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These facts also tell us that those exponential entrepreneurs with “fail forward” as their de facto motto have an incredible advantage. If people don't have the space to fail, then they don't have the ability to take risks. At Facebook, there is a sign hanging in the main stairwell that reads: “Move fast, break things.” This kind of attitude is critical. If you're not incentivizing risk, you're denying access to flow—which is the only way to keep pace in a breakneck world.

Rich environment
, the next environmental trigger, is a combination platter of novelty, unpredictability, and complexity—three elements that catch and hold our attention much like risk. Novelty means both danger and opportunity, and when either are present, it pays to pay attention. Unpredictability means we don't know what happens next; thus we pay extra attention to the next event. Complexity, when there's lots of salient information coming at us at once, does more of the same.

How to employ this trigger on the job? Simply increase the amount of novelty, complexity, and unpredictability in the environment. This
is exactly what Astro Teller did by throwing out existing assumptions and demanding a 10x improvement. But it's also what Steve Jobs did when he designed Pixar. By building a large atrium at the building's center, then locating the mailboxes, cafeteria, meeting rooms, and most famously, the bathrooms, beside the atrium, he forced employees from all walks of the company to randomly bump into one another, massively increasing the amount of novelty, complexity, and unpredictability in their daily life.

Deep embodiment
is a kind of total physical awareness. It means paying attention with multiple sensory streams at once. Take Montessori education. The Montessori classroom has been shown to be one of the highest flow environments on Earth.
²³
Why? Because they emphasize learning through doing. Don't just read about that lighthouse, go out and build one. By working with your hands alongside your brain, you're engaging multiple sensory systems at once, grabbing hold of the attention system and forcing focus into the now.

Psychological triggers are conditions in our inner environment that create more flow. They're psychological strategies for driving attention into the now.

Back in the 1970s, pioneering flow researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified clear goals, immediate feedback, and the challenge/skills ratio as the three most critical.
²⁴
Let's take a closer look.

Clear goals
, our first psychological trigger, tell us where and when to put our attention. They are different than the high, hard problems of big goals. Those big goals refer to overarching passions: feeding the hungry, opening the space frontier. Clear goals, meanwhile, concern all the baby steps it's going to take to achieve those big goals. With these smaller goals, call them sub-goals, clarity is of the utmost importance for staying present and finding flow. When goals are clear, the mind doesn't have to wonder about what to do or what to do next—it
already knows. Thus concentration tightens, motivation is heightened, and extraneous information gets filtered out. As a result, action and awareness start to merge, and we're pulled even deeper into now. Just as important, in the now, there's no past or future and a lot less room for self—which are the intruders most likely to yank us to the then.

This also tells us something about emphasis. When considering clear goals, most have a tendency to skip over the adjective
clear
to get to the noun
goals
. When told to set clear goals, we immediately visualize ourselves on the Olympic podium, the Academy Award stage, or the Fortune 500 list, saying, “I've been picturing this moment since I was fifteen,” and think that's the point.

But those podium moments can pull us out of the present. Even if success is seconds away, it's still a future event subject to hopes, fears, and all sorts of now-crushing distraction. Think of the long list of infamous sporting chokes: the dropped pass in the final seconds of the Super Bowl; the missed putt at the end of the Augusta Masters. In those moments, the gravity of the goal pulled the participants out of the now, when, ironically, the now was all they needed to win.

If creating more flow is the aim, then the emphasis falls on
clear
, not
goals.
Clarity gives us certainty. We know what to do and where to focus our attention while we are doing it. When goals are clear, metacognition is replaced by in-the-moment cognition, and the self stays out of the picture.

Applying this idea in our daily life means breaking tasks into bite-size chunks and setting goals accordingly. A writer, for example, is better off trying to pen three great paragraphs at a time, rather than attempting one great chapter. Think challenging yet manageable—just enough stimulation to shortcut attention into the now, not enough stress to pull you back out again.

Immediate feedback
, our next psychological trigger, is another shortcut into the now. The term refers to a direct, in-the-moment coupling between cause and effect. As a focusing mechanism, immediate feedback is something of an extension of clear goals. Clear goals tell us what we're doing; immediate feedback tells us how to do it better.
If we know how to improve performance in real time, the mind doesn't go off in search of clues for betterment; we can keep ourselves fully present and fully focused and thus much more likely to be in flow.

Implementing this in business is fairly straightforward: Tighten feedback loops. Practice agile design. Put mechanisms in place so attention doesn't have to wander. Ask for more input. How much input? Well, forget quarterly reviews. Think daily reviews. Studies have found that in professions with less direct feedback loops—stock analysis, psychiatry, medicine—even the best get worse over time. Surgeons, by contrast, are the only physicians that improve the longer they're out of medical school. Why? Mess up on the table and someone dies. That's immediate feedback.

The challenge/skills ratio
, the last of our psychological flow triggers, is arguably the most important. The idea behind this trigger is that attention is most engaged (i.e., in the now) when there's a very specific relationship between the difficulty of a task and our ability to perform that task. If the challenge is too great, fear swamps the system. If the challenge is too easy, we stop paying attention. Flow appears near the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety, in what scientists call the flow channel—the spot where the task is hard enough to make us stretch; not hard enough to make us snap.

This sweet spot keeps attention locked in the present. When the challenge is firmly within the boundaries of known skills—meaning I've done it before and am fairly certain I can do so again—the outcome is predetermined. We're interested, not riveted. But when we don't know what's going to happen next, we pay more attention to the next. Uncertainty is our rocket ride into the now.

There is also a collective version of a flow state known as
group flow
.
²⁵
This is what happens when a bunch of people enter the zone together. If you've ever seen a fourth-quarter comeback in football, where everyone is always in the right place at the right time and the result looks more
like a well-choreographed dance than anything that normally happens on the gridiron—that's group flow in action.

But it's not just athletes who play this game. In fact, group flow is incredibly common in start-ups. When the whole team is driving toward a singular purpose with incredible speed—again, that's group flow in action. “Because entrepreneurship is about the nonstop navigation of uncertainty,” says Salim Ismail,
²⁶
“being in flow is a critical aspect of success. Flow states allow an entrepreneur to stay open and alert to possibilities, which could exist in any partnership, product insight, or customer interaction. The more flow created by a start-up team, the higher the chance of success. In fact, if your start-up team is not in a near-constant group flow state, you will not succeed. Peripheral vision gets lost and insights don't follow.”

So how to precipitate group flow? This is where social triggers come into play. These triggers are ways to alter social conditions to produce more group flow. A number of them are already familiar. The first three—
serious concentration; shared, clear goals; good communication
(i.e., lots of immediate feedback)—are the collective versions of the psychological triggers identified by Csikszentmihalyi.

Two more—
equal participation
and an
element of risk
(mental, physical, whatever)—are self-explanatory given what we already know about flow. The remaining five require a little more information.

Familiarity
, our next trigger, means the group has a common language, a shared knowledge base, and a communication style based on unspoken understandings. It means everybody is always on the same page, and when novel insights arise, momentum is not lost due to the need for lengthy explanation.

Then there's
blending egos
—which is kind of a collective version of humility. When egos have been blended, no one's hogging the spotlight and everyone's thoroughly involved.

A
sense of control
combines autonomy (being free to do what you want) and mastery (being good at what you do). It's about getting to choose your own challenges and having the necessary skills to surmount
them.

Close listening
occurs when we're fully engaged in the here and now. In conversation, this isn't about thinking about what witty thing to say next or what cutting sarcasm came last. Rather, it's generating real-time, unplanned responses to the dialogue as it unfolds.

Our final trigger,
Always say “yes, and . . . ,”
means interactions should be additive more than argumentative. The goal here is the momentum, togetherness, and innovation that comes from ceaselessly amplifying one another's ideas and actions. It's a trigger based on the first rule of improv comedy. If I open a sketch with “Hey, there's a blue elephant in the bathroom,” and you respond with “No, there's not,” the scene goes nowhere. Your denial kills the flow. But instead, if your response is of the “yes, and . . .” variety—“Yeah, sorry, I had no idea where to put him, did he leave the toilet seat up again?”—then the story goes someplace interesting.

If you look under the hood of creativity, what you see is pattern recognition (the brain's ability to link new ideas together) and risk taking (the courage to bring those new ideas into the world). Both of these experiences produce powerful neurochemical reactions and the brain rides these reactions deeper into flow.

This means, for those of us who want more flow in our lives, we have to think different, it's as simple as that. Instead of tackling problems from familiar angles, go at them backward and sideways and with style. Go out of your way to stretch your imagination. Massively up the amount of novelty in your life; the research shows that new environments and experiences are often the jumping-off point for new ideas (more opportunity for pattern recognition). Most important, make creativity a value and a virtue. This is where we return to moonshot thinking again. As Teller explains, “You don't spend your time being bothered that you can't teleport from here to Japan, because there's a part of you that thinks it's impossible. Moonshot thinking is choosing to be bothered by
that.”

One of the most well-established facts about flow is that the state is ubiquitous—meaning it shows up anywhere, in anyone, provided certain initial conditions are met. What are these conditions? These seventeen triggers—it really is that straightforward.

And there's a reason for this as well. We're biological organisms, and evolution is conservative by design. When a particular adaptation works, the basic design is repeated again and again. Flow most certainly works. As a result, our brains are hardwired for the experience. We are all designed for optimal performance—it's a
built-in feature of being human.

“I watched the news today and I saw something sooooo . . . awesome,” says Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's
Daily Show
.
¹
It's April 24, 2012, and Stewart is, well, a little excited. His eyebrows dart, his nostrils flare, he's about to blow. A newsreel begins to roll. We see an anchorman in a suit, hands folded, cucumber calm: “This may seem like science fiction,” he says, “but today a group of space pioneers announced plans to mine asteroids for precious minerals.” Cut back to Stewart, in a tizzy, shouting, “Space pioneers going to mine asteroids for precious materials! BOOM! BOOM! YES! Stu-Beef is all in. Do you know how rarely the news in 2012 looks and sounds like you thought news would look and sound in 2012?”

What Stewart was boom-booming about was Planetary Resources, Inc.,
²
the asteroid-mining company I cofounded with Eric Anderson in 2009 and announced in 2012. Clearly, asteroid mining is a crazy science-fiction idea, bold on every level. To start this kind of company with any real hope of success and—equally difficult—to present it to the public in a plausible fashion requires a different kind of approach. Over the years, I've developed a series of strategies for tackling these
kinds of challenges, none more important than birthing projects above the line of super-credibility.

As will become clearer later, getting above that line requires a deep passion. Mine emerged in 1969. I was only eight years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and I decided then and there that going into space was what I wanted to do with my life. I was in my early twenties when I realized NASA was never going to get me there. Constrained by government spending and frightened by the risk of failure, the space agency had become a military-industrial jobs program unlikely to return to the Moon or push onward to Mars. It was clear to me, if we were going to boldly go, it was going to have to be without the help of government.