Welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast.

Today I’m bringing back a returning guest: Steven Puri, former Hollywood visual effects producer turned founder of Sukha, the flow-state company.

We’re talking cinema, screenwriting, and the actual neuroscience of getting into flow.

If you’ve ever sat down to write and felt certain that every word had to come out right the first time, you’re about to meet someone who spent years inside Hollywood’s biggest movies telling you that’s exactly backward.

Steven produced visual-effects work on films like Independence Day and Braveheart, spent years in development at DreamWorks working with some of the industry’s top screenwriters, and now runs Sukha, a flow-state company he built for writers, developers, and designers who need to actually get into deep work, not just think about it.

This time around, we get into what’s really happening in a writer’s brain during flow state, and the fMRI study on jazz musicians that proved it’s a measurable, different mental state, not just “concentrating hard.” We talk about why most of the talented young writers Steven knew in Hollywood didn’t make it, and why the ones who stuck around did. And Steven makes the case for the single most useful sentence any beginner writer can hear.

If you’ve ever been paralyzed by the idea that your first draft has to be good, here’s Steven Puri.

Audio:

Video:

The Writing Coach Episode #239 Show Notes

Discover Steven’s Flow State App at: https://www.thesukha.co/

Learn more about the Barbados Writing Retreat:

Click the image below to grab your FREE copy of The Busy Author Method:

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The Writing Coach Episode #239 Transcript

Kevin Johns: Well, there was a lot of interest in your episode, and I think the Hollywood angle obviously plays a part in that. As someone who’s seen behind the scenes of the writing process and worked with some of Hollywood’s top writers, what do you think are some of the big misconceptions that writers on the outside of the industry have about what’s going on inside, in the writing of a movie?

Steven: Okay, I’ll tell you. My answer is informed mainly by talks I’ve given to live audiences, because then you get the interaction — writers in the audience asking, “Well, what about this?” So a lot of what I’ll say is drawn from them.

Number one: writers who exist outside the industry — they haven’t had a produced film yet, but they’re aiming to be a screenwriter — don’t understand how collaborative making a film is. Sometimes they’ll ask questions like, “Well, how do I preserve the vision of my script?” And I’m usually in the position of saying, “Go write a novel. You’ll have a ton more control. If you’re precious about your work, go win a Pulitzer Prize — whatever it is, but choose a medium where you’re going to have the control you crave.” Because let me tell you, when you’re asking for a hundred million, two hundred million dollars to make your little 120-page script, there are a lot of people with opinions. When Brad Pitt decides he’s saying this line differently, your response most of the time is going to be, “Oh, cool.” Not, “But I wrote —” Okay.

And hopefully you do negotiate to a happy place with that, because sometimes the other person contributing has a great idea. I’m not saying Brad Pitt doesn’t have good ideas. It’s just a collaborative medium. So my number one thought is, from the outside looking in, you have to understand it’s not like painting a painting on your own, or writing a novel on your own. It’s a collaborative thing, and it’s going to evolve through the entire process. Scenes you love will be shot, scored, and then cut out in the editing room because they just didn’t work, or the movie didn’t need them. Okay, so that’s number one.

Number two — and this is going to hurt a little bit. Most screenwriters, even working screenwriters, write from having seen a lot of movies. “Oh, I’m an action writer, I grew up watching action movies, I’ve watched Taken fourteen times, Die Hard thirty-two times, John Wick twelve.” That sort of thing. And they write derivative work. You read their stuff as an executive who’s had to read two thousand scripts in the past three months — exaggeration, hyperbole, but you get a good overview of what’s being done — and they read like Frankenscripts. They read like people who’ve seen a lot of movies. You’re flipping through going, “Okay, you’re doing the scene from The Matrix, gotcha. And you’re doing the chase from the Schwartzman movie, okay. And you’re doing the Captain/Avengers scene here, okay.” They read that way.

And ultimately, why we tell each other stories — films, stories around the campfire, books, graphic novels, whatever — is to relate some truth about life, where the other person goes, “Oh yeah, that rings true for me. That’s sincere and honest about life.” It could be scary. It could make you believe in love. It could make you excited about going to Mars. Whatever it is, there’s a human truth there that inspires you to share it. And if it resonates with the other person, they go, “Okay, yeah, that doesn’t have a false note.”

Now, there are very few writers who actually write at that level. And I encourage the people listening here — who are taking the time to go, “Kevin, expose me to ideas around film” — here’s an idea. The really great writers I’ve worked with — and I’m talking about the action genre; I didn’t do broad comedies, I didn’t do intimate family movies, I worked on big action movies — you’re talking about Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci, Damon Lindelof, Chris McQuarrie, David Ayer, Billy Ray.

You go down the list of these guys, and they write from an understanding of human nature. That expresses itself through character, and the character is then expressed and tested by plot points. So the process of going, “This is what deeply happens between people, this is a real conflict between people,” then turns into, “Oh, and on the spaceship we need a scene with the alien.” But if you go backwards — “Wouldn’t it be cool if there’s a spaceship where an alien got loose?” — you can feel it. It’s outside-in writing, and you want inside-out.

I’ll give you an example. When we were working on movies at DreamWorks, one of the things Alex and Bob were very specific about was this razor they applied. They said, “We need to write movies where, even if we didn’t have a budget — even if we had two million dollars — there’s a movie we’d want to watch.” We couldn’t afford to pay for photon torpedoes, or ghosts in the attic, or teleportation portals. No genre elements, and the story works on the human level, because we’re confident we can add in the photon torpedoes and the Starship Enterprise later and it works. For example — I think we talked about this — Star Trek, the reboot with Chris and Zach. That’s Cain and Abel. It’s that simple.

And you look at the truth of the action movies that stand out, the ones you talk about years later, like Die Hard. Die Hard is a story of divorce. It struck a cultural moment, the zeitgeist: men in the ’80s were dealing with this. Women were suddenly making more money than they were; they were not just housewives. That was scary — did that endanger your masculinity? John McClane defines himself as, “Well, I can run and jump and shoot and kick, and I run around the streets as a cop and collar bad guys.” And then suddenly his wife’s in this tall tower with lots of money and all these erudite guys, people serving champagne and caviar, and he’s like, “Where is my place in this new world?”

Yes, the movie works because the plot is tight, and it’s a beautiful example of the genre. But it does more than work — it stands up decades later, because there’s a human truth to it, of a lot of guys going, “What is this new world, and where do I fit in? Does my wife still love me?” So anyway — back to you. That’s a long spiel. Sorry.

Kevin Johns: No, I fully support it. I teach a concept called monster as metaphor, because big action stories and adventure stories are my jam as well. That’s what I write, and that’s a lot of the writers I work with. But there’s an inherent problem in saying, “I want to write a book about spaceships,” or “I want to write a book about dragons.” It’s the people who are the core of storytelling, and the spaceships and the dragons need to be an extension, or a metaphor, for something we all relate to and all go through on a regular basis. Whether we’re talking about a thousand years ago or a thousand years from now, it’s only useful insofar as it’s applicable tomorrow to the people reading it.

Steven: Yeah, and I agree with what you’re saying about monsters as metaphors. I usually phrase it my own way, which is: the monster is the threat, the thing under the bed or in the closet — whatever, metaphorically, is threatening us. When it taps into what’s happening in our culture, it resonates on a whole different level.

To go back to that era when Basic Instinct was this really big hit movie that Joe Eszterhas wrote — essentially what it was saying was, “What if women were the sexually powerful ones?” It’s told as a murder thriller, but the core of it is simply, “That’s pretty scary, if women are in control of their sexuality.” Which you wouldn’t have made in Frank Capra’s day. Billy Wilder wouldn’t have made it. And you can go through each of these things in our culture that people are really afraid of, find that antagonism, and put it into an antagonist. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle: oh my God, there’s someone in my home who’s taking care of my child. Or Rosemary’s Baby. Powerful.

Kevin Johns: You mentioned The Matrix —

Steven: Have you seen it?

Kevin Johns: Perfect example. It comes out in 1999, the internet’s just starting to spread, and people are dealing with this anxiety: what if a future comes where we can’t tell the difference between reality and a digital construct? Cut to twenty-six, twenty-seven years later, and that’s what everyone’s asking now. How do I interact with the world and with other people when I can’t tell what’s AI and what’s real? So obviously, like you said, it’s a brilliantly constructed story, but it also tapped into an anxiety that maybe the filmmakers had the foresight to recognize — which, less than three decades later, everyone deals with on a regular basis.

Steven: Agreed. Did you ever see — I think it was Charlie Rose that Keanu was on — where he talked about having dinner with his friend, the director? It’s a good one, should you have the chance. I’ll do a small version of it, not the full talk-show version.

He essentially says, “I went to dinner the other night at my friend’s house” — a director he’s worked with — “and he has two daughters, fourteen and sixteen. At a certain point in the dinner, the daughters felt comfortable enough to say, ‘Hey, Dad’s friend, we know you’re famous for these Matrix movies, but to be totally honest, we’ve never seen them. Why are they such a big deal? What are they about?’”

And Keanu — who is one of the true nicest guys working in film; he and Hugh Jackman are just gentlemen — says, “Oh, they’re movies about a guy who wakes up and realizes the life he thinks is real is actually a simulation, and he wants to get back to his real life.” And the sixteen-year-old says, “Oh — why?” And Keanu’s like, “Well, because he realizes everything in his life is actually a simulation. He couldn’t tell the difference, but there’s another world that’s real, and he wants to go there and live there.” And she was like, “Yeah, but why?”

And he’s like, “Oh wow, that’s a generational change.” Because it was so obvious to him — the way maybe you and I would say, “Well, I don’t want to live in a computer.” And she was more like the Joe Pantoliano thing with the steak: is it real or not? I don’t care, I’m happy, so who cares? She was much more that mentality: “Okay, why?” It’s like, oh boy.

Kevin Johns: Absolutely — fascinating. I have just announced that I’m going to be hosting a writing retreat in Barbados this November.

Steven: What? Okay, I have to start writing just so I get to go.

Kevin Johns: Absolutely. This is the third retreat I’ve held now, and I did a lot of research heading into my first one on what environments we can create to support creativity and writing — and obviously this ties really nicely into your interest in flow state. So, to kick things off — this was something I was thinking about while prepping for the retreat — my understanding is that the studies show it generally takes from twelve to twenty-three minutes to get into a flow state.

Steven: Yes.

Kevin Johns: So my first question for you is: can we hack that? Are there steps we could take to get into that flow state quicker?

Steven: Oh, you kids today are so impatient. If your mother were here right now…

So let me preface the things I’m going to say about flow states, which I’m passionate about. The first time I experienced one, I was an adult, and my first thought was, “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this in college?” It would have changed my college career. There’s now a huge body of research on this, and I want to share that whatever I say that sounds intelligent is thanks to the people who’ve spent their lives studying it. I’ve just read it, and I’m passing it along. This is not me being smart; this is standing on the shoulders of giants.

Okay. So, toward that end: for a while, when Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote his book Flow, there was a little bit of “woo-woo.” Is this real? Are you just concentrating hard? Is this a big deal? Everyone concentrates. And Mihaly was like, “No, man, it’s a state you go into.” When you talk to these really high performers, it’s like seeing the ones and zeros — the world kind of changes. And one of the things Mihaly said that I thought was really great: many of the people they interviewed, famous people, have their own word for it. They didn’t call it a flow state. Michael Jordan talks about being in the zone — “it’s just me and the ball.” Picasso talked about his muses, that sort of state. But the bottom line is, there’s something more there.

And Charles Limb at Johns Hopkins — bookmark this, Google it — wanted to understand: is this real or not? And he had access to an fMRI machine. Some of the early inspirations for Mihaly were jazz musicians and freestyle rappers, who go into a state where they’re one with the music and it’s just flowing. So Limb was like, “I’m going to go get me a little jazz trio.” When they report that they’ve had that moment — they’ve kind of crossed over, and it’s not each of them playing, they’re all one with the music, the trio is creating the music — he wanted to see if their actual brain activity was different from before, when they were just sitting around.

And what do you know? When the jazz artists reported, “Yeah, this is the moment I feel like I’m flowing,” their prefrontal cortex — right behind your forehead, the part that handles a lot of being self-conscious, being aware of yourself, second-guessing yourself — the electrical activity fell off a cliff. It just shut down. Which makes sense, because if you’re freestyle rapping at speed, you can’t be doing that while continually second-guessing yourself. You’ve got to be in it.

If you and I were in a jazz trio with another friend of ours, there’s a point where you’re just inspired and you start going off on this solo melody thing. I have to just go there with you and trust you — “Yeah, I’m just feeling this, I’m with you.” Not, “Where’s Kevin going? Do I pull him back? What do I do to cue him?” So that was a very interesting flag planted: this is a neural state. You can measure it. It’s different from concentrating.

And I say all this to circle back to your question, Kevin Johns, which is: can you hack this and get into flow in five minutes? No one seems to have come up with a way to do it that quickly. It’s not like you click your fingers and go, “I’m going to concentrate on my book now.” Your brain actually goes into the state, and the electrical activity in the prefrontal cortex calms down.

Now, are there things that help? I set up Sukha, the website, to help myself, because after I’d experienced it, I was like, “I should do this all the time. I could get more done in less time and feel better. Why would anyone say no to this?” So yes, there are things you can do to help get there. We have a distraction blocker that pushes apps and websites on your phone into the background so you can focus. Obviously a lot of flow music and naturescapes — white noise, pink noise, brown noise, things like that. There are a lot of things you can do to help.

And it’s not just getting there; it’s also staying there. If you’re going to write for an hour or two, mark sacred writing time in your calendar: “This is inviolate. No one gets to book a meeting with me or interrupt me. This is where I write the stuff that hopefully moves my life forward.” You treat it as sacred. Then, in that time, you need to make sure you don’t wander off into, “Well, I opened up YouTube to watch that one research video, and then there was another really cool cooking video I was thinking about for tonight…” Yeah — gotta watch out for that.

Kevin Johns: Well, something you mentioned is this idea that you can’t freestyle rap if you’re second-guessing yourself, which really makes me think about beginner writers and their experiences with what they call writer’s block — their inability to move forward on a project or get words on the page. I think part of that is because they’re not getting into flow state. And why aren’t they getting into flow state? Because they’re constantly second-guessing themselves. They’re constantly saying, “My writing’s not good enough. I’m not good enough. I’ll never be Fitzgerald or Hemingway.” And in thinking all these negative thoughts, and second-guessing everything they do, they’re actually preventing themselves from moving into the very state that would allow them to create their best work.

Steven: Yes. And whoever is listening — if you ignore every damn thing I say, this is the one thing to listen to. Okay, here it comes. Wait for it. Three, two, one: writing is rewriting.

If you read the first drafts of many of these things — and I’m not going to name the writers, but earlier we talked about the kind of writers I’ve worked with, talented million-dollar writers — if you read their first vomit draft, their kitchen-sink draft, their first pass, their first stab at it, whatever your million-dollar-writer friend wants to call it, you would realize the bar is much lower than you think. The intimidation of, “Every time my finger hits a key, it must be producing Hemingway mixed with David Koepp mixed with Chris Nolan” — no, dude. Do you know how many drafts they’ve been through? Do you know how many friends they trust read that and said, “Hey, dude, I have a problem with this,” and they went back and rewrote that scene or that dialogue?

So you can help yourself by just going, “You know what? Let’s just get the first draft down, because I’m going to revise this.” The greats are great because they revise. That will decrease your writer’s block. Even if you look at the thing tomorrow, throw the entire thing out, and go, “This is trash.” I wrote a blog post the other day — I was traveling with Laura — and I read it this morning and thought, “There is nothing here worth salvaging.” It happens sometimes.

But sometimes you do write it, and you rewrite it, you polish it, and it becomes one of your best things. I have a really popular blog post called “The Magic and Science of Flow States,” and it talks about some of the stuff we’re talking about. Huge hit. I get asked for that link all the time; it gets all these hits on our blog. I’ve rewritten that five or six times, top to bottom, just as I’ve learned more and thought more. So that is the one thing, if people take nothing else away to make their writing better: writing is rewriting, man. Lower the bar on the first draft. Don’t judge yourself.

Kevin Johns: Steven, this is so wild — I guess great minds think alike. I have a short book on writing retreats called The Science and Magic of Writing Retreats.

Steven: There you go. Okay, I like it.

Kevin Johns: So you recently mentioned to me that you’ve had such an influx of writers in particular interested in what you’re doing at Sukha that you’ve created some web pages and whatnot directly for writers. I’d love to hear more about that.

Steven: Yeah, I’ll tell you a funny thing. What Tony and I made — to help me with my ADHD, and just procrastination and distraction — is a flow-state website. Super simple. You open it up, hit play in the morning, and it helps you get through your morning. Now, by noon I’ve done what I used to get done in my entire day. So in the afternoon, I can do stuff like this.

Kevin Johns: It’s interesting — some people might think of getting into flow state as this active step toward productivity, but I think, at least these days, it also needs to be framed as an active battle against distraction. In the same way —

Steven: You’re speaking to my heart, Kevin.

Kevin Johns: — drug addicts, alcoholics, someone trying to quit cigarettes: with all of these addictions, it’s been pretty clearly established that getting some support to stop is nearly vital. And I think in today’s world, where there’s so much demand for our attention, where our phones are designed to distract us, a tool like Sukha isn’t just about getting to flow. It’s also about getting away from the distraction we’re drowning in.

Steven: This is so true. Nir Eyal has written some great stuff on distraction and traction. And I have a pretty strong opinion about some of this — this is not a gray issue for me. If you look at the business model of most of the big companies on the stock exchange, their business model is: steal your life. The reason Zuck has multiple 400-foot yachts is because he’s built a platform — a series of platforms — that are basically about, “How do we keep you here forever?” Elon running X, Twitter, whatever; the Snap guys; the TikTok guys. Their business model is straight-up steal your life, and they call your life “shareholder value.” Because if you end up eighty years old on the sofa going, “Oh man, I could have written that screenplay, I could have directed that movie” — they win. That is the contempt they have for you.

That’s why Zuck notoriously hires casino game designers on staff. When you talk about addictions to tobacco and alcohol, you skipped gambling. He hires the guys who create gambling addicts to design Instagram and Facebook — and now notice how WhatsApp has changed. This is not a coincidence. There are behavioral economists on staff at Meta just to help them understand this.

And you get stuff like variable rewards. Did you know it’s more addictive if you get bad stuff mixed in with good? If you’re scrolling through Instagram and it knows you really well, and everything that comes up is, “Cool, I love it, I love it, I love it,” that’s actually less addictive than when Instagram and Facebook learned to stick some stuff in there you don’t like. So when you see something you do like, the dopamine hit is higher, and it’s more addictive chemically. Variable rewards are more addictive — like a slot machine, like a gambling table. If you won a little bit every time, you wouldn’t be addicted. But, “Man, I won fifty bucks!” So you keep losing a dollar at a time. “But I won seventy dollars!”

So that’s something to consider, because there’s a contempt they have for you: “I don’t want you to write the screenplay. I don’t want you to write the novel. I want you to scroll, because that makes me another billion dollars, and I need my four hundred billion dollars,” whatever it is. So if you’re going to fall victim to distraction — and yeah, our phones are beautifully designed to distract; they’re beautiful devices — even when you’re on your desktop or your laptop: “Oh, I’ll go to Reddit for a minute and look this up,” and you spend twenty minutes on Reddit, watch that YouTube video, read that Wikipedia article. You go down those rabbit holes, and you’re not going to release your greatness.

If you believe you have something great inside you, you have to keep your eye on the prize. You have to go, “Am I going to go to my grave saying, ‘Well, the next great American novel was in me, but it’s going into my coffin with me’?” Or are you going to say, “You know what? I’m going to set aside an hour a day. I’m going to, like you said, set the bar low. My fingers touch the keys — it doesn’t have to be Hemingway. It just has to be that at the end of the hour, I wrote something or I rewrote something. And I’ll make it better, and I’ll make it better.”

And I’ll tell you this: when I was in development in my twenties, if you’d asked me and my friends in film development who were going to be the next great writers, the next great filmmakers, we would have guessed wrong. And I’ll tell you why: because we would have based it on the idea that the determinant was talent, and I don’t believe that anymore. Now I see a lot of the working writers and filmmakers in their forties, and the determinant was tenacity.

The determinant was, “Hey, I’m going to stick at this, and if you say no, I’m going to try to learn from the no and make it better.” Not, “Oh, you said no, I’m bad, I should go be a realtor, I should get out of this.” Some of the most talented people I knew in my twenties got out of the business because they couldn’t take no — they couldn’t accept that their stuff needed to be rewritten. And the people now — I live in Austin, as you know — who come to town and reach out, “Hey, man, I know you’re in Austin. My premiere’s tonight, you want to come? Be nice to see you, like old times” — those aren’t necessarily the ones who were so talented in their twenties. They’re the ones who were tenacious. The ones who said, “I’m going to set aside time every day to move this forward. I’m going to look for every opportunity. Every no is simply something I can learn from.”

Kevin Johns: Couldn’t agree more. Having worked with hundreds of writers over the last few years, I consistently see the most naturally talented writers not succeeding.

Steven: Right.

Kevin Johns: It’s the hardest workers, and it’s the learners — exactly like you just said. It’s the people who say, “I’m passionate about this. I care about it. I’m going to make it a priority in my life, and I know there’s room for improvement, and I’m looking forward to that.” Those are the ones who go gangbusters.

Steven: There you go. Yeah. So if there’s a second thing people should listen to — the first one is writing is rewriting; the second one is develop a thick skin, because you’re going to feel like everything is a judgment on you. Everyone is starring in their own movie, metaphorically speaking. They read your script, they didn’t buy it this week — maybe their boss just bought a similar script, maybe they couldn’t buy it, whatever. Rejection is not about you. But what can you learn from it? How can you take that rejection and go, “Let me become one percent better”? It’s like the famous Michael Jordan thing: Michael Jordan rose to being beaten. When you beat Michael Jordan, you could bet that the next time he saw you, he was better than he was before. And that’s why he was the greatest basketball player in history.

Kevin Johns: I wish more artists and writers would study entrepreneurs a little bit — things like the lean startup and the minimum viable product. You don’t have to write Mrs. Dalloway. What’s the minimum-viable-product version of Mrs. Dalloway, so we can get something down and then iterate? That’s foundational to small-business building and entrepreneurship.

Well, Steven, if there’s a writer listening to this who’s struggling —

Steven: I hope there’s more than one.

Kevin Johns: Let’s hope. If they’re struggling with ADHD, if they’re constantly distracted, if they’re just interested in flow states and getting to a place of productivity — where can we send them? What can they do to learn from you and take advantage of all the things you’ve built for writers?

Steven: Straight up — I wrestle with all that procrastination and distraction myself. I built this flow-state website with Tony, my partner, to help basically me and us. If you think it would help you, try it for three days. You can try it for free — seventy-two hours straight, the most amazing flow state for three days. Try it, man. And I’m in there all the time, so DM me — you’ll see me in the little group chat. Tell me if there’s something you want that’s not there, or something you hate, or that you love it, whatever. Be vocal. You can read all about it at the Sukha Company: T-H-E-S-U-K-H-A dot C-O, slash for, slash writers — thesukha.co/for/writers.

And the greatest thing for me — because I don’t draw a paycheck from this; Tony and I do it for free, we both have kids, and we just needed it — the greatest thing is when someone reaches out in the group chat and says, “Oh, this is what I got done thanks to this.” Which sometimes is, “I just got my work done faster, and I had time to play with my kids.” Now that I’m a dad, I place a pretty high value on not wasting my time and having time with the little rascal.

Kevin Johns: Absolutely. I say to my clients consistently: health is number one, family is number two, and writing comes after that. And if you can write better and quicker, you can get to the family stuff. And when you’re with your family, you’re inevitably going to be happier and living a better life.

Steven: Straight up, straight up. I’ll tell you — Laura, my wife, named our company. I’m going to tell you a story, because you said something so close to my heart.

As we were building this, we knew we wanted to build a flow-state website that was super simple: you just click on the website, hit play in the morning, and it guides you through. We had a working version, a beta, and a bad working title for it. And Laura and I got married — we met in yoga, we have a daily yoga practice. When you do a lot of yoga, where do you go on your honeymoon? You go to Bali, so you can do yoga on the beach and have great photos and memories and all this stuff.

So we’re flying there, and I’m talking to Laura: “The biggest problem right now is I’ve done that whole brainstorm thing — write a list of everything your company could be called — and every name on there is worse than the bad one we have now.” Like Flow State App Nine, Distraction Blocker Two, Flowy.io —

Kevin Johns: Right.

Steven: God, so God-awful. Embarrassing. I hope I burned that list, although it was probably digital. Laura said to me, “You know what? For the next two weeks, everyone in the office knows you’re on your honeymoon. No one’s going to bug you. Maybe your unconscious mind just bubbles something up.”

So we got to the hotel in Ubud, and I said to her, “You know, I was thinking about what you said. Maybe that’s the approach. What would seed my unconscious, if this is cool — do you mind if today I just have a couple of quick Zooms with some of our beta testers, our members right now, and ask them what their favorite thing is? Then maybe over two weeks those words or stories bubble up into the great name.” And she was like, “I’m going to the pool, but I will see you at dinner, my friend.”

So I did. I put it in the group chat: who has five minutes, ten minutes, to talk? Talked to three people. With the third guy, I was going into the wrap-up: “Hey, thanks. I said ten minutes, it’s been eight. This has been super helpful.” I’d asked, “What’s your favorite thing? Do you love the flow music? Do you love the little assistant that helps you break stuff down?” And I said, “I want to respect your time. We said ten minutes. We should wrap up.”

And he said to me, “Steven, you asked the wrong question.” I’m like, okay, guy I don’t know that well — what was the right question? He said, “You should have asked me why I pay you.” I was like, “Dude, it’s less than a dollar a day.” But okay, I’ll take the bait. “Sure — you tell me. Why do you pay me?”

He said, “This past year, I find that I have two kinds of days. At three o’clock, I’m playing with my kids — they’re currently two and four. Or at six o’clock, I’m like, ‘Where did the day go?’ And the difference is: did I hit play on your website in the morning? So the reason I pay you is, they’re not going to be two and four forever.”

Okay, you won that round. I’m an idiot. That was a good question.

So I go to dinner with Laura, and of course I’m excited, like a startup founder: “I talked to this guy who’s so smart.” I told her, and she’s like, “Yeah, he’s way more articulate than you are. That’s really, really good. You should hire him.”

So we’re going to bed like cute little honeymooners on our first night, wearing little white spa robes, brushing our teeth, and with a mouthful of toothpaste, Laura looks at me and goes, “You know, in yoga we hear all these Sanskrit terms — your prana, your life force; your karma; your dharma, your duty in life. That dude described to you sukha: that feeling when you’re in your lane, doing what you’re meant to do, and it feels good, like you can do it with ease.” She’s like, “That’s what you should call your company. It’s not about blocking this, or flow state that, or music this. Ultimately, you just want people to be happy. Call it the happiness company — the Sukha Company.”

And wouldn’t you know it, for fourteen whopping dollars, the domain was available. I bought it and went to bed. And that’s why it’s called the Sukha Company. Exactly what you said: that guy wanted to be playing with his kids at three o’clock, not wasting time, and then at six o’clock going, “But I was busy all day — where did the time go?”

Kevin Johns: Great origin story. I love it, Steven. Thank you so much for this.

Steven: Awesome, Kevin. Thank you for having me.

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