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Welcome to The Writing Coach Podcast, the show where I talk to the people whose job it is to help writers actually get the work done, including coaches, editors, marketing experts, and the folks building the tools behind the craft. I’m your host, Kevin Johns.
Today’s guest, Steven Puri, spent years as a studio executive at Fox and DreamWorks, producing digital effects on around fourteen films, working alongside James Cameron, David Fincher, and Mel Gibson, and picking up an Academy Award along the way for Independence Day. But somewhere in there, he got tired of sequels and spinoffs and walked away from film entirely to solve a different problem: why smart, talented people, including him, still can’t get out of their own way when it’s time to sit down and create.
That led him to build Sukha, a tool designed around flow states, to help writers and other creators beat procrastination and distraction and actually finish the thing they set out to make.
We get into what he learned in the room with some of Hollywood’s best storytellers, why “hustle culture” isn’t the same thing as doing great work, what flow state really is and how to get into one on command, and how any of us, whether we’re writing a novel or just trying to finish that blog post, can stop waiting for inspiration and start doing the work.
Check it out now:
Audio:
Video:
The Writing Coach Episode #228 Show Notes
Suka – The Happiness Company: Steven’s focus and flow-state tool for writers and creators.
Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Deep Work by Cal Newport
Pick up Kevin’s latest novel: The Page Turners: Fantastic Realms.
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Grab your FREE copy of The Busy Author Method here.
Buy a copy of Kevin’s colouring book: The Frustrated Writer’s Colouring Book.
The Writing Coach Episode #228 Transcript
Steven, it is great to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for joining me.
You know what? Let’s make this one of your best.
I hope I have some interesting little tidbits to share. In listening to your podcast, I don’t think you’ve had anyone on quite like me.
For those listening, I was a studio executive at a couple of major motion picture studios. I spent a lot of time with top screenwriters, studying how they actually work—you know, the million-dollar club. What techniques and practices do they use to actually do the thing instead of just talking about needing to do the thing?
That’s what I lecture on now. That’s what I talk about. So I hope this is interesting.
As a teenager, I worked for Blockbuster, and I always had this idea in my head that I’d go for this career or that career, but at least I could always fall back on Blockbuster.
Right. As we laugh about that now.
Exactly.
Looking at cinema this summer, there was a Star Wars movie that underwhelmed in terms of performance. Do you think we’re seeing the end of cinema as the defining art form in our culture?
This is a very biased opinion, but part of why I got out of film and went to build Suka was because everything I was doing as a senior executive at Fox was basically a sequel, prequel, spin-off, or mash-up.
There was such a focus on safe bets. Ticket sales were going down, so exhibitors—the theater owners—kept raising ticket prices to make up the revenue, even though fewer people were going to the movies.
At the same time, the competition became enormous. I could spend my time on social media. I could spend it playing games. There were so many other entertainment options.
So the industry gravitated toward the safest possible investments. Avengers 4012 is a safer bet than an original film, right?
After a while, you’ve gone back to the Star Wars well so many times. There’s only so much water you can draw before people start saying, “Really? Again?”
The stories can still be good, but after a while it starts to feel like a money grab.
So I think the real question becomes: How many of these stories actually need to be told?
I told you it was a biased opinion.
Well, I think it aligns with the general analysis. I think the viewing public is smart enough to know the difference between a George Lucas film and a Disney product, and those are very different things.
That’s true.
I appreciate what you’re really asking, which is how film functions in society today. We see all these movies, and many of them aren’t performing as well as they once did.
But if you go one layer deeper, you’re really talking about storytelling.
Modern technology gives us movies, TV, streaming, books, comics—all these different media through which we tell stories. Going all the way back to sitting around a campfire telling stories.
The reason we tell each other stories is because they’re how we communicate truths about life.
You hear the story of Icarus flying too close to the sun, and you learn something about your own life. It’s entertaining—the wings melt, he falls—but beneath all of that is a truth.
Those truths exist regardless of the medium.
If you and I hang out after this and I tell you a story about my life, you might think, “That’s fascinating. I learned something about my own life from that.”
Or you watch a new Netflix show tonight. Even though it’s fictional, it still communicates some truth about how we relate to one another—even if it’s Love Island.
As someone who studied both story and technology and worked in both fields, I’m curious: where did it start for you?
Was teenage Steven interested in stories, or were you interested in technology?
That’s a really good question. I rarely get asked that.
The weird thing is that I grew up in Northern Virginia, and both my parents were engineers at IBM. My mom was a software engineer writing code. My dad was a hardware engineer designing logic chips and CPUs.
If your parents are great ice skaters, you probably learn to skate just by being around them. So I learned to code, but I never really thought that would become my career.
While I was in Washington, D.C., I auditioned for—and became—a newscaster on the top-rated youth television show in the D.C./Baltimore market.
That was a lot of fun because it was a news show. We conducted interviews, covered current events, and reported from teenagers to teenagers about what was happening in the world.
This was before Facebook, so it was a fascinating time.
That led me to the University of Southern California, where I studied broadcast journalism and business.
While I was there, I still had those coding skills, and I had a Watson Scholarship, so I made money as a junior software engineer while I was in school.
The lucky break came because a lot of my friends were in USC’s Cinema-Television School, which is phenomenal.
I wasn’t.
I was studying nonfiction journalism.
But I was constantly exposed to the way they thought about film. They were talking about Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and all these incredible movies.
Then filmmaking became digital.
Suddenly, I happened to be one of the few people who could speak both “creative” and “engineer.”
That was an incredibly valuable combination.
So I got pulled into the film industry almost by accident.
It was basically, “Hey kid, you know how to sing and dance? Get over here.”
That’s what happened.
It was an incredibly lucky break.
I ended up producing the digital effects for about fourteen films.
I worked with James Cameron on True Lies, David Fincher on Se7en, Mel Gibson on Braveheart, Brian De Palma, and a number of other amazing filmmakers.
To be in your early twenties and sitting in dark post-production rooms while these people debated how to shoot or edit a movie…
My God.
Could there be a better masterclass?
I don’t know.
There are certainly wonderful instructors, and I don’t mean to diminish them.
But for me, sitting in those meetings while Cameron went department by department—with the color timers, visual effects team, editors, everyone—talking through exactly what he wanted from the film…
It was incredible.
You were a fly on the wall.
So I’d always been interested in story—particularly nonfiction. I thought that was going to be my future.
Instead, my technology background pulled me into fictional filmmaking.
After about fourteen films, I realized I didn’t just want to be the person who got called after a movie was greenlit to handle the digital effects.
I wanted to help get the movies made.
That eventually led me to become Executive Vice President at DreamWorks and later Vice President at Fox, working on franchises like Die Hard and Wolverine.
From a leadership perspective, what sort of things can you learn from being in the room with someone like fellow Canadian James Cameron?
One of the biggest influences on me actually wasn’t James Cameron.
It was Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci, whom I worked with at DreamWorks.
They fundamentally changed how I understood story.
For people who don’t know them, Alex and Bob worked on Alias, The Legend of Zorro, The Island, Mission: Impossible III, Transformers, Eagle Eye, Fringe, and many other projects.
They’re incredibly talented storytellers who genuinely love film, science fiction, and the craft itself.
Working with directors like Cameron teaches you what it’s like to command an army.
Making Titanic meant coordinating thousands of people and an enormous budget.
Great producers make sure the right decisions reach the director at exactly the right time.
They’re not asking, “Should the wall be blue?” after it’s already been painted.
They create the opportunity for those decisions to happen when they matter.
And they also have to remain flexible.
Sometimes a scene that worked beautifully on the page simply doesn’t work once it’s filmed.
The film is still alive at that point.
It hasn’t been locked into the final print.
You can still change it.
You can still fix it.
That really is like being the general of a massive army.
But honestly, what fascinated me even more was watching how stories were built before anyone spent a dollar on cameras, digital effects, or production.
That’s where Alex and Bob completely rewired how I thought about storytelling.
They were my “red pill” moment.
It was like seeing The Matrix.
Suddenly I understood story on an entirely different level.
Both of them are generally considered to come out of the J.J. Abrams school of storytelling.
Very much so.
Hercules, Xena, Alias…
That was their early progression.
Given the trajectory of Abrams’ career in recent years, do you think there are flaws in the mystery-box approach to storytelling, or does it all come down to execution?
J.J. talks a lot about the mystery-box approach, and I think he makes it work.
But I think something even more important sits underneath it.
When you’re writing movies filled with aliens, ghosts, photon torpedoes, Klingons, lasers in space, and cities exploding…
Alex and Bob always asked a different question.
They’d ask, “Could this movie still work if we only had a three-million-dollar budget?”
Could we tell the story without the spaceships?
Without the aliens?
Without the giant visual effects?
If the answer was yes, then you could layer all the spectacle on top.
That’s what I loved about their work.
Yes, all the structural beats are there.
The characters evolve.
The obstacles escalate.
The storytelling mechanics are solid.
But underneath all of that sits a simple human story.
Star Trek is essentially Cain and Abel.
It’s two brothers who can’t stop fighting until they finally reconcile.
Only then can they save the day.
Mission: Impossible III is really a story about marriage.
You’re lying to your spouse.
Things aren’t going to end well until you tell the truth.
True Lies is the same story.
You don’t need Harrier jets flying over Miami to tell a story about two people keeping secrets from one another.
Those are stories people relate to.
You see the same thing in many of the best superhero movies.
At their core, they’re often about siblings trying to save their family.
The superpowers are just genre dressing.
Strip away the costumes and special effects, and you could tell exactly the same story on a farm with five siblings defending their home.
That’s what I find so compelling.
Audiences connect with that emotional truth.
You can certainly talk to people like Damon, J.J., and others about mystery boxes, reveals, and narrative sleight of hand.
Those techniques absolutely matter.
But for me, the place to begin is always the organizing principle.
What’s the deep emotional truth at the heart of the story? That’s where I start.
Kevin Johns
Clearly, you and several of the people you’ve worked with are high performers in your industry. At this point, how do you define high performance? Having won an Oscar and worked with so many accomplished people, what does high performance mean to you now?
Steven
First, I don’t want to claim that I’m a high performer.
What I will say is that I struggle with things that hold me back from performing at the level I know I’m capable of. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to solve those problems and sharing the tools that have helped me.
I was also part of the team that won the Academy Award for Independence Day, which was incredible, but a huge number of people were involved. I don’t want to take individual credit for what was very much a group effort. It’s not like winning a Pulitzer Prize for a book you wrote.
Here’s the thing: I’ll tell you straight up, and it took me a long time to be honest about this.
I procrastinate.
It’s a problem for me, and it shows up in very ordinary ways.
I’ll think, Okay, tomorrow at nine a.m., I need to return those emails, write the first chapter of whatever I’m working on, and finish that blog post.
Then, at 9:15, I’m still scrolling through the news. At 9:30, I’m answering low-priority emails.
That’s procrastination. That’s what it is.
The pain of it doesn’t show up at 9:30 because you still have the whole day ahead of you. The pain shows up at six o’clock, when you’re thinking, How did I not finish that blog post?
Then you start making those terrible promises to yourself.
I’ll wake up really early tomorrow and finish it.
Or, Laura, I know we’re having dinner with Kevin and his wife tonight, but let’s make it quick because I need to come home and finish all the work I didn’t do today.
I don’t want that.
I’d much rather be able to say, I wrote the thing. I reread it. I polished it. I love it. I posted it. Now let’s go to dinner.
That’s a great feeling.
The same thing happens with distraction, and I’m very open about this. I’m Steven Puri, and I’m a distractaholic.
For me, distraction usually appears when I become frustrated.
Let’s say I’m writing a blog post. I reread the last couple of paragraphs and think, This is clichéd. This isn’t expressing what I really mean. I haven’t found the truth of what I’m trying to say.
I get frustrated.
That’s the moment when my hand reaches for my phone.
Let me check WhatsApp and see whether anyone replied. I’m going to New York next week—maybe one of my meetings has been confirmed. Let me quickly open TikTok or YouTube.
But it’s never just a minute.
Half an hour goes by. Sometimes an hour.
Then it turns into, Where did the day go?
The same thing happens with coding. If I’m building a feature and the build fails a couple of times, I get frustrated. My brain is so well trained to know that there is zero-effort dopamine available inside this little metal box.
Just pick it up.
Or open Reddit.
Tell yourself you’re doing research.
Having a child last year made my time feel even more precious. If you want to be present in your child’s life and watch the little rascal grow up, you can’t squander your time.
There’s this pressure to do the thing I believe I’m here on Earth to do, while also not missing the chance to see him stand up, toddle around, and experience all those little moments.
That’s what led me to ask: What tools can help me do the work I’m meant to do and feel good while doing it?
That’s essentially what Sukha means.
It’s the happiness you feel when you’re in your lane, doing what you’re meant to do, and doing it well. You feel in control of your day. You can work with ease, which doesn’t mean the work itself is easy.
You can watch a great figure skater or Michael Jordan playing basketball, and they perform at such a high level that it looks easy.
It isn’t easy.
They’re simply doing it with ease because they’ve become so skilled.
The same thing applies to writing a haiku. Someone might say, “It’s only seventeen syllables. What’s the big deal?”
But getting those seventeen syllables exactly right is incredibly difficult, even if the finished poem makes it look effortless.
That’s what matters most to me now: overcoming distraction and procrastination. I have both in abundance, and they hold me back from what I could be doing.
Let’s talk about some of the tools you use and have developed.
I’ve heard you use the term dopamine management, which I thought was fantastic because it gets to the core of the problem.
It isn’t simply about how to stay off your phone. It’s about how to manage the thing that makes you want to reach for your phone.
Tell us a bit about those tools.
Let me set the stage a little.
We’re beginning to understand certain neurochemicals, although I’m sure our understanding will be dramatically better fifty years from now.
At least today, we can say, Okay, serotonin seems to do this. Dopamine seems to do that. Norepinephrine does something else.
We’re still learning, but we know certain chemicals influence how we feel.
You fall in love, and certain chemicals flood your brain.
You become frightened, and a different chemical response occurs.
Dopamine has been a major topic in Silicon Valley for the past ten or fifteen years. Companies know that if they can cause a dopamine release while you’re using their product, the product can become addictive.
We also know that certain foods, like chocolate, can trigger those pleasurable chemical responses.
That matters because enormous corporations make money from keeping you engaged and watching advertisements. They are deeply invested in figuring out how to make you associate their product with dopamine.
You scroll through your feed and get that little rush of anticipation: What’s the next thing going to be?
When you understand that trillion-dollar companies are spending enormous amounts of money to capture your dopamine, you start thinking, Maybe I should learn how to use it for myself.
How can I generate those feelings in healthy ways?
Maybe it comes from loving your wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, or child.
Maybe you write a blog post that gives you genuine joy, and people respond to it and share it.
That kind of dopamine reinforces a much healthier pathway.
So dopamine management is incredibly important.
The other thing I want to talk about is flow state. I’m passionate about it because I didn’t discover it until long after college.
When I finally did, my first thought was, Why didn’t anyone tell me about this earlier? I could have used this in college.
Let’s get into flow state, but first I’d love to hear you contrast it—or perhaps connect it—with hustle culture.
You’ve led three start-ups and raised twenty million dollars in venture capital. When I hear that, I think of hustle culture.
But then I watch you on YouTube, and you’re talking about flow states.
Are those two different things, or do they merge?
I think it’s an evolution in understanding.
The best part of hustle culture is the idea that you should hustle. You should do something. You should put effort into creating the thing you believe in.
Maybe that thing is a business.
Maybe it’s a novel, a graphic novel, or a screenplay.
The positive side of hustle culture is: don’t sit on your ass. Pursue something.
The negative connotation is that, unless you’re grinding until two in the morning, burning the midnight oil, barely sleeping, and hardly eating, you’re not really committed.
That may not be the healthiest approach.
You can certainly accomplish things by treating yourself that way, but there is a finite amount of time you can sustain it before you burn out, your body shuts down, or something else goes wrong.
What interested me was watching some of the people I worked with at the very highest level.
At that level, many of the action writers were men, although there were women like Laeta Kalogridis and Amanda Silver. But I’m talking about people like Matt Damon, Alex Kurtzman, Bob Orci, Billy Ray, and Christopher McQuarrie.
These were writers creating work for me or with me, and they had figured out the game.
They were making one or two million dollars per script, and they were surviving.
They had developed ways to be incredibly productive while still managing their output. They were having dinner with their families.
They weren’t saying, “I have to stay up until two in the morning because hustle culture demands it.”
They were saying, “I’ll deliver the next Mission: Impossible draft, and I’m still going to have dinner with my family tonight.”
That’s an evolution beyond hustle culture.
Take the best part of hustle culture: have a goal, pursue it, love it, and put real energy into it.
But do it efficiently.
Because the work you produce between two and three in the morning is usually the work you end up rewriting.
You may create some output—code, words on the page, whatever—but when you return to it later, you often think, That drifted away from the point. I’m not sure it will survive the final edit.
I’m the father of a teenager now, so I’ve suddenly become a big believer in the theory that nothing good happens after midnight.
Exactly.
That’s what interests me about the relationship between hustle culture and flow state.
The best part of hustle is having a goal, putting energy toward it, feeling passionate about it, and doing something meaningful with your life.
Then the question becomes: How can I do that in the most efficient way and produce the greatest possible result?
The answer isn’t staying up all night, every night.
It isn’t microdosing psilocybin in Silicon Valley because you’re a coder.
It isn’t developing an alcohol problem because you want to be Hemingway.
It’s about being smart and intentional, the way someone like Andrew Huberman might approach it—or, in my world, the way Christopher McQuarrie, David Ayer, Billy Ray, Matt Damon, Alex Kurtzman, and Bob Orci approached their work.
These were people making two million dollars per script who still had dinner with their families.
When I discovered flow state, I didn’t know the term. I didn’t even know it was a thing.
I was flying from Austin to San Francisco. The next day, I had a meeting with my team, and I wanted to mock up an idea for a new feature.
I needed to create enough of it that I could show the team and ask, “Should we build this? Is it worth testing?”
It had to be concrete enough for them to understand. I couldn’t just wave my hands and describe it.
So I thought, I’ll mock it up on the flight.
I boarded the plane. Alaska Airlines runs a nonstop flight from Austin to San Francisco.
The captain came over the speaker and said, “Sorry, everyone. The Wi-Fi is down. We’ll see you in San Francisco.”
We took off, and I started working.
What felt like fifteen minutes later, the plane began descending.
I thought, There must be a problem with the aircraft. We’re probably landing at Dallas–Fort Worth or somewhere else to change planes.
Then I looked at the time.
Two hours and forty minutes had passed.
We were descending over the San Francisco Bay.
I couldn’t tell you whether the drink cart had come by. I couldn’t tell you the name of the guy sitting next to me.
But my design was finished.
I had created a rough but surprisingly accurate version of the feature, and I was ready for the meeting.
Originally, I had expected to get off the plane, take an Uber to the hotel, grab a sandwich in the lobby, go upstairs, finish the project, and collapse into bed.
Instead, I got into the Uber and called a friend.
I said, “I have a free night. Do you want to have dinner?”
At dinner, I told him, “You wouldn’t believe what happened on the flight. I got the entire thing done. I was completely in the zone.”
He said, “You were in a flow state.”
I said, “A what?”
He couldn’t believe I didn’t know the term.
Then he explained that flow is a measurable neurochemical state. You can learn to enter it, although it takes some practice and certain conditions.
Music can help.
Distraction blockers can help.
You need a task that feels meaningful.
There are certain conditions you can intentionally create.
He explained that researchers had placed jazz musicians who reported entering flow inside fMRI machines. At the moment when the musicians said, “This is where I became one with the music. I lost my sense of self and felt like I was part of the trio creating something together,” researchers could observe corresponding changes in the brain.
Activity in the prefrontal cortex—the area behind your forehead associated with your sense of self—decreases.
It’s almost as though your brain says, You want to drop in? You want to be in the zone? Okay. We can do that.
Then my friend said, “You should read more about this. By the way, try the Brussels sprouts.”
That conversation led me to start researching flow, and I discovered that many very intelligent people had already written extensively about it.
I feel like I gained an early understanding of flow states because, as a good Canadian boy, I played hockey for most of my life, and I was a goalie.
There are all these jokes and myths about how strange goalies are and all the bizarre rituals they perform.
I’m convinced those rituals are largely about getting into a flow state.
As a goalie, you have certain games where you think, Nothing is getting past me. I can feel it.
Then you have other games where you’re thinking, I can’t get there. I can’t find it.
Everything may be going right around you, but you’re simply not in flow.
Yes. That’s so interesting.
A hockey game might look like chaos and physical exertion to most people, but for a goalie it’s largely a mental game.
You spend a lot of time alone at your end of the ice, talking to yourself.
Stay sharp. Stay in the zone. Find that groove and ride it for the entire game.
Later, when I started experiencing those same feelings while writing a book, composing a song, or creating something else, I thought, I know this feeling. This is the good hockey feeling.
It’s amazing that you had that experience so early.
Did you know it was called flow or a flow state, or did you simply have your own name for it?
I called it goalie energy.
I love that. I hope you bring that goalie energy into your writing now.
In any given hockey game, there was only so much goalie energy on the ice, and you were battling the other goalie to get all the good goalie energy.
But as I expanded beyond the hockey rink, I did become familiar with the term. I know you’re a fan of Cal Newport’s work, and I think Deep Work is a book every writer should read. So I certainly became familiar with the concept.
That is so true.
It’s funny. My wife was a Division I ice hockey player in college in the ECAC, and I would not characterize her description of her hockey experience as being in flow. But tonight at dinner, I’m going to ask her more about that because I’ve never really dug into it.
Sports are definitely a place where people experience flow.
There’s that famous Michael Jordan quote about being in the zone—when he’s in the zone, it’s just him and the ball. There is a state where you become completely absorbed in the sport you’re playing and perform at that level.
That’s incredibly cool.
It’s also true in art. There’s that story about Picasso creating Guernica, if I have this right. He completed that enormous canvas in a very short period of time to capture the horrors of war. He stayed up through the night, lost his sense of time, forgot to eat, and became completely absorbed in the work—as though the muses were speaking to him and he was channeling them onto the canvas.
That’s amazing.
The same thing happens with writers. There’s something about creation where, if you can harness flow, you can go further and faster.
Let me back up for a moment.
I know there’s a portion of your audience who are already flow masters. They know all about this, and they’re practically floating above their desks right now.
Then there’s probably another group thinking, I’ve heard the term flow state. It’s in the zeitgeist, but I don’t really know what you’re talking about.
So let me explain it briefly.
About forty years ago, a Hungarian American psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi developed a theory.
He noticed that when high performers in very different disciplines—athletes, artists, inventors, and scientists—talked about the state they entered while doing the work that made them exceptional, they described it in remarkably similar ways.
Even though their activities were completely different, the experience sounded the same.
He wondered, What is going on here?
So he conducted the research, interviewed people, and wrote the book Flow, which became the seminal work on the subject. That’s why we call it a flow state.
He said he chose the word flow even though some people called it being in the zone, working with the muses, or other things.
Flow was the best metaphor for what he discovered.
We are all on a river, paddling to move ourselves forward. But when you align your boat with the current, the current begins to carry you. You travel further and faster because it magnifies your effort.
That’s what these people had figured out how to do.
Since then, people like Cal Newport and many others have explored different parts of the process.
Someone focuses on music.
Someone focuses on distractions.
Someone focuses on how to choose a meaningful task.
Csikszentmihalyi identified a number of common characteristics.
People lose track of time. Check. You and I have both experienced that.
They become fully immersed in the work.
They lose their sense of self and almost become one with what they’re doing.
Distractions stop feeling interesting.
They do some of their best work faster than they thought possible.
And when they finish, they often feel uplifted or joyful rather than drained and exhausted.
When I experienced that on the plane and my friend told me what it was, I thought, Wow. I need to understand the conditions that allowed this to happen so I can do it again.
I would much rather walk off the plane thinking, Done. Let’s have dinner, than thinking, This is going to be a long night.
I’ve had enough of those long nights.
That’s really at the core of what I do now: how do we share these tools with people?
It isn’t for everyone. Some people enjoy grinding it out. Some people like being awake at two in the morning and feel connected to a culture or ethos built around that.
Other people think, I want to do great work, and I also want to have dinner with my family, go windsurfing, or go paragliding.
It’s interesting. You mentioned the listeners who are already floating above their desks as they write.
And I hope there are some flow masters listening who are thinking, Oh yes, I love this.
You mentioned the ones struggling to get there, but what you’re actually missing is a big group of beginner writers. They are the ones who think they can’t write until the flow state magically arrives, and they’re sitting on the sidelines. They’re not even in the canoe. And so, what I have found, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, is you have to do the work with intention, and that’s when the inspiration or the flow or the creativity comes. You don’t sit around waiting for it and then only act once you’re already feeling it.
Yes. I’m so glad you said that.
You’re right. I probably skipped over that part.
The research into how people enter flow suggests that certain conditions are important. Csikszentmihalyi and many others have written about this.
And, by the way, anything intelligent I say should be credited to the very smart people who have spent their lives studying this. I’m simply relaying the information because I discovered it and thought it was amazing.
You need to begin with something meaningful and achievable.
The task can’t simply be, I want to write my novel, because you aren’t going to write your entire novel today. You’re not going to enter flow around a three-month goal.
Instead, you might say, I want to outline Chapter One. I know where my character needs to begin. I’m going to write my character bible.
You need a meaningful goal—something you believe is worth doing—and it needs to be achievable.
It also needs to involve skills you already possess.
Csikszentmihalyi pointed out that Picasso didn’t enter flow by throwing a basketball, and Michael Jordan didn’t enter flow by painting.
You need to be doing something for which you have developed some ability.
Maybe you haven’t been published yet, but you’ve been writing, honing your craft, and building the necessary skills.
The task also needs to be challenging.
It isn’t simply writing a poster for the high school dance. It’s thinking, I believe I have the great American novel inside me. I know writing is rewriting. I’m going to write this, get feedback, revise it, reread it, and revise it again because I have something meaningful here.
You also need some form of feedback while you’re working.
You need a way to ask, How am I doing?
A writer can reread the paragraph.
An athlete can look at the scoreboard.
A painter can step back and study the canvas.
There has to be some measurable sense of progress.
Otherwise, you’re simply pouring effort into a black hole without knowing whether the work is good or bad.
You might be editing a spreadsheet for your overlords at Microsoft, thinking, This could be good. It could be terrible. I have no idea.
That probably isn’t going to lead to flow.
But if you reread a paragraph and think, I’ve rewritten this twice, and each time it gets better. This is working, then you’re receiving feedback.
And, as you said, none of this becomes possible until you take the first step.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. It doesn’t begin with sitting on your doorstep waiting for flow to strike you.
You have to start walking.
Research suggests it generally takes around fifteen to twenty-three minutes for your brain to begin shifting into that state.
Your brain starts saying, Okay, let’s reduce activity in the prefrontal cortex. Let’s sharpen your focus and make concentration easier.
That’s the magic moment.
Then you look up an hour or two later and think, Wow. I didn’t realize I had done all that. The thing is written. I’m going to have lunch.
Something I’ve found incredibly successful in my coaching communities is group writing sessions and in-person retreats.
It sounds silly. Why would you need a gym buddy to write? Writing is such a solitary art form.
And yet, being able to look across the room and see someone else writing—having that external experience of being surrounded by people doing the same thing—can go a long way toward motivating you and helping you enter flow.
What has your experience with that been?
You’re speaking my language. I love that you said that.
Let me tell you a funny story.
When I was a development executive, my job involved reading enormous amounts of material: submitted manuscripts, treatments, comic books and novels being considered for adaptation, screenplays being offered for option—just a tremendous amount of reading.
At Sony, DreamWorks, and Fox, I always had this looming pile of material to get through.
I could have read at home. I had a beautiful condo in West Hollywood.
But across from the Directors Guild on Sunset Boulevard, just west of Fairfax, there was a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf that was known as a kind of writers’ clubhouse.
You would walk in and see a room full of people working on laptops.
I would go there to read even though I wasn’t a writer, because there was something about the energy in that room.
It wasn’t highly social.
People weren’t constantly saying, “Kevin, how’s your project going?” or, “Steven, it’s so good to see you.”
That wasn’t the atmosphere.
You walked in, and everyone was working.
In one corner, there might be an established older writer working on three Marvel scripts that year. He was already successful, but he still came there because it had been part of his practice since his twenties.
At the communal table, there might be two young women from Iowa who had just arrived in Los Angeles and were hunting and pecking their way through their first television pilot.
Some of those people were going to make it. Some weren’t.
But everyone was surrounded by the energy of people trying to create something great.
That was infectious.
It helped me get through my own work.
When we were building Sukha, the flow-state platform I created to help people enter flow, I realized there needed to be some kind of community experience.
I knew many of the members individually because they talked to me, but they had no sense that all these other people were also using Sukha at that moment—writing, coding, and designing.
So I emailed a few members and asked whether I could bounce an idea off them.
I wondered whether creating a sense of community would be incredibly distracting.
At that point, everyone was playing a single-player game. It was like everyone was playing Pac-Man alone without knowing there were other Pac-Man machines in the arcade.
What would happen if we turned it into a multiplayer experience where people could check in with one another?
A few people said, “I don’t know. It might be cool.”
Then one woman made the decision for me.
I’ll tell you what she said because it burned itself into my memory. This is almost verbatim.
She cut me off and said, “Steven, listen. I can go to the Nike store and buy a pair of shoes. They’ll sell me a left shoe and a right shoe. I can put them on and run. They work perfectly well.
“But there’s a reason one hundred million people belong to Nike Run Club. Together, you run further and faster.
“On the days when you’re struggling and don’t want to run, your friends come by and say, ‘Come on. Let’s do this.’ Then you do it, and you feel great.
“And on the days when one of your friends is struggling on the sofa, you go over and say, ‘Come on, Kev. Let’s do this.’ They feel great, and you feel even better.
“You should absolutely create this because we’re all in it together.”
I completely agreed.
She made up my mind.
It was done.
In Sukha, people can share what they’re working on. They post links to chapters of novels they’ve written, websites they’ve designed, and other projects.
Other members can see those things.
It creates this feeling of, I’m part of a community of people trying to do something meaningful with their lives.
I find that inspiring.
It’s the first thing I open in the morning because I want to see what everyone accomplished the night before.
Let’s tell the listeners a little more about Sukha. What is it, and how does it work?
The concept of flow states changed my working life.
As I’ve said, I struggle with procrastination and distraction. I’m human, like everyone else.
Once I realized I could have a deeply productive morning and then spend the afternoon doing podcasts, having conversations, and taking meetings, I started looking at the various focus apps available.
Some were very helpful.
There were apps that played music.
That was interesting.
There were apps that locked your phone for ninety minutes so you couldn’t touch it.
That sometimes felt like being treated like a child, but it was effective.
There were distraction blockers, phone lockers, music apps, timers, and Pomodoro timers.
I experimented with many of them. Some were better than others, but none of them actually put me into flow.
They were individual ingredients.
It was like wanting a cake, then eating some eggs, flour, and sugar separately. You had all the ingredients, but you didn’t have a cake.
So when we built Sukha, we asked, What does the research say? What are the ingredients required to enter flow?
I wanted one button.
When I begin work in the morning, I usually do a two- or three-hour focus block in which I complete most of the deep, thoughtful work for the day.
I wanted to press one button at the beginning of that block and have the tool guide me through it, treat me like an adult, help me feel good, and then give me feedback at the end.
Music became a major part of that.
This is a fun subject because I have several friends who are film composers.
When we were building the platform, I reached out to some of them. Film wasn’t what it once was, so some of them had time available.
I said, “The research suggests that many people enter flow most easily when listening to music between sixty and ninety beats per minute. Certain key signatures, including D minor, may work better than others. Long melodic passages without vocals that repeat and loop can also help.
“Could you compose that?”
They created hundreds of hours of original music—tracks ten, twenty, or thirty minutes long—and we organized them into playlists.
We had lo-fi music, upbeat music, down-tempo music, and other options.
Then I learned something interesting.
A friend of mine named Julian, who works as a sound mixer on several Star Wars games, called me one day.
He said, “I just got back from Nepal.”
I said, “That’s cool. Why were you there?”
His son had done very well in high school, graduated, and been accepted into a good college. As a graduation present, Julian asked where he wanted to travel.
His son chose Nepal.
Julian told me that while they were in Kathmandu, there was one day when it rained so heavily they couldn’t leave.
It was this lush, warm, beautiful rain.
He had some recording equipment with him, so he decided to record it.
When he got home, he realized he probably wasn’t going to use the recording in a Star Wars game, but he remembered I had a flow-state app.
He asked, “Do you want it? I’ll give it to you for free.”
I said, “Free is a good price.”
So we quietly added a playlist called Himalayan Dream Rain among all the music playlists.
It became the third-most-popular playlist in our entire catalogue.
We did no promotion.
It contained no music.
And I thought, What the hell? We paid for all this custom music, and rain is one of our biggest hits?
So I emailed some of the people listening to it.
I run the platform, so I could see their email addresses.
I asked whether they would talk to me because I wanted to understand why the rain playlist was so effective for them.
Their stories were different, but they all said essentially the same thing.
Listening to rain transported them back to periods in their lives when they had to stay inside, study, and work hard.
One person had been raised by her grandmother in Georgia, where it always seemed to rain around finals.
Another remembered going to a family lake house during spring break and studying while it rained.
The sound triggered something in their minds:
It’s raining. We’re inside. We’re working. It’s time to focus.
I thought that was fascinating.
Then I made what seemed like the obvious assumption.
I thought, If rain works, we should try streams, ocean surf, and lakes.
We added a recording from Emerald Lake in Canada, complete with the sounds of local birds.
It completely flatlined.
No one listened to it.
It was a failed experiment, which was also useful because it taught us that rain wasn’t simply one example of a broader category. The rain itself was the trigger.
Then one of our members emailed me.
She was a fairly well-known UK blogger who had always written in coffee shops. That café atmosphere was part of her creative identity.
She said, “Steve, I noticed you’ve been experimenting with non-musical playlists.
“Not everyone knows this, but I had a child during the pandemic. I can’t really take a two-year-old to the coffee shop and expect them not to run around, but that atmosphere is where I write best.
“Could you create a playlist that simply sounds like a coffee shop?”
So we found someone in Vienna who had recorded his local café—the espresso machine, cups clattering, and the background murmur of conversation.
We uploaded it as Café Wien.
It became incredibly popular, particularly with writers.
Engineers rarely used it.
Designers didn’t gravitate toward it either.
But writers loved it.
When I looked at the profiles of the people listening, almost all of them described themselves as writers.
Those are the kinds of things I’ve learned while building Sukha. The way our brains work is fascinating.
Tony and I built the platform because some people are going to waste their lives.
Some people are essentially saying, “Mark Zuckerberg, I would like to scroll through your platform and watch advertisements so you can buy another yacht. My life is worthless. Please take it and sell it.”
The same is true of TikTok, Twitter, and every other platform designed to capture your attention.
But other people are going to raise their hands and say, “I have the great American—or Canadian—novel inside me, and I’m not going to my grave with it still there. Help me.”
We built Sukha for those people.
Steven, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to come and chat.
This was a fun one. I know it’s probably one of your longer episodes.
I was in a flow state. I was fascinated.
There we go. I know I may have gone on a little too long. To anyone who is still listening: bless your soul, and thank you.
Where can people go to learn more about Sukha? Where should we send them if they’re interested in the topics we’ve discussed?
Anyone can try it free for three days.
Think of a task. Think of something you want to write. Then open the platform and try it.
You can find it at TheSukha.co.
Sukha means happiness, so it’s T-H-E-S-U-K-H-A dot C-O—the happiness company.
Sign up, try it for three days, and if you enjoy it, send me a message in the group chat. Say, “I heard you on Kevin’s podcast, and now I’m here.”
After the free trial, I think it costs around sixty or seventy cents a day in U.S. dollars.
If that’s a problem because you’re a young or struggling writer, send me a direct message.
Say, “All I can afford is twenty cents a day.”
I’ll make it work.
Tony and I don’t take a salary from this. We built it because we want people to actually accomplish things.
Reach out, tell me whether it’s helpful, and I’ll work out whatever arrangement you need.
Amazing.
I get pitched regularly for this podcast, and so often the pitches come from publicists or authors who simply have a new book to promote.
But that isn’t what I do on this show.
I speak with people whose job is to help writers achieve their goals—coaches, editors, marketing experts, and people developing tools like Sukha.
When I saw your email, I immediately thought, Boom. He’s perfect for the show. This is going to be a great conversation.
And it was.
Steven, thank you so much for reaching out and for joining me today.
This was so much fun. Thank you for having me, and thank you to everyone who listened.
—
There you have it, my friends: my interview with Steven Puri.
I hope you enjoyed that glimpse into Hollywood, writing productivity, focus, and flow states.
Is flow something you were already familiar with?
Are you able to enter that state?
Is it something you’ve struggled with?
Either way, Sukha is probably worth checking out. I’ll include a link to the platform in the show notes for this episode. Head over to www.kevintjohns.com for all the information and links.
Once you’re done checking out Sukha, head over to Amazon and pick up a copy of my new book, The Page Turners: Fantastic Realms.
It’s for anyone who misses Stranger Things, grew up reading Steven King, or wants the scope and grandeur of C.S. Lewis’s The Last Battle.
If that sounds like your kind of story, I think you’re going to love the book.
That’s it for this episode.
Thank you so much for tuning in, and I’ll see you next episode.
—
Kevin T. Johns is a writing coach, editor, and author who helps writers strengthen their craft, find their voice, and build stories that truly connect with readers. Through coaching, courses, and The Writing Coach Podcast, he shares practical, encouraging guidance for writers at every stage of the journey. Need help finding more time to write? Grab his free guide: THE BUSY AUTHOR METHOD.
