What Worked Episode 38: How remote workers stay focused with Steven Puri
In this episode of What Worked, Tyler interviews Steven Puri, Founder & CEO at The Sukha Company, a flow state website for remote workers. Steven talks about his journey from Hollywood exec to entrepreneur.
Steven shares his insights about:
- Answering the what, how, and whys around flow states.
- How leadership and better hiring prevent WFH issues
- Relating those lessons to parenting, movie-making, and yoga
We'd love for you to connect with us:
Transcript edited for clarity:
Tyler Rachal
Welcome back to another fun episode of What Worked. This one is coming to you straight from my garage here in Los Angeles, California. For anybody who's checking this out on YouTube, or if you happen to see a clip and you're like, I'm just going to call it the obvious. There's a string behind my head that is like a little pulley to get into the attic crawl space here in my garage. And then I've got a surfboard there, and a barbell there. So we kind of got all the things that I think even over here, you can't see it, but there's a bunch of kid junk because I've got kids.
Steven Puri
Your set decorator is amazing.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, exactly. They were like, I was like make it look grunge, chic, like a parent that doesn't have any time sort of motif, if you will. And I feel like they nailed it. So thank you very much. What Worked production team. David is probably off the corner being like, what is he talking about?
Steven Puri
David's shaking his head. How is this my life?
Tyler Rachal
Yes, exactly. So I am thrilled to welcome to What Worked another fan of, we're going to be talking about things that I'm very passionate about, which is remote work, productivity, flow states, all that good stuff. I've got the one, the only Steven Puri, did I, did I nail the last name? I hope so.
Steven Puri
Yeah, nicely done
Tyler Rachal
There we go. And Stephen's company is called Sukha Yes. Did I get it right?
Steven Puri
True, yeah, two for two, man.
Tyler Rachal
That's my sign to stop. So I'm going to quit while I’m ahead. And as is customary on What Worked, I'm going to ask Stephen to go ahead and introduce himself to the What Worked audience and let us know a little bit about who you are, what you do and all that fun stuff. Take it away.
Steven Puri
I do all the things, absolutely. Hope this is both an entertaining episode and one that has some actionable, helpful stuff. So here's the short for those listening at home or playing along in the car, here's what is interesting about me. I'm one of the few people you will meet that has been an executive on a couple of motion picture lots as well as raised over $20 million of venture, run three startups, one successful exit, two failures and you'll learn some stuff along the way and Tyler and I were talking about sharing some of it. So here we go.
Tyler Rachal
Let's go. Before we dig into Sukha, I'm just curious, what are the three startups? If you don't mind giving a quick little bit, you don't have to go into great detail, but let's talk about the one that was successful, then maybe a quick little punchline about the other two that didn't make it.
Steven Puri
Let's focus on what worked and save the pain for later.
Tyler Rachal
The podcast is called What Worked. It's not called What Didn't Work. No, I'm just kidding, we talk about it all.
Steven Puri
Exactly. What still troubles you as an adult? Well, let me tell you, Tyler.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah
Steven Puri
Okay, so super fun story. I'll tell you this. A lot of my life has been Forrest Gump like fortunate things that dropped in my lap, coupled, I believe, with some hard work to make something of them. So here's the deal. First company I started in my 20s, I had met Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin when they were gearing up to do Independence Day. I produced the digital effects for Independence Day. We won the Academy Award for the visual effects. Thousand people involved, very proud to be part of that team, right? Roland, Dean, and I got along very well. We decided to start a company together to do computer generated film. Your favorite thing in the world, Tyler, right? More CG. Yes, just scratch that itch.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, actually Independence Day, that was my sweet spot for film. That was the level of effect that I can handle and I liked. It was pretty, obviously, revolutionary at the time, but very cool.
Steven Puri
Appreciate you saying it. It was the third highest grossing movie in film history at the time. So you do a film like that and many people are involved, but Roland, Dean, and I were very fortunate we could then raise money to go create a company. We created a company called Centropolis Effects, which I ran while they were doing movies and raised about 15 million. Did a bunch of movies through there, about four years later, got a buyout offer from Das Werk,
a German media conglomerate, sort of like a Liberty Media in this country. And it was a 6X return, so it was a decent multiple for investors for me, Roland, and Dean. And, as one thinks in their late twenties, that worked. I'm really smart. You think you're better looking than you are, smarter than you are, more successful than you are.
Tyler Rachal
What could go wrong? Yeah.
Steven Puri
So that was fun. At 28, I'd sold a company. I was like, okay, great. What do we want to do next? And so then later after I got into film and became an executive, my final job in film was a Vice President of Production at Fox, which was part of News Corp at the time, now part of Disney. And there I was running the Die Hard franchise, Wolverine franchise, a bunch of action franchises, which was sort of my thing, like sci-fi and action. And that was when I definitely had a moment of the movies that I'm working on that are going, they're kind of meaningless. Like Die Hard 5, there's not a great script. It was just a decision that was made from a business point of view of, if we put out this movie, it will make this amount of money. So let's just do it. I's called show business, not show art. So that was my cue to leave.
Tyler Rachal
That was the Russia one? I'm trying to remember Die Hard 5.
Steven Puri
Wow, it just disappoints me that you know that. It was such a bad movie. You're correct.
Tyler Rachal
I love Bruce Willis. I'm part of the bald tribe. So he's one of our heroes along with Jason Statham.
Steven Puri
There you go. Okay. The Rock.
Tyler Rachal
The Rock, these are all people that I support, heroes of mine.
Steven Puri
Okay, these are people.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, Michael Jordan. We have some notable people in our crew.
Steven Puri
Sinead O'Connor, right?
Tyler Rachal
Yes, but I do remember watching that one. And I was like, man, this one just is, it's off for sure.
Steven Puri
You know what it is, I'll tell you this. I know this is a slight digression, but most of the big movies, even the 100, 200 million dollar movies. If you strip out the genre element by genre element, I mean the laser weapon in space, the bomb with the LED counter. If you take out all that the aliens, if you take all that out at the core of it is like a $2 million Indie film. That's about some truth about a family.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, it's got to be all kind of the similar storylines and that sort of framework.
Steven Puri
There is that. And with Die Hard 1, the reason it's such an amazing movie that gets quoted by screenwriters to this day when they're talking about their own films is it is a true story about what was happening in the world at the time where suddenly women were successful in business and Bruce felt left behind by his wife and he came to Los Angeles to say, I want my family back, right? There's a lot of truth to that. Die Hard 5 was just, hey man, we can get this out and make money. So it's not a deeply emotional, true movie, you know?
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, it makes total sense. She's at Nakatomi Plaza. And you're totally right. As you put that in my brain, I now think about that's him just like, he's fighting all modern day things, right?
Steven Puri
It's Taken, you've seen Taken, right?
Tyler Rachal
Yeah.
Steven Puri
Taken is beat for beat, Die Hard.
Tyler Rachal
That is wild. Now I won't be able to unsee that, okay.
Steven Puri
It is man who loses the love of female family member to someone wealthy. And he's a blue collar guy. And those movies are both wish fulfillment. As much as it seems awful that the daughter gets kidnapped and the wife is, I'm gonna tell you straight up, those movies are wish fulfillment because those two guys who are blue collar like kick shoot kind of guys, they see that loss and they say, man, I can't compete with this rich world. But if she ever needed someone who could jump and shoot and kick, she'd love me again. And guess what happens? Bad guys show up and they win the women back because they can do that thing. Both movies are the same movie.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, that's so funny. You say that that's totally right. And I think about bringing this back full circle, Die Hard five, probably the part that I thought was most interesting was when it was like they kicked out the whole power grid. And Bruce Willis, he's back in his element. There's no technology so it's my time to shine. So that's cool. So but it sounds like you were mentioning you kind of lost your passion for it. Is that fair?
Steven Puri
Yeah. Fox was definitely, it was an experience of… let's just say contrasted a lot with DreamWorks, right? I was an executive vice president for Kurtzman/Orici at DreamWorks for four years. And that was immediately prior to Fox. And I'll tell you, at DreamWorks, there was definitely a sense of hey man, go home tonight and try and make your project 1 % better.
And at Fox, there was an ethos of, Hey, go home tonight and make your project 1 % cheaper. It's not as inspiring, Tyler. You know, when you go, I'm going to wake up, be 40, 50 years old, making Die Hard 9. It's really not that inspiring.
Tyler Rachal
no, I get it. Just all about the, it's like private equity. It becomes about the decimals more than anything.
Steven Puri
Yep, that's a very good analogy.
Tyler Rachal
Okay, so then you're there and then what are the...
Steven Puri
Okay, so as the French say, bring us back to our sheep.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, how did we get to founding Sukha?
Steven Puri
So Sukha is actually an interesting story in that we all have friends. A buddy of mine is an engineer at GroupOn and asked me to co-found a company with him that was around a mindful to do list. And I said that bores the F out of me. I've used so many to-do list apps. I have no insight into the secret sauce that would make me use one for any period of time. I've tried him and a month later I'm not using it anymore. Right?
Tyler Rachal
Totally, I tried that a million times too.
Steven Puri
Right. So I told him, I love you. I'll help you with this company, but I don't want to be your co-founder. So in the course of helping him, I became very passionate about flow states. And at a certain point he tapped out and said, Hey, you know what? I'm having a kid, my daughter's coming, I need to go get a real job and go work for some real estate company. So what I told him was I think we're onto something. It's not the product that you were describing, but I think I could use that code base and actually adapt it and make it more of a flow state app. When I met him, I didn't even know what a flow state was, but I experienced this. Have you ever experienced a flow state? I can talk about it a bit if you want.
Tyler Rachal
Why don't you talk about it? I'm curious if I have, so it's like, think that I have. So now I'm curious to hear you break it down. And also, I guess another question is to, I hear flow state talks about all the time and honestly, why should I care? Why should anybody care about it?
Steven Puri
That is a great question because any of this stuff it's like how does it actually affect me and make my life any better? Right? Okay, let's approach it from that point of view and I know a bunch of your listeners are like I'm the flow master, I know how to do my flow state, I get my work done quicker and some are like I've heard of it I'm not really sure what the hell you're talking about. Let me set the table for 60 seconds and then let's talk about it, right?
So here's the deal just to get us all in equal footing. There was a Hungarian-American psychologist this guy, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. And he had a thesis, he's like, high performers in these different disciplines, athletes and artists and scientists and inventors, they get into these concentrated states where they do the thing that they're famous for, like the stuff that moves the world, and they describe it in very similar ways. What is up with that? So he does research at the end of it, like Prometheus, who wanted to go to Mount Olympus, grab some fire, bring it down to the rest of us, he wrote a book. And the book is called Flow. And it is the seminal work on this, it's why we call it a flow state. And I love this, he said, I chose this word because it was the most beautiful metaphor I could find for the fact that we are all on the river paddling ourselves forward. But if you align your boat with the current, it carries you. It magnifies your efforts. And that's what these people figured out to do.
So that is the experience. And I'll tell you a personal experience, I didn't know the term flow state. When I got on an Alaska flight from Austin, where I am now, and I was going to SF, and I wanted to illustrate an idea I had for a feature. So I was going to open up Figma and like try and hack it together so I could show my team the next day in SF, like, hey, we should build this thing, right? We took off from Austin. The pilot was like, Wi-Fi is out, so sorry. And we started landing like 15 minutes later and I thought we're landing in Dallas. The engine fell off. They don't want to scare us. They won't tell us what's wrong, but something is drastically wrong because we just took off. No, I looked down. Over two hours and 40 minutes had gone by. I had no concept of it. But my design was done and I actually really liked it. .
Tyler Rachal
That's cool. Yeah, I totally get that now. Okay.
Steven Puri
So that sort of thing. And the nice thing is I got there and I was totally prepared for run through the hotel lobby, grab a sandwich, go to my room, finish mocking up the designs. In reality, I called a buddy of mine, I was like, hey man, I have a free night in SF. You wanna have dinner? And in hindsight, learning about it, it's all the things Mihaly talked about where it's like, when you're in that state, you lose track of time. You block distractions. You're focused on the work. You're in it. When you're done with it, you actually feel energized as opposed to drained. And that's a lot of what I share now. That's the company and I built, when you asked me about Sukha, I built a website to help you get into flow state. It takes the five components that people talk about to help you: The music, the timers, blocking your phone, blocking your websites. And it's all there with one big play button. You just hit play and it's like, if you want to use it for flow states. That's what we do. So that's how it got started. Kind of an odd way about a buddy of mine.
Tyler Rachal
Very cool. And I am a big proponent. Have you heard of the company Brick? That company, it's like a distraction kind of tool.
Steven Puri
Yeah, Brick's awesome. Yeah.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah. So that's very popular amongst entrepreneurs. It's funny, as you were talking about that, literally this is basically perfect cinematic timing. I got a phone call from probably a scammer or spam person, literally cause my MacBook is connected to my cell phone and whatever it is. And so as you're talking, I didn't realize that I hadn't put it on dp not disturb. So I'm getting this phone call, so that illustrates a larger point that there are all these things in sort of modern society that are competing for your attention. So I completely understand getting into the flow state and how now you need things like Sukha. You need things like Brick to actually be able to do that because all of these things now are, are so sophisticated and so good at grabbing your attention. I have a follow up question on flow state because, you mentioned athletes, right? That's the first thing that comes to mind. I think about, you know, really iconic athletic performances. I mentioned Michael Jordan.
Steven Puri
You know the Michael Jordan quote about this, right?
Tyler Rachal
I don't. Please give it to me.
Steven Puri
The one where he's like, when I'm in the zone, it's just me in the ball. It's exactly what Mihaly was talking about.
Tyler Rachal
No, it makes sense. As you say that, so I grew up outside of Chicago. I'm a diehard Michael Jordan fan. I was there for those 90s bulls teams and I have watched the Last Dance on Netflix, I mean, I would be curious to see what the numbers are internally. I would say pound for pound when I'm up against anybody else out there. I've watched it like a million times.
And so I think about Michael Jordan’s flu game and then a bunch of his things. And a lot of times I think about that performance, or I think about another example of flow state is like, you look at any of these people that do endurance sports, and of course, we'll mark the time David, our producer, mark the time David at 17:52 before I mentioned CrossFit. I'm a CrossFitter. So that's the old joke about CrossFitters is that CrossFitters will tell you that they're CrossFitters, right? I'm butchering the joke, but it's basically like, you don't have to ask
Steven Puri
Yeah, it's like being vegan. It comes up.
Tyler Rachal
They will come up. Anyway, I'm mentioning CrossFit. But there's some greats in that sport, Rich Froning, Matt Fraser, Tia-Clair Toomey. And when I think about these people, when I think about these incredible flow states that they get into, I think about the number one thing that I think about is the distraction free, but it's also the level of preparation. It's the preparation that it takes to be able to get into flow state. So I'm curious, how does Sukha account for that? Because that's oftentimes what I think about is that it's less so about the okay, now let's get into a flow state. A lot of it is that you can get into a flow state because you've done the work to be able to prepare yourself to get into that flow state. You have practiced what you're practicing. You’ve thought consciously about it. You have prepared. I make cold calls every day for my business. And the way that I can get into a flow state for that is because I've done the work to really research who I'm calling. So yeah, how do you kind of think about that, the preparation, when it comes into your app?
Steven Puri
Yeah, so what you said is a very smart way of approaching this which is What Mihaly wrote and then subsequently many smart people have researched around this, the different aspects, the music, the way to mentally prepare. So it is like a muscle like many habits. So you have a sense of everyone agrees it takes you like 15 to 23 minutes to drop in. You don't sit down and say, I'm in flow and you're deeply focused, right? So there are conditions precedent you can set to help you get there and to help you stay in it because every time you get interrupted, it takes you another 15 to 23 minutes to get back into that state, right? So that said, it's kind of a precious thing. So how do you do that? Number one, you need to set aside time. Like in between Zoom meetings, you're not going to get into flow for nine minutes while you're returning emails, right? So you sort of have to say, you know what? There is something important I need to do, it is going to take an hour, hour and a half, two hours, whatever. And you set that aside and it's a meeting with you. So people don't book time over it. And in that time, here are some of the things you can do to get into it. Number one, lots of research on music. The sweet spot for most people is 60 to 90 beats per minute, certain key signatures, non-vocal, ambient rhythmic music. Now we all have the friend that's the outlier. It's like I listen to show tunes, 90s gangster rap, death metal, whatever. But, for most people that is it. I'll tell you when we launched Sukha, I have a bunch of friends who were film composers, obviously, who had time on their hands. And I was like, here are kind of the guidelines with the research shows, can you write me something? And there were like a thousand hours of music. So in doing that, talking to the members of our community, it's interesting how a number of people asked about naturescapes?. Oh, I love listening to rain, to streams, to surf, to birds around the lakes. We launched all those. Binaural beats? You played with binaural beats?
Tyler Rachal
I was about to say exactly. Yes. You took the words out of my mouth. Yes.
Steven Puri
Boom, there you go. Yeah, we launched some binaural playlists and for those playing at home, just you know, binaural is when the left and right channels going into your brain are slightly offset. So you have to have headphones for that. You can't just listen on your Mac speakers for that. What are we going to say, Tyler?
Tyler Rachal
I was going to say, you nailed it. It's funny. So I'm a huge Spotify listener every year I get my, whatever it's called my end of year Spotify wrapped. And it's always funny because my top artists always surprise people because of two components to it. One is I listen to a lot of music when I work. And the other part is that I have a basically four year old girl. And so it's always funny because my top five will typically be like, whatever, it's all across the board, but then there'll be these kind of outliers of sorts, right? So I'm gonna venture a guess that this year probably my top five is gonna be like Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Maren Morris, all artists that my daughter loves. Chappell Rhone is the latest one. But the other outlier is I listen to a ton of movie soundtracks, composers specifically.
Steven Puri
Ooh, which composers?
Tyler Rachal
So I love, who's the big one? Is it John Williams?
Steven Puri
John Williams, Ennio Morricone, yeah, Hans Zimmer.
Tyler Rachal
So whoever did Interstellar, Hans Zimmer is great. Did he do Interstellar? Who did Interstellar?
Steven Puri
I believe so, yeah. He worked with Nolan a bunch.
Tyler Rachal
But I'm gonna throw you a curve ball. I love Nine Inch Nails. I love Trent Reznor. And Trent Reznor and his partner, they've done a number of scores. I love the Social Network. I love some of the other stuff that he does. I think he's even done like a Pixar movie.
Steven Puri
I will tell you a funny story. If you ever seen David Fincher's movie Seven, you seen that?
Tyler Rachal
That's the one with Brad Pitt.
Steven Puri
Correct, Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth.
Tyler Rachal
No, I need to see it. I've seen the famous ending because it was spoofed a long time ago, MTV video music awards. Do I know the ending of that movie, but I need to see it. I've heard it's incredible. And David Fincher obviously has talked about, raved about.
Steven Puri
If you ever watch it, I produced the main and the end titles and the visual effects for that movie.
Tyler Rachal
So I will watch it for sure. It's a classic.
Steven Puri
Trent gave us a cut of Closer where all it has is the button of Closer to God. It's all instrumental as you're watching the opening title. And at the very end, it just has this button that goes Closer to God. And the whole opening, what Fincher wanted is he had all of these props created for John Doe, the Kevin Spacey character, that are real. He's like, these crazy notebooks you see on the shelf, pull anyone down. The prop department made real notebooks with fingernails super glued in there and cockroaches stapled and stuff. So we went to town and shot this inside the mind of John Doe for the opening titles. If you ever see it, I produced that.
Tyler Rachal
I'm so excited to check it out. That's really cool. Yeah. So anyway, you totally nailed it. I love working to that stuff and it makes all the sense. It helps me get into a flow state.
Steven Puri
There you go. Oh, so we're talking about flow states. So some of the components, right? What you talked about with Brick, which is a great product if you want to go buy hardware and do all this stuff, right? I am semi lazy or I don't like friction. So what we did was super simple because my phone does distract me while I work, especially when I hit an obstacle. Like I'm writing a blog post and it sucks. I know after we write it I get frustrated, I reach for my phone to check my WhatsApp or whatever.
Tyler Rachal
Of course, yes.
Steven Puri
We did the simplest thing. When you open Sukha in the morning and hit play and then the flow music starts and all that. A QR code pops up. I can tap with my phone, put my phone down. If I touch my phone, my smart assistant, my computer speaks to me and says, hey, do you really need to be on your phone? And it just gives me that one second to say, who do I want to be? Do I want to be the guy who actually gets shit done? Or I want to be the guy who was like complaining at end of the day, how I was busy, but nothing got done. So.
Tyler Rachal
Totally, 100%.
Steven Puri
So it’s that kind of thing. Like we made a Chrome extension. This just watches what websites you open. So if you open something that's on your distraction list, like, hey man, keep me off ESPN or whatever. If you open ESPN, you just get a little pop-up that goes, hey man, is ESPN helping you? It seems like a distraction and you get to choose. You get to choose who you want to be. And that's what I think it is. I thought a lot of like, if I had a friend sitting next to me during the day, helping me to be my best version myself, that's what he would say. He'd just be like, hey man, I see you're opening ESPN. Steven, is that really helping you get out of here on time? And I'd be like, no, actually it's not, you know?
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, totally. it's like you're preaching to me. I've got most stuff blocked, I have most stuff not on my phone, social media wise. And so it's so funny, my top three websites because I don't have them blocked are like ESPN, cause I'll just go to ESPN and look at whatever the headlines are.
Steven Puri
Of course.
Tyler Rachal
Or like right now, I know this is all getting confusing because I grew up in Chicago and then I also spent though, like high school years and middle school years in Philadelphia, MLB playoffs are MLB playoffs are coming up. So I'm kind of checking out the Phillies and I'm here in LA so the Dodgers too. Anyway, so now here we are getting distracted, but yes, I, that all relates a lot. I want to bring it back to the topic that I am very passionate about, which is remote work. How do you think about Suka in terms of remote work? So I'm obviously a big supporter, but there is something that I get it when I see companies talk about the lost productivity.
Steven Puri
Okay, so I'm going to give you two parts of that answer. Okay. And the first part, I want to push back on something implicit in what you said, which is a lot of the RTO tug of war with remote or hybrid is really about bad hiring. And I know you're very involved in the process of choosing talent, matching talent with jobs, right? So if you are a leader, if you're a good leader, there are two big things that you do. You declare a mission. Hey, we're here to cure cancer, man. We're here to clean the environment. We're here to make the best rom-coms in the studio. You declare a mission and you declare a set of values. This is our culture. This is how we're going to treat each other. We're going to treat our customers. We're going to treat our competitors. And if you do those two things well, you attract people who are aligned with that. And let me tell you, if you as a leader are going, I really don't know what the hell Tyler's doing right now. It's three o'clock on a Tuesday, he's working from home. That means you didn't hire well because let me tell you something, if I'm out to cure cancer and Tyler came here because his dad had a cancer, I don't need to see you at 3 p.m. You are moving the ball down the field. And if I'm hiring Tyler who has an indeed surfing resume of five jobs in six years, then I'm an idiot, right? So hiring is fundamental.
Tyler Rachal
I totally agree. Yeah. It'll come up when I'm talking to prospective customers of Hireframe and they talk about what happens if the person doesn't work out? And what I oftentimes point to is I'm like, listen, you don't need to babysit the person to understand if they're, they're doing their job or not. Because it's all about inputs and outcomes, right? A lot of employees can't set their own inputs, at least not initially. It's hard for them because they don't have the view of the field that you do as the business owner or the executive. And so you can get that, you can build that over time. But really to me, it's about setting people up for success. It's about being crystal clear in what the inputs are and what outcomes you're trying to achieve. And the inputs to me are the non-negotiables. It's, hey, we've decided collectively as a group, this is what we're doing. And so to be able to see this thesis through, we have to be able to execute on our inputs. But to be clear, if we execute on the inputs and the outcomes aren't what we're looking for, then guess what? It's back to the drawing board and you will never be terminated because of the outcomes, right? You're terminated because you don't do the inputs. And to me, if the inputs are missing, that should be evidently clear.
And that's just a person that whether you're in an office or you're remote, I totally agree with you. That's the wrong hire. If someone can't execute on the agreed upon inputs, that's just the wrong or more importantly too, I'll say a lot of people just aren't good enough at raising their hand and asking for help. That to me is like the total unacceptable thing is when people are like, I didn't know what I was doing, I just didn't want to bother you. I'm like, well, you're going to get lost in the sauce here.
Steven Puri
As a leader, you need to create that environment. And I'm to tell you a little story that takes itself track for like 60 seconds, but it really illustrates this, which is when I made it in my career to DreamWorks, right? And I was an engineer who fell into film and then suddenly had a career that was going well. I remember the first time I was in Steven Spielberg's conference room, right? The Navajo rugs and the whole thing and the Southwestern Adobe styling. And I'm like, no matter if I'd earned my way there, there was a moment in my first meeting as conference room where I was like, OMFG, I'm sitting four feet from Steven Spielberg and the chairman of DreamWorks and the writers and producer. Wow, this is my life today? What?
And I remember we were talking about something and out of respect to Steven, I'm gonna falsify the details of this, okay? But we were developing an alien movie and Steven has done a bunch of them, right? This is a guy who's thought about aliens, right? So he brought up something that was like, let's say he said, okay, so alien comes through the wall and then the encounter X, which we learn now is going to be their kryptonite. And someone who is sort of the, let's say the coffee boy was coming through the room at that time and chimed in and said, actually, I feel like we just saw that coming through the wall kind of beat with the kryptonite thing in this other movie last summer. Maybe it should be something else. And I thought to myself, that's the last time we'll see coffee boy alive.
Tyler Rachal
He'll just see an alien come through the wall and gobble him up
Steven Puri
Right that he will be in the dumpster in little pieces after this and without blinking, Steven thought for a few seconds and said yeah, that's better, we should do that and the meeting continued on as if nothing had happened. And that was the game played at the level where you are not precious about your ideas and as the leader of that entire company, Steven made it clear best idea wins not my idea wins and that affects everyone in the company. So that is a leader setting a condition where like you're saying, someone can raise their hand and go, hey boss, what about this? And it's not like, God, will I get fired because it goes against what my boss suggested, right?
Tyler Rachal
Yeah.
Steven Puri
So let me pick up on something you said a moment ago though, because I know you just want to hear me talk endlessly, which is what I love, right? So let us peel back what you said a moment ago, one level deeper, which is we talked about, hey man, when you're matching people with jobs, you want to align their values and their intention. They want to be into the mission. And that takes away a lot of the problems of like, are you working? Are the inputs, the right inputs, right? But here's the thing I think is even deeper: If you fundamentally have a thesis, as I do, that we all have something great inside us, and the question of this lifetime is, are you gonna get it out or not? Then if you're a leader, you really view your job as giving people the opportunity to get that out, to draw out of the greatness. Just like when you were talking about the Bulls in that era, it was like, how am I going to have this guy be the best point guard ever, the best rebounder ever? Give them the room to do the greatness that they have inside because it sucks to be that guy or girl at 80 years old who's sitting on the sofa and been like, yeah, I could have done, I had that idea. I could have written that book and started that company. I could have done that restaurant. No man, don't die with it inside you. And if you're a leader, that's your job to go, I need to size up everyone in my team that I have hired well and go, you are going to be great at this. This is what's inside you and we're gonna unleash it and that's why we're gonna win. And that I think is really great. And it's not about being under the same fluorescent lights 10 hours a day, five days a week. No, it doesn't effing matter. It matters that someone's here going, I'm getting to sing my song, this is what I was meant to do and I'm gonna crush it for my team.
Tyler Rachal
I love that. And by the way, you're tossing me a wonderful softball to like smack out of the park here.
Steven Puri
Go, go.
I'm going to do a What Worked first here, and I'm going to do a callback to another episode. Anybody who's listening and Steven, if you haven't checked it out, you should check out this episode. We had an incredible episode with Mike Lemire and he talked about a, I don't want to call it a concept because it's a lot more than that, but it's basically a leadership structure, style. Mike is probably shaking his head like, no, no, but Mike Lemire talks about situational leadership and what you just touched on is exactly what situational leadership is all about. Basically there's these two things that are kind of at play with any, any employee team member, et cetera, right. Which is it's marrying their desire to do something with their actual ability to do something. And the example that he gave was he had a team member who he basically charged with helping the company to find basically a new office space to lease out. And the person had all of the desire, but they had no, none of the ability or capability to do it.
Steven Puri
They hadn’t been trained to do that.
Tyler Rachal
That's exactly it. And so it's like, hey, if you can kind of understand, there's essentially these four kind of like phases, four quadrants where people might be. If you can understand where they are on that X and Y axis, then you can understand how to get them to the end state, which is where you have both. They have desire to do the job and they also have that capability, right? But you're totally right. It's like that greatness is within you. I think the the common misnomer is that most people say this person stinks, get them out. And they don't kind of understand that everybody is kind of different. There's that book that talks about your working genius. Everyone has a different genius and it's about understanding that.
There's a phrase we use all the time at Hireframe, we certainly didn't coin it, but we say no sacred cows, right? Just because myself and my co-founder Mike say something doesn't mean that we know what we're talking about. Doesn't mean that it's the right thing. Anybody has the right to challenge us always and come up with your own ideas. And if it works for the group, guess what? We'll pursue that. So yeah, that's really, really cool. I totally agree. Greatness is with all of us.
Steven Puri
But your pod is called What Worked and what you're getting at here, what we're talking here, I think is really the foundation of that, which is why it worked.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, that's it. Without a doubt. And it's funny, when you mentioned that getting that genius out, I think that's the entire, you know, people oftentimes have asked me what's the theme of this pod, I wish I could give something clean. I wish I could say something super specific like we talked to people that own plumbing businesses.
Steven Puri
Men in garages.
Tyler Rachal
That's what it should be called. Right. But it's like, we talk about how to grow a plumbing business from $0 in revenue to a million dollars a year. Whatever. But that is the podcast summarized. It's about finding that greatness, which for many of the people that come on here, that comes through a lot of time and sacrifice and 10,000 hours. And at the end of it, you kind of look up and you're like, yeah, that worked. And let me talk about it.
Steven Puri
How do you instill the idea you just articulated into your daughter? How do you express that to her?
Tyler Rachal
Yeah, that's a great question. The thing that I think about very consciously, and people talk about this all the time especially with young girls, is - And let me give credit where credit's due. This is me not just mansplaining, this is information that's passed along by my wife - what I try to do very actively is I try to be very intentional with my words to her. And the thing that people talk about in modern parenting is applauding effort versus outcome.
Steven Puri
Yeah, that's the theme with you.
Tyler Rachal
It's the inputs and I'm trying to show her that. I'll give a good example. Just yesterday I was cooking with her and I cook with her all the time. There's a book that's very popular among parents called Hunt, Gather, Parent and It's about this woman, I think she was from the New York Times. She ended up traveling the world and sort of witnessing parents in different cultures. And she took away these incredible lessons. And one of them is she visited this Mayan village down in Mexico. And she saw that the children of any age were so willing and able to help out. It was the type of thing where they woke up in the morning, they didn't say, mommy, daddy, where's my breakfast? They went and immediately started to do the dishes, to prepare breakfast. And this is at very, very young ages.
The idea was basically like, everybody is a part of the tribe. Everybody has a responsibility to contribute. And there is no, you're too young to contribute. So the idea is you also put them into situations where most people would say that's crazy. For example, in cooking to give a child a knife, right, is very scary and dangerous. But the idea is that you allow them these situations where you are there to support and to supervise. So you're not gonna let them stab themselves, but you're also going to allow them to literally crack some eggs, literally make a mess. And my daughter did say something when we were cooking yesterday. She said something to the effect of I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I made a mess. And I said, do not apologize for the mess, you are trying. And that's what I appreciated. I do not care if you get the whole kitchen a mess. We are learning. And she says, that's right, I'm learning. And so those are the types of words that we talk about as we talk about effort. We talk about trying.
What I avoid is the classic parent pitfall which is you always say, good job. Oh, you tied your shoes. Good job. I say, hey, I noticed that you were really trying to put on your own shoes there and it took you a while. And then I do the thing where I say, how does that feel? And this is, it felt pretty good to put on my own shoes. I feel good. Cool. Remember that feeling. So anyway, you've got me on a good rant there.
Steven Puri
Tyler so I came here today to share things I'm passionate about to help people about how to be intentional and flow states and all that I'm going to have my first child in six weeks. I'm having a son in six weeks.
Tyler Rachal
Oh my goodness, okay, cool.
Steven Puri
And I appreciate what you just gave me because I've been thinking a lot about how to be a good dad. And that was really powerful. You just said that I will take in my life, whether this makes the podcast or not, that will affect how I treat my son. .
Tyler Rachal
That's so cool. And this will definitely, we don't really cut things. And I am very passionate about, as you can see, we talked about a bunch of stuff, but I can talk about parenting, music, movies all day long. Congrats to you. That's so exciting.
Steven Puri
Thanks. Super excited, yeah.
Tyler Rachal
I'm just curious off the rip here. Is there anything that's on your mind? How are how are you feeling? I guess too, I know it's an annoying question, but how are you guys, you know, doing, how are you feeling personally about this?
Steven Puri
I appreciate you asking. We were at the OBGYN this morning, did one of the growth ultrasounds, seeing little reconstruction of what his face looks like his little arm that's like right over his forehead and stuff.
Tyler Rachal
Oh yes. You mentioned aliens before, by the way. They're aliens.
Steven Puri
Yeah, right. They kind of look like little aliens. Amazing. My dad came. He's super happy. He's going to be a granddad. It was just a really great moment of this is what I'm going to be focused on the rest of my life is making sure I'm a good dad. And that's a novel thing in my life. So, yeah, super excited about that.
Tyler Rachal
That's incredible. Well, I'll give you two things because everyone gives you unsolicited parenting advice.
Steven Puri
Oh, they do. I know. Hit me. What do you got?
Tyler Rachal
I'm going to do two remarks and I'm going to keep it at that. Right. One's not even advice. It's more like, I'll keep the theme of this conversation. Children are like a bulldozer when it comes to breaking into your flow state because you have no choice. They are a physical brick following you around a physical Sukha. It's incredible because, as they get older, they can literally find you and they will remind you, constantly reminding you of what's really important in life and you have no choice. I get it how people can maybe not be great parents, but I just think that at the end of the day, children will tell you what they need eventually, right? So, whether it's through sounds or physical touch or words later on, but they're that they will break you into the flow state.
Steven Puri
Can I interrupt you for one second? Something that you don't know to ask, but I'm going to share with you is I chose this really weird name for my company. I know it's weird, right? I'm going tell you why I chose that. So Laura and I met in yoga. I married the girl on the yoga mat to my left, right? We've been together 10 years. When we had a working version of this flow state app with a working title, we were going on our honeymoon, which when you do a lot of yoga, you go to Bali and I was very grateful I could go there, do yoga and hang out on the beach. So I said to Laura on the trip, I was like, you know what? I'm hoping the next 10 days, the universe speaks to me and gives me some great name. The way Amazon is not called like bookstore online or something or Nike's not called likeshoe place, right? And I want something that's better than flow state app or like distraction blocker. She's like, I wish that for you. Good luck.
So we got there and I said, I think something that would seed my unconscious is do you mind if I did like maybe two or three quick Zooms with current like beta testers and to say, what do you like about this? I see you using every day. She said, go for it. I'm going to the pool. I'll see you at dinner. Right. So I talked to three people for 10 minutes. I said I just want 10 minutes of your time. And I asked them, what's your favorite thing? As we've talked about, do you love the music? Do you love the smart assistant, the timer, the distraction block, whatever it is, right? Third guy, I was going to my wrap up. Hey, Tyler, thanks. I asked for 10 minutes, it's been 10 minutes. I'm gonna let you go. I really appreciate it. And the guy cut me off. And he said, Steven, you asked the wrong questions. And I was like, okay, dude, I do not know that well. I'll take the bait. Like, what's the right question?
And he said, you should have asked me why I pay you. And I was like, we charge like 10 bucks a month. So it's not like a Birkin bag or something. Okay, why do you pay me? And he said, I find in the past year or two, I have two kinds of days. At three o'clock, I can be playing with my kids. They're two and four right now. Or at six o'clock, I can be down myself. I was busy all day. Why didn't I get the important stuff done? I'm miserable. He said, I realized the difference is did I hit play in the morning in your app when I started working? So I pay you because my kids are not going to be two and four forever. I was like, wow. Okay.
And I turned to Laura at dinner and I told her that this dude is more articulate than I am about what I'm doing. She's like, yeah, it's really good. We were going to bed brushing her teeth. And she looked at me. She said, you know in yoga, we hear all these like Sanskrit concepts, you know, your karma and your Dharma and your prana life force. It's like that dude said to you, Sukha, that feeling he wants to be in control of his life, doing what he's meant to do, doing it well. It's about having a time with his kids. It's it's not naming it after what it does, it's naming after how he wants to feel. And I bought the Sukha Company website that night from bed in Bali for 14 bucks.
Tyler Rachal
That's so cool and shout out that guy. Do you know his name by any chance? We can give him a shout out.
Steven Puri
He's still, I still see him working in, now we call it a Sukha, but you I still see him in there. I'm very proud. The people who do the seven day free trial and actually do it and get into flow and go, this is cool. We have 94 % paid retention month over month, because once you do it, you're like, why would I work any other way?
Tyler Rachal
That's killer.
Steven Puri
So anyway, you had two things though, and I interrupted you because we were talking about spending time with your kids. That guy named my company.
Tyler Rachal
No worries. That's such a cool story. And it's very relatable. I think about a current customer of ours. And when I was talking to her about the requirement that she had, this is my side tangent, but I can totally relate to what you just said. When I was talking to her about the requirement, I was like, well, who's doing this work today? And she was like, I'm doing it and I'm doing it on the weekends. And I'm doing it in lieu of, you know, basically spending time with my kids. And so totally it's that value beyond. We have a very literal name, Hireframe, it's all about hiring people. and a frame o your mindset to building teams globally, the modern day of scaling.
To bring it back full circle to flow state, now we've talked about a bunch of stuff, right? And I'm going to bring it in. I'm going to bring in parenting. We talked about flow state in athletics. And when you see some of these great athletes, Tiger Woods comes to mind. Now the kind of current Tiger Woods-esque person would be Scotty Scheffler. And when you see these people and they talk about winning these golf majors, right? There's of course skill, the thousands and thousands of hours of practice that go into it. But oftentimes what they talk about when they win that major is they talk about the mind state, the mindset that they have and the flow state that they get into. And specifically, and this is where I'm going to relate it to parenting: In the majors, when you see someone take a leap, a lot of times you'll have somebody in a golf major who consistently, the greatest example is he just won, not a major, but Tommy Fleetwood could not get over the hump and win a golf tournament. He had the most second place finishes in recent time. So he just couldn't get to that next place. And what he talked about when he finally won, the big change for him was not allowing a bad hole to stay with him, he would sort of wash it away and just move on to the next hole. And you hear all these great athletes talk about that because they say these bad holes are going to happen. And specifically in fatherhood, I don't know how you are. One of my big things that I had to personally work on is that I'm a person that desires to be perfect. Like a lot of other people that want to be high performers. And I really struggle when something doesn't go well. I really struggle to get out of my own head. I'm almost kind of paralyzed by it.
And that's where I think there's such a great connection to flow state in fatherhood is I really learned that there'll be times when you're going to lose it, right? Your patience is not endless. And kids are really great about testing boundaries. And a big thing for me in learning how to be sort of a better dad was it's less so about getting it right per se. And it's more so about when you get it wrong, you got to just let it wash over you. And it's on to the next hole. Because kids actually, it's weird. They have a very long memory in the sense of trauma. We're all shaped by trauma, specifically our most of its childhood trauma. So yes, children will remember the things that you do. And the thing my wife and I always joke about is that there will come a day where our kids will tell us exactly why we suck and why we're the worst parents ever, that will happen. That's a rite of passage is what we kind of see it as. But at the same time though, kids also have no memory. And so like, they're like losing their minds. And then the next second they're like, I lost my mind. They're like, what are you talking about? So as a parent, I try to just remember that and just try to say it's onto the next hole. It's onto the next at bat. It's onto the next play.
Steven Puri
That's a great way of thinking about it. Okay. Yeah.
Tyler Rachal
Yeah. And you just got to let it flow over you because it's almost worse when you carry it with you. They can feel that. So that's my one bit of true unsolicited advice.
Steven Puri
Thank you, I will leave it on the last hole.
Tyler Rachal
There you go. My last question for anybody listening to this episode, where can they find you if they want to reach out to you and what do want them to reach out to you about?
Steven Puri
Oh, that is a very nice question. I will tell you two things. If there's anything we've talked about where someone in the audience is like, oh, I'd love to learn more about that. It doesn't have to do anything with what I do for a living, but it's like, who's Cal Newport or what's that reference you made to the Hungarian dude or whatever? My email address is very public. It's Steven with a V at the Sukha, T H E S U K H A dot CO for company. So that's Steven at the Sukha company.
And email me, I will send you back a blog post or some link or something to help you on your path of learning how to manage your intention and manage your day. I get back to all my emails in 24 hours or less if I'm not sick or traveling. So that's an open offer. And if someone doesn't want to learn more about their own flow state and see can they get their work done faster, choose something you have to do. Like have a task is going to take you a half hour, an hour to do. Go to our website. It's free for seven days. No BS, no credit card. Try it. It’s thesukha.co. And if you dig it, drop into the group chat and say hi. Be like, hey man, I heard you on What Worked. And this is really helping me. Cause that's why I do it. I don't collect a salary. I just do it because so many people have done cool things. And I think that's cool.
Tyler Rachal
So cool. Well, yes, definitely if anybody is listening and you want to talk to Steven about anything, he just made a very open offer. So email him, reference what worked, please. And as I always say, as we end every episode, if you are listening to this episode and you think there's someone great like Steven who you think would be a fantastic guest, maybe that's you. Yes, you listener. Please reach out to me. You can find me on LinkedIn.
My email is very easy to find as well. It's just Tyler at Hireframe.com shocker. But, yes, please do reach out. We love to hear from our listeners and, of course, future guests as well, usually come from that. So Steven, thank you for your time. I'm going to go ahead and get into my flow state. So I'm going to exit this, but I greatly appreciate you coming on the pod. And I loved talking all things, parenthood, movies, music, et cetera.
Steven Puri
A lot of ground we covered. Thank you for having me. Thank you to everyone for listening and Dave, thank you for making us sound good.
Tyler Rachal (56:01.006)
Awesome. All right, everybody. We will catch you on the next one. Bye bye.
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