Ep 63: Enter the Flow State

Guest Bio:

Steven is one of the few people on Earth who has been a senior executive at two motion picture studios and also raised over $20MM in venture capital. He’s produced the digital effects for Independence Day which won the Oscar for Visual Effects and in addition to his film work, he’s founded 3 start-ups - one successful exit and two failures. He lectures now on the lessons in sustainable high-performance he learned working alongside some of the world’s more productive people.

Follow Steven Puri on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-puri

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Episode Highlights:

Steven Puri, a guest with a rare background spanning both Hollywood and the startup world, discusses how to achieve peak performance through the flow state and the human skills that artificial intelligence cannot replicate. Steven moved from an engineering background into the film industry at a crucial time when film became digital. He produced the digital effects for 14 films, including blockbusters like Independence Day (for which he won an Academy Award), before becoming an Executive Vice President at major studios like DreamWorks and 20th Century Fox, overseeing franchises like Die Hard and Wolverine.

Steven's pendulum began to swing back to engineering when he experienced disillusionment with the creative compromises required by the studio system, noting that the pursuit of guaranteed revenue superseded quality. He returned to the startup world, successfully exiting one visual effects company in his late twenties, but also learning valuable lessons from two subsequent startup failures. This experience, both successful and challenging, shaped his current focus: using engineering to solve fundamental human problems. 

This need for efficiency is the core motivation behind his company, Sukha (pronounced "soo-ka"), which he named after a Sanskrit word meaning happiness or ease, inspired by a conversation with his wife on their honeymoon. A beta member powerfully articulated the value of the platform, saying: "I pay you because my kids are not going to be two and four forever. I find I have two kinds of days: at 3:00, I am playing with my kids, or at 6:00, I'm down on myself." This insight crystallized Sukha's goal: to help people gain control of their lives by utilizing their working hours so effectively that they finish their deep work earlier. Sukha is designed to be a simple website where hitting "play" aggregates the conditions needed to enter flow.

Stephen defined the flow state, a term coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, as a highly concentrated state where you are doing your best work, you lose track of time, and distractions fall away, leaving you with a sense of joy and uplift rather than depletion. The Sukha platform offers tools—like scientifically designed ambient, non-vocal music and distraction blockers—to help the brain drop into this state, which research suggests takes about 15 to 23 minutes. They even incorporate binaural beats, which some users find stimulates focus by slightly offsetting the pitch heard in each ear via headphones.

Finally, Steven offered actionable advice for individuals and leaders to integrate flow into their professional lives. He emphasized the necessity of balancing shallow work (emails, administrative tasks) with deep work (creative, strategic thinking) which is the true driver of winning businesses. Leaders should establish social norms and block time in the calendar—the team's "flow time"—to protect this concentrated effort. For self-improvement, he suggests a simple free audit: draw a Monday-Friday grid and track what you did and how you felt in the morning and afternoon. The patterns that emerge will reveal your personal chronotype and optimal time for deep work, proving that flow is an attainable advantage available to anyone who commits to the practice.