidays here and I have my kid here, so time’s distractions by fifty million. 

Steven: Not to exaggerate, but, okay, yes. 

Rachel: So, it’s really interesting, that voice of customer, told to you that you want to hit three o’clock and be doing something else and not thinking about work instead of being at six and going, well, another day just fritted away on stuff. 

Steven: I had too many of those days where you’re busy all day, but the big things that actually move your life forward didn’t get done. That’s easy to stack those days up and then just be old, be like, well, I coulda. 

Rachel: Could have done something better.

Steven: I think that is a crime. I think it’s criminal. I look at my children’s generation, which I’m really excited about having my son and daughter and I hope that they look at us with social media the way I look at my dad’s generation with smoking. Where I’m like, dad, man, three of your friends died of lung cancer. You watched it like you have emphysema. How can you do it? And for dad, he’s like, all the movie stars were doing, it is the cool thing you don’t understand. Like tobacco companies are putting out, you know, studies that they funded on how healthy smoking was. He’s like, we didn’t know. I sure hope my kids look at us on social media and they’re like, how could you waste your life? How could you not write the next great novel or the screenplay or start the company or do whatever. And we’re like, you just don’t know how addictive it was watching Kim Kardashian’s ad for skims underwear. Fourteen million views. 

Lynne: Oh, my goodness, that’s a lot. I don’t even want to think about that. Gosh. So how do you get yourself out of being stuck creatively? What’s the very first step that you’d suggest? 

Steven: Go for a walk. 

Lynne: Ah.

Steven: There’s actually a fantastic book. I’m going to promote something else now, which is, there’s a book called The Net and The Butterfly. It is Olivia Fox Caban and Judah Pollock, and it talks about the creative process, the executive mode and default mode networks in your brain. And I’ll tell you, this was when I was twenty before the book was written. My first job, I was a senior in college, but starting to work in film was at an ad agency that did trailers for movies.  It was run by these two guys, twenty years older than I. Amazing reputations. They were like go-to promo guys in Hollywood. They wrote music videos and trailers and commercials and stuff. And one of them, his name is Jeff. He’s still a friend. He came in my office, and he was – by the way – he’s the only person in my life who’s ever called me Stevie. So, for the purpose of the story, he’s the one calling me Stevie. Right? He comes into my little office, which had no windows. I was like twenty years old. And my job at that time at the agency was when rough cuts of movies came in. We did a lot of Warner Bros movies and a lot of Buena Vista, essentially Disney movies. When movies came in, I would assign them to a writer to write the trailer. Oh, we got in this great Will Ferrell comedy that Sony’s going to release next year. Rachel, you did a great job at that one last year. Here, take this home, watch it start to write, right? So, Jeff comes to my office, and he goes, Stevie. I was like, yes, Jeff. It’s like, Bart, and I’m like, racking my brain. I’m like, there’s a guy in the vault that delivers tapes named Bart. He’s like, you ever given him a trailer to write. I’m like, Bart, the guy who like gets coffee and delivers tapes around? No, Jeff, I haven’t. Where are you going with this? He’s like, I got an instinct about him, Stevie. Okay. You know what, Jeff? You’ve been doing this for 20 years. Let me find something for him. So, I pulled like a Warner Bros b title that had a month deadline. So, if he comes back after a week, he’s like, I hate this. I don’t want to do this; I can give it to a pro and knock it out. Two days later, Jeff’s in my office, Stevie, how’s Bart doing? I said, Jeff, I gave him that movie two days ago, I’m not going to stress him. I’ll ask him Monday, fair? He’s like, okay, what else did you give him? I’m like Jeff, he’s never written a trailer in his life. I gave him one movie. I don’t want him to blow his brains out. And he goes, Stevie, let me teach you how creativity works. It is never about the thing you’re thinking about. It’s about the other thing. If you give him one movie to watch, he’s going to stare at that thing with little beads of sweat coming down his temples and he’s going to write the most obvious B version of that trailer you can imagine. 

The part of your brain that does that, huh, I don’t know what did chocolate and peanut butter taste like together? It’s not the part that you think you’re thinking with. He said you have to give him another movie in order for this to work.

Can I tell you how many times in the last twenty-eight years I’ve seen that proven true in film, in technology? Bart is now a writer, producer, a senior producer at Fox doing this. Jeff called it, he’s like that kid. There’s something about him. He was right. And that book I mentioned is about the neuroscience behind why it is if we’re walking or doing the dishes or showering or driving. Sometimes you have that idea that you do not have when you’re sitting at your laptop staring at it going, I must think of the next great paragraph in this thing. And it’s because the default mode network, which is to be very reductive, sort of like the little child, the one that’s like, oh, you know what? Cell phone, what does that taste like? Where the adult would never do that, right? And the executive mode network, which obviously executes action, oh, I have a meeting at ten am tomorrow, let me finish the slide deck tonight. Oh, I have to go pick up the kids, let me execute driving. Right? When the executive mode network is busy, is when the default mode next gets to play. Which is why when you’re doing the dishes or driving or whatever, the default mode goes, hey, I have a cool idea for that blog post. And it’s a great book if you ever want to skim it. 

Rachel: Oh, I’ll definitely check that out.

Steven: I’ve talked your ears off. 

Lynne: No, it’s great. It’s really good! It’s so interesting. I think all our neuro things, they’re all firing now. 

Rachel: It’s interesting because we’ve talked about other people a lot. I would like to know what your daily or weekly system is when you are working on your own project business. Do you have a system or a routine? 

Steven: I realise like Lynne, that I’m very good when I get up at five am and in my case, when I sweat. So, I will do either five am yoga or go to the gym for a little bit to get that the blood flowing. And then I try not to book a meeting before eleven am. If I can get away with it, that is sacred time. It’s blocked my calendar. If you guys have my Calendly, you’ll notice you just can’t book that window, right? It’s when I write my blog posts, it’s when I do decks, it’s when I write code, it’s when I do graphics, whatever it is. That is a time when I actually have that clarity of thought where I can be concise. I can be hopefully insightful, sometimes funny, never know – happens. And then I will at lunch, take an actual break. During the morning, I use my own Pomodoro timer in Sukha, which every twenty-five minutes which says, hey man, stretch for five minutes, here’s the breathing we offer you a breathing exercise, or go get water or do something, right? So, I do that, but then I do by mid-morning, need some sort of an actual reset. Like, hey, I’m going to go downstairs for half an hour, whatever, have a salad, walk around and do something to get out of the chair, right? And then in the afternoon, I’ll have a next big goal. If the morning has a big goal, usually around creativity, the afternoon will have a big goal around business because I’m better at thinking through those collaborative things. There’s a reason we are not having this conversation at six in the morning. Although you guys are fifteen hours ahead, I think. 

Lynne: Yes. That’s so interesting. One of the things we ask all our guests on the pod is about the tools that they use. Obviously, there’s your app, but I’d love to talk about other tools that you can recommend that’s part of, things you can’t do without and makes your work go better.

Steven: To be generous, I will mention things that I do not use, but I think are good because I’m a big fan of simplicity. 

Lynne: Yes. 

Steven: I find sometimes Google tasks is enough for me. I don’t need to use Asana or Jira or Linear or Todoist or Trello. Sometimes those task managers feel to me like a job unto themselves just to manage and groom them. I’m a big fan of, if there’s a way to do it with my phone, my calendar, great. And when I need to be in a flow state, I just open the website, hit play, and go. So that’s how I work. However, let me mention some other things that are very good. I just don’t use them. Fair?  

Lynne: Yes. 

Rachel: Okay. That’s a first for, for the podcast. 

Steven: For music, I know a lot of people like Brain of FM and Endel, I’ve tried them. They’re really good. They’re really smart. If that is your jam, if you find the thing that you want. Sometimes our sense and sound is so specific, it’s you’ve got to hit that thing where you go, ah, that’s my groove. I’ll give an example in my life of something that struck me when I was like, oh. When we started Sukha because there’s a lot of research, as I mentioned, into the kind of music most people use, right? I have a lot of friends who are film composers with time on their hands, right? Hey, friends, could you write stuff within the spec?

So, we have a thousand hours of original music, written by friends. We’re just like, hey man. Awesome. Some free time. Sure. Here we go. Now there is a buddy who’s a sound engineer for Lucas Arts, doing the Star Wars games up in Marin, north of San Francisco. He calls me, he’s like, hey, so I just got back from Nepal. It was my son’s graduation present. He wanted to go to Nepal. While we were in Kathmandu one day, it poured rain. It was this lush downpour. We didn’t even leave, and I had my audio equipment, and I recorded two hours of it. Do you want it? And I was like, for free? Let’s do an experiment. Julian let’s just throw up a playlist in the middle of all the lo-fi beats and the down tempo and the upbeat stuff, dah, dah. It’s thrown in there. I called it Himalayan Dream Rain. It’s just a two-point loop of rain coming in. Can I tell you, it’s our third most popular playlist. 

Rachel: Oh, wow. 

Steven: And I didn’t promote it. I just put it there quietly to see who’d find it. Which then opened me up to in the group chat, hey, who’s listening to this? Why do you listen to that? What is it? And some people talked about how it evoked for them. I used to be at my aunt’s house, my grandmother’s house up in the mountains, and I’d hear this and it was like, oh wow. So, it does that mental thing for you. So, we launched the Surf and Cyprus.

Lynne: Yes. 

Steven: Emerald Lake in Canada, which has I guess some, some indigenous bird that’s very particular to that area. A stream in Japan. You’re sitting by a gurgling brook writing your poetry, whatever and then a woman asked me for a coffee shop. Which I had a very sweet spot for coffee shops because when I was a development executive, I’m not a great writer, but I was a pretty good executive and it means every weekend, you’re taking home a stack ten to twenty scripts to read, right?  And treatments and books and video games that people want you to buy, right? So across from the Director’s Guild on Sunset Boulevard, there is a famous coffee bean and tea leaf. It’s known as a writer’s clubhouse.

Lynne: Oh right.

Steven: And when you go, maybe you’ve heard of it. When you go in there, it’s a sea of people inside and outside on their MacBooks, writing the next great screenplay, writing the next great teleplay and I would go there to read. I was not writing, but the energy of being in that room was really kind of cool because you had, in one corner, the old guy who’s written three studio movies this year he is making two million a script. But his habit from when he was twenty-five was coming here and he still comes here to write, you know what I mean? And you have like two girls who just got off the bus next to you who are like hunting and pecking their first TV pilot and there was something about being in there where it’s not a social environment. Everyone’s not just going up to other people like, what are you writing? But it was an energy of who were all trying to do something great. I really loved that and so a woman said to me, have you considered putting up a coffee shop because I used to work in coffee shops before I had kids. Now I can’t, out of the luxury of going to write in a coffee shop. And we found someone and recorded two hours or an hour and forty minutes or something of a coffee shop in Vienna, Austria. And you heard the baristas and little cups clattering and stuff like that.

We put it up. Some people love it. So, I share that because it is interesting how sound we are so particular about the sounds that allow us to drop in and do the thing and I learned a lot about that. So Endel and Brain FM are fantastic products. I don’t use them, but I know friends that do and really love them. Find the thing that works for you. It doesn’t have to be what I created, it’s just whatever allows you to go, I want to do something. I want to do the thing. 

Rachel: Amazing.

Lynne: Amazing.

Rachel: Steven, we could talk to you all day. Thank you so much for such a great chat. 

Steven: Thank you for having me on.

Rachel: All your very cool stories. Love them. Tell us where our audience can find you and subscribe to The Sukha.

Steven: Oh, that’s very sweet. I will offer two things. If there’s anything that I’ve said where someone wants to know more, it does not have to be about The Sukha Company. It can be, hey man, you mentioned Cal Newport, or that Hungarian guy or whatever. They’re welcome to email me. My email address is very public. It is steven@thesukha.co. Send me an email. Go, could you tell me how I could learn more about whomever, whatever. I will send you back a link. It will not be nineteen paragraphs of my life. You don’t want to read it? I don’t have time to write it. But I do get back to all my emails in twenty four hours if I’m not sick or traveling. 

Lynne: Wow. 

Steven: So that’s just open offer anyone who wants to learn more, right? And if someone wants to try Sukha, it’s free for seven days. No credit card, no funny business, if you don’t cancel, we’ll bill you. We don’t even ask for a credit card. We have 94% paid retention. because the people who get into a flow state, they’re like, this is magic. Why would I do anything else? So, you’re welcome to go to thesuka.co. Try it for seven days for free. 

Rachel: Okay. Cool.

Lynne: Fantastic. We’ll put some links in the show notes and that’ll be fantastic. Wow. Steven, thank you so much for being our guest this week.

Steven: It was super fun. 

Lynne: It was. It was really good.

Rachel: It was really great chat. 

Lynne: So that brings us to the end of the show, but thanks to everyone listening and don’t forget to leave a rating and review and also go to the show notes to find out how to get a transcript of this conversation and connect with Steven. That’d be great. Thank you. 

Steven: Bye everyone. 

Lynne: Okay. Bye. 

Rachel: Bye everybody. 

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Credits:

The Sukha Company and app is here: https://www.thesukha.co/

or connect with Steven via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-puri/ 

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com 

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Episode edited by Marker Creative Co www.markercreative.co