The Talent Forge: Shaping Workforce Behaviors with Jay Johnson

From Hollywood Lessons to High-Performance Habits with Steven Puri

• Jay Johnson

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What if the secret to consistent high performance isn’t more grind, but a better story? We sit down with Steven Puri, a former studio executive turned founder, to connect surprising dots between Hollywood and the workplace: how timeless myths power blockbuster hits, why fear and risk shape decisions, and how those same forces show up in teams that confuse busyness with value.

We get personal about failure, shame, and the discipline of reflection. Steven shares what he learned leaving big studios, launching startups, and then stopping—pen and paper in hand—while the wounds were still fresh to ask, What did I learn? The answer, listen, becomes a theme for leaders who want to swap surveillance for stewardship. Instead of paying for time, we make the case for paying for value and building cultures where people can do the kind of work that moves the business forward.

The conversation closes with community and accountability—how sharing one finished thing a day can create momentum that sticks. If you’re a leader trying to reduce burnout, an individual contributor craving focus, or a trainer designing learning that actually lands, this episode offers a clear path: clarify the mission, manage for output, protect deep work, and recover well. If this resonates, subscribe, share with a teammate who needs it, and leave a quick review telling us your favorite focus ritual.

Meet the Host
Jay Johnson works with people and organizations to empower teams, grow profits, and elevate leadership. He is a Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements®, a two-time TEDx speaker, and a designated Master Trainer by the Association for Talent Development. With a focus on behavioral intelligence, Jay has delivered transformational workshops to accelerate high-performance teams and cultures in more than 30 countries across four continents. For inquiries, contact jay@behavioralelements.com or connect below!

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayjohnsonccg/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jayjohnsonccg/
Speaker Website - https://jayjohnsonspeaks.com

Jay Johnson:

Welcome to this episode of the Talent Forge, where together we are shaping workforce behaviors. Today I am joined by Steven Puri. Welcome to the show, Steven. Thank you. I hope we have some entertaining, engaging ideas, and some actionable ones too. I am confident we will. And this is going to be one that I think our audience is really going to enjoy because we're going to dig into procrastination, productivity, and all of the things, all of those behaviors that essentially we all want to achieve high performance. I truly believe that. And I will, you know, up fight me on it. Uh, but I do believe that no one wants to be terrible at their job. And we all want to achieve more on some level. So before we get into that though, Steven, I'd love for you to share just a little bit about your background because I think it's important to know some of the experiences that you have. Let's give it some context. Yeah.

Steven Puri:

Totally with you. Okay. For those who are playing along in their cars or at home, here's the reason to listen to this of Jay's many episodes, which are awesome, right? I am one of the few people you'll meet who has been a senior executive at Two Motion Picture Studios and also raised over $20 million of venture, had a successful exit in two failures companies that I've run.

Jay Johnson:

Right.

Steven Puri:

And along the way, yes, I've done a bunch of fun stuff. I'm very grateful for the life I'm leading. It's awesome. But most importantly, I've been around some incredibly productive people and people who can do it in a sustainable way. And a lot of what I do now is share the lessons that I've seen firsthand. There's a theory, which you know, Jay's very steeped in. You guys have probably heard a lot about. And there are also some specific practices that I love to share that I was like, this I've seen work. So that is the context. And Jay, please, uh, if you want me to fill any of that out.

Jay Johnson:

You know what? Just from my own curiosity, can you share what it was like working in those studios? And what did you learn from those experiences?

Steven Puri:

Well, um let me bifurcate that into there's the business part, which people find fascinating, and then there is the performance part. Okay. So the business part is, and I to this day, people still want me to help them get their script made, get their movie financed, stuff like that. And I'm like, I'm out, right? But here's the deal is people do not associate the word show with the word business. It is it is one word, right? So if you want to do something solely on artistic merit, don't do it where there's 10 million, 50 million, 250 million dollars at stake because it is a business. Your piece of art has a PL, right? So go be a painter, be a poet, write a novel, right? So the business of film was fascinating for me because it is a very mercenary, cold-headed or level-headed, cold-eyed view of what do we think the returns are on this piece of art, right? So working in that environment, you know what? You have three kids you've never heard of do some indie film that grosses a quarter billion dollars, right? And you're like, wow, this is a strange indie hit. You also have Steven Spielberg go off, make a movie with Tom Cruise or Will Smith or some huge star at the time, and it flops. It's it's has a risk profile like wild catting for oil because you just don't know, right? It's a huge gamble. The result of that is there's a lot of fear in that business, right?

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Steven Puri:

So relationships are super important because it is not something where you can simply say, hey man, we had a battery that delivered this many miles of range. If we tweak the chemical composition somehow, we'll get 12 more percent. We can sell more cars. And you know, those are businesses you can quantify very clearly, you can, you know, manage with entertainment. It is like this year's Avenger movie bombed, last year's made 500 million dollars. What was really different? You know, it was kind of the same plot, rehashed that we've been doing for 10 years. You know, why did this LucasArts one bomb? So the business side of it is fear-driven and it's um it is a business, and you have to remember that. Uh, the creative side, and I'm gonna stop in a moment because I can see you're ready to say something, is interesting because the people who succeed in that, and I speak more about the writers and directors than I do actors. Actors are paid to stand and say a line and not bump into the furniture, right? Some are very good at it. Most you employ because they're playing a version themselves on screen. There are like five, 10% of actors that are like Meryl Streep. Most of them are like you're basically hiring Jay to play a version of Jay on screen, right? To be super blunt. So I speak mainly about writers and directors. It is interesting to see the ones that have decades-long careers, the practices that they come up with for how to be that good over that period of time, and also how to recover from that film that didn't work because you were judged on the last thing you did, right? Um, back to you. I know you wanted to say something. I don't want to talk too long.

Jay Johnson:

No, and this is so fascinating. And I don't want to derail the conversation to be had on this, but I think it's so interesting. So, uh Steven, how important is the ability to I I don't want to say predict behavior? Because in many cases, we can look and say, hey, here's the model, this has worked and it should work again, and it doesn't. Or, you know, here's a complete change to the model, and we have no idea if it's gonna work. And as you said, it turns into a $350 million movie. So on some level, what was the experience trying to predict, I guess, trends, audience behaviors, reactions? Like that's all got to be just an incredible, incredible set of conversations that occur in that space.

Steven Puri:

What's your favorite movie?

Jay Johnson:

Oh, tough question. I think name two.

Steven Puri:

If it's too hard to pick one, name two.

Jay Johnson:

All right. So I I I generally love cinema films. I'm gonna go with an old school.

Steven Puri:

Cinema Cinemasy, right?

Jay Johnson:

I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go, uh, I'm gonna go old school on one that maybe affected me uh when I was when I was in college, and I'm gonna say fight club.

Steven Puri:

Oh, interesting choice. Okay, gotcha. And if you could have a second one, you said high barbell brush.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, if I was gonna say a second one, uh see. Oh gosh, this is so tough because I do love I love the action movies. I did love the Avengers.

Steven Puri:

Okay, no shame. It made a lot of movies, a lot of people saw it, right? McDonald's is popular, a lot of people go, no one admits to it. Okay, right. That's right. Okay, so let the reason I ask you that is let me share with you something that's underneath the hood a little bit. And I hope this is interesting. I know we'll get into a lot of very germane topics for you know talent development and and leadership, but in terms of film, film is our modern way of expressing mythology. The same way if you think about famous mythologies for us in the Western canon of the Greek and the Roman mythologies, right? Or whether you're you know Indian mythology, like those myths that they would tell around the campfire were their versions of movies, right? Our movies are versions of those myths. So, what's interesting is the reason they get passed around and become so popular is because they express fundamental truths, but in a way that is often entertaining or has details that are fantastic or something, right? Yeah. So here's the thing most popular movies, like big movies, they boil down to a very relatable story about a family. I'll give you an example. Star Trek 11, a movie that you know I worked on. That was the first one with uh Chris and Zach as Kirk and Spock.

Jay Johnson:

I just watched it last night, ironically enough. I swear to God. Steven, I swear to God.

Steven Puri:

You know what? You heard I died in that movie. In the battle scene, maybe you didn't catch this. In the battle scene, when Spock, Mr. Spock, jumps into Kirk's chair, which is vacated, and he calls down to Bones. He goes, Bones, where's you know chief medical officer Purie? Bones goes, Chief Medical Officer Pury died on deck six. And Spock's like, Well, you're chief medical officer now, Bones. So that was our inside joke about how Bones became the chief medical officer of the of the enterprise, um, which was a running joke with female friends and my assistants. So my assistants, when the movie came out, put a plaque on my door at DreamWorks that said Steven Puri MD underneath it said deck six in parentheses Leto, because the joke was I died on the Leto deck during the battle, which is the shuffleboard deck. So I was probably playing shuffleboard during the battle. Not a not a noble death. So in that movie, however, the organizing principle is Kane and Abel. That movie, if you strip out all the genre elements, all the photon torpedoes and aliens and spaceships, that movie is simply two brothers are going to kill each other. And if you notice, they lose the movie until the moment in which they agree not to kill each other, and then they can win the movie. It is a story of two brothers. You can take all the set dressing out. I don't know if you have a brother, I do, and I've had moments where I wanted to kill him.

Jay Johnson:

I've got three of them, and that's three times the moments.

Steven Puri:

Okay, that is why that movie works because there is a fundamental organizing principle about a family. Yeah, you can relate to the Avengers, exact same thing. These are my brothers and sisters. Yeah, we all kind of fight and we kind of get along, and we're united now against the you know the Hatfields and McCoys, we got a band together, and you know that sort of thing, right? Yeah, and most of those movies like die hard. People ask me all the time about diehard. Oh, is it a Christmas movie? Is it not a Christmas movie? Like every guy over 30 basically asked me that question when they found out I worked on that franchise for Fox. And what's so interesting is do you have you ever seen the first movie? Oh, yeah. The original, right? Yep, okay, which is so tightly done as a story. It is like you pull that apart as a screenwriter, it is like a Swiss watch, even though it is a broad populist movie, it is brilliantly written as populist entertainment. And here's the thing when, you know, in the opening, Bruce Willis, John McLean, comes to Los Angeles, right? He gets Argyle, the limo driver, who's like, hey man, it's my first day on the job, you know. I'm trying to figure this out. And Bruce Willis, we've seen New York guy, street cop, you know, jumps, runs, shoots, kicks for a living, runs around the streets, right? Yippie Kaye, right? So he's now put in a limo with Argyle. And of course, because he's they want to emphasize he's a man of the people, he puts the teddy bear in the back. Remember, he sits in the front like a worker with Argyle. And Argyle says to him, Hey man, come on, tell me, tell me why you're here. It's my first day on the job. And Bruce is like, screw you. I'm not gonna say, Hey, man, come on, tell me, screw you. They're talking. He finally says to him, like, hey, well, here's the deal. My wife, this, that. And Argyle looks at him and basically says, the movie, if you ever watch this, it's astounding how clearly screenwriters are like, here in two sentences is our movie. So Argyle looks and goes, Let me get this straight. So your wife left you for some rich guys, and you came out here to throw her over your shoulder like a clay caveman and bring her back to New York. And Bruce Willis kind of laughs, he goes, Yeah, kind of like that. Kind of like that. The ending of the movie, he's got Bonnie Medalia over his shoulder, walking out of a burning building, gonna take her back to New York, right? Such a great movie. Yeah, is the story which was very relevant at that time of a family getting divorced. Yeah. And women were suddenly in the workplace. You had women making more money than men, bingo. And this played to that weird thing in the zeitgeist. Just like right now, we have the whole thing with like trad wives, and like, there's like a thing in the zeitgeist around like, how do men and women relate to each other? Who's more potent, right? There it was that thing of like, hey man, I thought I was a powerful guy. I'm a I'm a policeman with a gun. And my wife is suddenly in this tall uh tower with these rich guys doing this stuff, and that was simply a story of a family. So the answer to your question is that is what really underpins when you talk about Fight Club and you're talking about, okay, is it really a guy who has multiple personalities, sort of you know, split kind of thing, and he's fighting for himself. Does it matter? Because the story he's telling is so true when you think about it reduced down that way. And with most of these top movies, you can anyway, long diversion. But I hope next time you watch a movie, you'll start to see like the ones in the zeros where you're like, oh my God, this is a story of two sisters. This is you know, and they dress it up, but you pull away all the dressing, and that's what you get.

Jay Johnson:

That's brilliant, Steven. So I I think at some point in time we should have a conversation about storytelling in terms of how storytelling impacts, you know, impacts the workplace, because that's one of the big things is good leaders are often really good storytellers and able to kind of bring that sort of reality to people, whether it's through analogy, whether it's through symbolism, or whether it's even from telling their own personal stories and allowing people to kind of step into it.

Steven Puri:

So Jake, I couldn't agree with you more. Let me hang a lantern on that, which is yeah, if you like you know, a lot of leaders talk to me because of Suka, right? My the community I run, where they're like, hey man, five of my guys are in this. Should I get a seat license? What is it you do anyway? What is this focus app thing, right? So what's interesting is when you talk to them, very often like the remote and the hybrid come up. They're like, Well, you know, I've got all these developers that are hybrid, remote, I've got these engine uh designers, you know. And you're like, Well, how do you feel about that? And very often there's a feeling of fear. I don't know what Jay's doing Tuesday at 3 p.m. I just he could be at the dog park with that beautiful black dog that used to be behind you. Um yeah, there you go. And that's interesting when you say, Oh, I understand we've peeled back like five whys to get to why is that worrisome to you? And you are right, it comes down to if leaders can express a story, because a story is fundamentally there is a heroic force, there is something that opposes it, there are obstacles, villains, something right? There is that thing where there's man against man, man against society, man against nature, whatever it is. You find those two things in collision, and if this man woman, I'm not I don't mean in a gender-specific way, right? If this person, this heroic force overcomes their flaw, it is a successful movie. If it's they don't, it's a Greek tragedy, right? And that's basically what happens here. So as a leader, you have two big things you have to do. And I don't mean making sure the TPS reports are filed. I mean, that's managerial stuff, right? As a leader, you lay out the mission. We are here to cure cancer. We're here to make you know carbon captured, we're here to clean the oceans, we're here to make the best romantic comedies of any studio, whatever it is. Like you have to tell a story of here is the big goal we have, and you have to lay out how you're gonna do it. This is how we're gonna treat each other, this is how we're gonna treat our customers, and this is how we're gonna treat our competitors. And if you do those two things well, if you tell that story about this is what we're doing, this is why we're here, how we're gonna do it, you attract the right people into your organization. We're Tuesday at 3 p.m., I know Jay's moving the ball down the field.

Jay Johnson:

Ah, so spot on, Steven. And that is the fundamental tenets of building a culture that's actually sustainable. You talk about this a lot. Yeah. Yeah. So I I love it. Now I'm gonna I'm gonna give this segue here. We're pivoting. You you you've you're in this, you're in this space, right? You're in this space of of films and production and so on and so forth. And now let's fast forward. You're in a space of helping people be more productive. And particularly, I know that you had a lot of influence during the time of like when everybody was trying to figure out remote versus hybrid versus, you know, in the person. How did that before we even get into like the tactics of overcoming uh procrastination or productivity? How did you how did you make that shift? Like what brought you into sort of this space of helping people shift?

Steven Puri:

A painful one. I I'll r relate this to you, but I don't think uh you're gonna be prepared for the answer. So just go with me. All right. So when I was uh vice president at 20th, uh, this is before Disney bought News Corp, like the Fox, right? And I had been recruited. The the chairman of Fox recruited me from DreamWorks by saying, Hey, listen, I'll double your salary, I'll do fun stuff, but guess what? I will give you the diehard franchise, I'll give you the Wolverine franchise. You probably grew up watching diehard movies, didn't you? And I was like, I did. He's like, You could be the guy making the next diehard movie. That was really impelling to me. So he said, Listen, we want to up our game here. We've got all this money because they had done Avatar. And he's like, for the first time, we have a ton of money. We can buy our way into better movies than what we've done, the alien versus predators, and you know, stuff like that, bottom feeder kind of like stuff. And he said, Help me be part of this new world, this new version of Fox. And I had a lot of writer-director relationships because at DreamWorks, the last studio run by a filmmaker, right? When I was there, that was Steven Spielberg and Stacy Snyder, who were amazing. So you DreamWorks, you could kind of call anybody up and say, Hey man, Jay, I just want to have a general meeting with you. And you could be like a two million dollar screenwriter, you'd be like, Yeah, you want to have coffee on Tuesday. Because you were like, Yeah, if I could get a job at DreamWorks, that would be cool. I'd love to work there for Steven Stacey, you know, that sort of thing. So the thing of Fox was like, Hey, bring those relationships. So in the first year, true to his word, he gave me an open checkbook. So I had projects, I brought over David Ayer, Alex Kerson, Bob Orsi. We had Damon Lindelof working there from you know, Lost. We had Billy Ray writing the 24 adaptation for me. We had um uh Chris McCrory, you know, doing the Wolverine sequel, like tons of stuff, right? But the only thing he was interested in was Die Hard Vive. We would have our basically every studio you have like a Monday or Tuesday, it's sort of like a venture capital firm where you have basically meaning we all get together and go, What should we green light? Can we go gamble 150 million dollars on this movie and you're fighting about it? There are eight of you in the room, it's like the vice presidents and the chairman and the president, right? So I could bring in stuff where I'm like, I have the draft from David Ayer. He wants to write and direct this for us. And it would be like, Yeah, but how's the Iron Five? So one day I was walking down, we left the meeting, I was walking down the hallway, and I said to him, I I'm failing you. Like, I'm working really hard to bring the kind of product that we would do at DreamWorks here. But the only thing you seem to ask about is the worst thing on my slate. It's a writer I inherited from a previous. This, you know, executive who's working on this, and it's terrible. Like, there's no idea there. Like we talked about Die Hard One. It is a family in jeopardy. Are they going to get back together or not? Christmas is the perfect time to set it because that's when families come together, right? There's a lot about that movie that works. And this movie, I'm going to tell you script strip awful. After I left Fox, the screenwriter was kicked out of the writer's guild for plagiarism, by the way. I was like, not a surprise. And he's like, listen, here's the deal. As long as you make it for less than this budget number, we put out a poster or one sheet's called that says diehard anything on it. It will make that number opening weekend. I don't care what the reviews are. I don't care what anyone tweets. He's like, we'll be in the black by Sunday night. And that's how I keep my job. So he's like, as long as you make it for less than that number, we're good, Steven. Is there more we need to talk about? And I was like, No, it was actually one of the most honest conversations he and I had ever had. And I was like, I'm gonna wake up 40, 50, 60 years old making tired 19. Why? Like, you know what I mean? It was not inspiring. And that's when I thought, what's the other thing I know how to do? Because as you know, I started out as an engineer. How I got into film was I was a software engineer who started producing digital film. And I met a lot of filmmakers, and it was like, hey, kid, you want to come produce films, right? So that's when I said I have to get up. I gotta find something I can apply engineering talent to because that's the only other thing I knew how to do, other than you know, produce story. And I did two small startups, raised about three million for each. Both didn't work, both got to like 50,000, 60,000 monthly actives, not a series A, like you know, inflection point. And I was humiliated. I felt so much shame and so much embarrassment. I was like, you know, you go to dinner and you bump into your friends from film, and they're like, Hey man, how's your startup going? You're like, terribly, I'd like to kill myself. Like really, really, really badly like, I don't think we're gonna raise our next round. And I moved to New York. I was like, I can't stand going to the dry cleaners and bumping into Jay. And Jay's like, hey Steven, how's it going? I'm like, so that is what led me to a real this is now the context for this sentence, which is that's what led me to sit in reflection and say, What did I learn that is valuable? And it was, I have been around some of the top screenwriters, directors, engineers, designers. What are the commonalities of what I've seen, and how do I make that available to more people who want to elevate their talent? Whether as an individual contributor, like I just want to produce better in a more healthy way, or as a leader going, like, hey, let's have healthier practices and just up-level all their games. And that's really what I've been doing the past six, seven years. Is that it's incredible.

Jay Johnson:

I want to I want to highlight something that you said. And it would be under normal pretenses, this would probably be let go. But I I've literally been in conversations with some incredible, incredible leaders and and actually like people studying adult learning and everything else. One of the things that you said there that I think is so important, and audience, this is your takeaway reflection. You stopped for a minute and you evaluated. And that is one of the most important skills, I truly, truly believe, one of the most important skills that we as humans were given in order to shape our future. And if we don't actually take that moment to step back, reflect, and understand what did I learn from this situation? What did I learn from these experiences? You're essentially just it's it's so much that's just let go. And and it's so easy for us to just be like, all right, what's next? What's next? What's next? And just get beyond wherever we're sitting today. But if we don't actually put time into the calendar to reflect, to better understand who we were yesterday, we will be losing something for who we are tomorrow.

Steven Puri:

So Jay, I have to I appreciate your saying that and hanging a lantern on that. And I'll tell you this. I had a successful startup in my 20s, which I thought, you know, of course, in your 20s, you think you're smarter than you are and you know, better looking than you are, all right? So I was like, oh my god, I built a company with, you know, we'd won the Academy Award off uh Independence Day and built a company, sold it, right? So when I had those two failed companies, I when I reached the moment with each of them where I was like, I should not raise another round because we've tried everything we could try, and it I don't have anything new to try. So we need to have that conversation with the investors and say, I'm really sorry, we lost your money, right? And lost like three quarters of a million of my own money too. I was like, ooh. So yeah, both times I thought it is so easy, exactly what you said, Jay. It is so easy to run onto the next thing, and in six months or a year, it's like, what did I learn from that? It's like the rose colored glass of like, oh, it wasn't that bad, you know, we recovered from it, and now I'm running another company. I stopped, I sat in the same this chair with the window, the comes huge window that comes in over my shoulder, and I took a piece of paper and a pencil, like old school, not dictating into Siri. I took a pad of paper and I sat there with no one around. I said, What did I learn? And I wanted to do it while the wounds were still bleeding. I was like, this is fresh. Both times, the first word that I wrote down was listen. And I realized along the way, as I thought about what were the markers in time where it's like, we could have gone this, we could have gone path one or path two, then later, we could have gone path two or path three. What were those moments when maybe someone had said to me, like, hey, you know, Steven, have you considered like this thing in the environment? Or have you thought about adding this functionality or getting rid of this functionality and streamlining it? And there were things, if I had listened, and you have to be selective, you have to have vision and have your own, you know, idea of what it should be, but you have to also balance that with like someone giving you gold, being like, I think this will help you. That right now with Suko, with my current focus app, I'm in a moment of reflection. That is this, uh, we're doing this Thanksgiving week. I have budgeted time with my wife and you know, our little newborn. Um, I budgeted time to spend time just in reflection to think this next period of growth. What is it that's going to expand us from what we do into what we could be doing? And it is so easy to skip reflection and just keep running towards the next thing. So I I appreciate your highlighting that.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, I think that it's one of those where it's and I love that you did your reflection while the wound was still fresh. Because I I'll tell you, you know, at one point in time, I thought I had this idea that I wanted to be a politician. All right.

Steven Puri:

I can totally see that. Oh my God, I could totally see that.

Jay Johnson:

Don't insult me, Steven. No, I'm just kidding. No, we too, hey, where we are in this country, we need great politicians. So I started in the municipal, local municipality. I won my first election. And just like you said, you know, at 20, it's like, uh unstoppable. Now, mind you, I won against an incumbent by 72 votes. All right. Wow. Didn't know what I was doing, had no idea what I was doing. Uh, I knocked on every door. I didn't have like lists or any of the other things, literally just knocked on every single door and I did it twice. I was like, I'm just gonna outwork that. Yeah.

Steven Puri:

So for what like a county seat, like a council?

Jay Johnson:

No, this was like local township. So it was uh in a township, it's trustee, and you know, so city council basically. All right.

Steven Puri:

City council's got it.

Jay Johnson:

I win that election. Uh the first two years, I really enjoyed some different aspects of it, really didn't enjoy some different aspects of it. But I listened to people going, You need to run for state representative. And I was like, let the ego get in there and everything else. Like, yeah, I can do this. Yeah, I do. Yeah. I jump in there and everybody's like, You're a shoe-in. There's no way, there's no way you can lose this. You're so popular and everything else. And I'm just like, keep keep talking, keep telling. Yeah. Um, but I lost I lost. That's the end of the story, but I lost. And I remember in that moment, all of the I was so embarrassed. I had so many volunteers, people that funded, people that jumped in there, sponsorship, endorsements, etc. And I had to look them in the eye and say, I lost. So, what is the obvious thing to do? It's just like, oh, we couldn't have predicted this, or we had no idea. And honestly, the reflection piece of that came later. And I looked back and I said, I lost because I didn't put the energy in. It is all on me. It is 100%. I can look back at that and take full ownership of all of the excuses I made in that moment were complete BS. I wish, I wish I would have actually sat with that in that moment. Because it took me several years to come to the conclusion of I need to own every single moment of my life. Like I am not that the excuses are complete BS. And it took me several years to actually come to that. If I would have sat in that and really said, really, Jay, was it that you didn't predict this or that you didn't do X? Was it because you did this? Or is it because you were, you know, your your ego got in the way and you didn't work as hard as you did previously? And all of those things would have been better life lessons learned in the moment to carry forward rather than a couple of years afterwards reflecting and looking back. So I appreciate and value, but it hurt. It was painful. I hate losing.

Steven Puri:

But taking ownership of that, take the I no wonder you are where you are, because that is a great lesson that a lot of people could still get through that experience and not have made part of themselves. I will tell you a funny thing. I was in relationship counseling with an ex-girlfriend who really wanted, we were gonna break up, and she's like, just do this with me. We did it. The end result was we still broke up and it was the right thing, and we're friends and all that. But there was one thing that came out of that that was gold for me that applies in my business as well as my personal life, which is at one point the therapist looked at this and said, looked at us and said, instead of assigning like percentages of whose ownership of this problem, this thing, I want both you to own it a hundred percent and solve it as if it is completely yours to solve. Skip the step of trying to figure out who's responsible 100%. You have to solve this. And I was like, wow, and I've taken that into business where I'm like, I don't care. I don't care. What I care is everyone here is completely your problem to solve. Now let's solve it.

Jay Johnson:

It's the mission. It's a great time that you take the ownership of the mission. It's what can I do? Or, you know, if this is a setback, how did I create the conditions for this setback by either doing or not doing something? Because you own it. Everything is figure out if but I I even look back at your reflection story and and what you were talking about is you know, where you were looking at the different pathways that you were going down. And I think that obviously hindsight becomes 2020, but those rose-colored glasses, like, oh, I didn't have a choice in this moment. Well, maybe not in that moment, but what about five moments before that? What about 10 moments before that? Were there a series of choices that led to you not having a choice? And that's any any time that I've been like, my hands were tied. I look at it now and I go, What were they? And what created the conditions to make me feel that my hands were tied? Because I guarantee it was it was a choice somewhere before that that led to my hands getting tied and having to make whatever brutal choice, whether it was to shut down a company because I have been in the same boat, I have failed, you know, successful. Yeah, you know, and every time it could be the easy thing to look and say, if this one thing would have occurred versus looking before that and saying, if I would have made this choice here, that might have led to a different thing. And again, it's all yeah, conjecture at some level, but if you learn from it, that's the important part.

Steven Puri:

I would say it is not conjecture for this reason. Character is revealed more through failure than through success.

Jay Johnson:

I would agree with that. I would 100% agree.

Steven Puri:

Okay, just for the enjoyment of those playing along at home, I'm going to reference a movie that illustrates this so incredibly well. It is like a Washington monument that no one can see. It's standing right in the middle of the movie and no one no one recognizes it. Very few. Have you ever seen this is the the original movie that launched multi-billion dollar franchise, theme park rides, like the whole thing called Raiders of the Lost Ark?

Jay Johnson:

Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Steven Puri:

Okay, so I'm gonna ask you a question. Indiana Jones, the hero of that story, it is an action adventure movie. If he had never been born, would the outcome be any different?

Jay Johnson:

That's such a fascinating question. If he had never been born, would the outcome be any different?

Steven Puri:

He is the hero of the movie. It is a one-hander, it is you know, him and the girl, but it is a one-hander. It is not the Avengers, it's not you know it is he is the hero of the movie. If he had never been born, would this action adventure movie end any differently? No. No one notices it. You know why no one notices it? And I will tell you this I have worked with some of the top screenwriters, I've seen God knows how many action adventure movies. I can't name another successful movie where you could say that. Not one I've ever seen. Could you say, oh, the hero didn't appear in the movie, but it's still kind of in the same way. Talk about elephant never.

Jay Johnson:

You've literally just changed my chart. I I remember watching that movie.

Steven Puri:

I love that movie. And do you want to know why? It illustrates, and I know some people playing along the cars are like, where is this going, Puri, right? But it illustrates what we just said. Characters are revealed through failure. You watch the movie again, you notice he fails, he fails, he tries to get the thing, they steal it from him. He tries to get the thing, they steal from him. He fails through the entire movie, right? Yeah, but here's what is actually important about that movie, why it launched a multi-billion dollar set of movies in theme park rides is Do you remember the opening of the movie sort of establishes like guys stealing relics from temples, and you know, this kind of belongs in a memory fiber, right? He's like sort of like I don't know, right? And the the the government guys come to his uh his university and they're like, Hey man, Hitler's after this arc thing. What why does he want this, right? So he does the exposition, pulls out the old book, he goes, Well, you know, if you believe this stuff about the Ten Commandments, they put it in this thing, and now armies that carry it, win, and you know, old wives day or whatever, right? So he's very skeptical, very skeptical. So they hire him, they're like, go get the thing, okay? So he's got to go see Marion up in the Tibet Nepal, wherever the hell she is, right? He goes to see her, and she does not want to see him. She's like, You were my dad's partner, you broke my heart, you never cared about me, you used me like some notch on your belt, I hate you, right? You never cared about, right? So we've established he's basically a skeptic, you know, he doesn't believe in anything but stealing shit. And he used this girl, right? When she was young, the young daughter of his partner, right? What an awful guy. Can you name any movie you've ever seen, any action movie in your entire life, where in the climax the hero is incapacitated? The answer is no. I know that. Yeah, no, I can't. In the climax of Raiders, Indy is tied to a stake with his hands tied behind his back, right? Marion's tied behind him. He can't even move. The hero of the movie can't do the typical thing. Oh, he's a great archer, sniper, jumper, shooter, bomb expert. He can't move. What does he do? He says, he says, Marion, close your eyes. And with that, he goes, Yeah, I believe in God. He's coming right now, and it's gonna be bad. And he goes, I love you, I'm gonna save you. So he pays off by saying, This is my true character. Yeah, I believe in God, and I do love you, and people love that movie because he may fail, but his character is revealed in that moment.

Jay Johnson:

I love that. I love that. I and you know, I never even thought about never even thought about that in terms of that. I'm gonna I because the screenwriting is so good. You just gave me homework, Steven. So I'm gonna have to go back and watch it again.

Steven Puri:

But yeah, great storytelling is often like sleight of hand where it's just like you're watching this and this hand is doing the thing.

Jay Johnson:

Very cool.

Steven Puri:

I know.

Jay Johnson:

Okay, bring us, bring us back on topic. No, I know we're into this. This is no, this is I think this is gold. So reflection, et cetera. It's important, audience. Get there, do it, make time for it, and be honest with yourself. All right. So we were segueing into how did you get into the space that you're at? So talk to me. You've you've got the Suka Company, which is all about helping people to essentially be more productive. Now, this is a podcast all about workforce behaviors, and we know that people are being asked to do more with less. We know that people are essentially stressing out right now because no matter what they seem to, no matter how busy they are, they're not feeling like they're accomplishing things or not getting the things done. And you've taken an approach to kind of help people out with it. Let's talk about the approach, and then we can talk more deeply about like, all right, what are some of these challenges? What are these villains that are keeping us from this is fantastic?

Steven Puri:

Okay. So, as you mentioned, we all want to be productive. I believe this. Like, we do have something inside us that is great and will be released. There are a lot of factors in this world that work against that, like procrastination, like distraction, you know, like inertia. You know, like there are things that stop us from whatever it may be. The great thing inside you may be the book, uh, the app you're gonna create, the restaurant, the you know, school, the whatever it is, right? And uh great leaders are uh they assemble teams where they say, My job here is to release your greatness. Like I see what it is in you, I see what's holding you back, and you're Greatness will impact not just you, but this company, right? So you may be have the great copy inside you or the great code inside you, whatever it is. And ultimately, if you as a leader see yourself as the releaser of greatness, you start to frame things differently in your mind. You know, like it's not about the TPS reports, right? So toward that end, one of the things, and these are now very specific to me, one of the things in my experience where I was like, oh, this is interesting about high performance and sustainable high performance because people want to stick around. You want to talk about employee retention, right?

Speaker 3:

Right.

Steven Puri:

If someone feels self-fulfilled, they want to stick around. You know, there are very few people who are like, oh my god, I'm singing my song at work, and I hate it, I'm gone, I'm out of here. You know, it's like people may be hear the siren song. Some people be hear the siren song of money and be like, Oh my god, I could make $500,000 going and do this. Okay, great. Someone can really pay them that. But if you're talking about comparable jobs, and in one, they're like, I'm doing the thing I'm great at. It feels amazing, right? I'm getting recognized for it. Like people I work with know that I'm a great copywriter or great designer or a great coder, you know, a great developer. So what I got really deeply into is flow states and understanding this. And I'll tell you the first time I experienced a flow state was not with any awareness of what it was. But now it is a practice that we share a lot of saying, like, how could you finish your work more quickly with a higher output and at the end feel elated, feel uplifted as opposed to depleted, right? Because when you feel that sense of ah, this is great, you're gonna want to repeat it as opposed to depleted, you're like, oh god, not this, right?

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, so can I jump in real quick for something? Yeah, I'm gonna relate this to something that we have talked about. You know, when you were talking about making the transition um between, I think it was DreamWorks and Fox, you had mentioned, yeah, they offered to double my salary, yeah, they did this, all these cool things. But what they offered me was, and then you went into uh the franchises or the value proposition, sort of that internal uh relationship to who you were as a kid, it was purpose. They offered you a sense of purpose, the value that you were bringing into that company towards a goal that had a meaning to you. And spot on.

Steven Puri:

As I said, if we can make the DreamWorks version of Die Hard, what an amazing action movie that would be.

Jay Johnson:

Sure. You know, and and as I'm sitting here and I'm listening to you and you're talking about this, I think about that because I think that so often that's where leadership and management sometimes miss the boat, is you've got talent, but you're not guiding them to see like how can that talent create meaning? How can that talent create sustainability, legacy, even purpose, you know, something larger than ourselves? And I think it's so important that if we don't draw that out as leaders, you've got people that are going to come in, they're gonna do their job, maybe, uh, quietly quit, disengage, do the minimum, and go forward. And then the leader looks and says, gosh, these people are lazy. And rather than taking ownership and going, gosh, I failed to storytell the mission properly.

Steven Puri:

Boom, Jay, this is gold. I should be writing notes. This is really good. Um, no, let's let's take a step back though, because I do want to share this because I think there's some valuable actionable nuggets in it, as well as a larger idea. So I know that there is a cohort of listeners who totally understands flow states, they harness them, their teams are in flow, they're doing amazing work, and there's probably another cohort that has a passing understanding of it because it's becoming pretty popular in the zeitgeist, but kind of what is it? And so, if it's fair, can I set the table for 30 seconds about what it is?

Jay Johnson:

No, by all means, because I was gonna ask about that anyways, and related to something. So go for it. Swing okay.

Steven Puri:

So, for those playing at home, there was a Hungarian-American psychologist, this guy, Mihai, Chin Sent Mihai, and he had a thesis. He said, if you talk to high performers in varying disciplines, athletes, artists, designers, inventors, scientists, when they talk about the highly concentrated states where they do the thing that makes them famous, they talk in very similar ways. And he's like, What's up with that? So, like Prometheus, he wanted to go up to Mount Olympus, steal fire, and bring it down to the rest of us going, I figured out fire guys, right? So at the end of his research, he wrote a book called Flow. It is the seminal work on this, it is why we call it a flow state. And he name he said this about why he named it flow, which I thought was awesome. He said it was the most beautiful metaphor I could find what I discovered, which is we are all on the river paddling to move ourselves forward. But if you align your boat with the current, it carries you, it magnifies your efforts. You go further and faster, and that is what these people have figured out how to do repeatedly. And in the book, and you know, there's been amazing research since the cotlers, the newports. So many people have written about you know deep work and flow states and you know being in the zone. And oh, by the way, you know, you don't you don't have to call it a flow state. Like Michael Jordan has that amazing quote about like when I'm in the zone, it's me and the ball, which is a beautiful way to say actually it's not about the stands, the scoreboard, or really even the defenders. If I control the ball, you're gonna see this on a highlight reel in 30 years, you know. That's that's really what this is comes down to, and that's an amazing amount of focus. And there's a great Picasso um quote where he talks about you know, I was up all night and I kind of lost track of time and I didn't eat or pee or blah blah blah. But I think I kind of captured you know, the horror war. I think it was his 14th night working on um on Guernica, right? So in the book, Mihai says, Hey man, there there are some conditions precedent that seem to be true for getting into this state. He said, in this state, you have to believe what you're doing is meaningful. You know, it is not, hey man, I staple the papers here and I put them in the box, right? Right. You have to have skills that apply. You know, it's not Jordan painting, right? You have to be challenged. Like that code you're writing actually has to be something you need to think to make the thing that is great for your company. It is not writing just another bit of HR software to automate a process, right? He said you lose track of time, you do your best work, distractions fall away, and at the end, as we discussed, you feel a sense of joy as opposed to a sense of depletion. And it is fascinating once you have experienced this, you do look up, you go, man, I thought like 15 minutes have gone by, two hours went by, my thing's done. I think I did it well. And I have time free now because I got it done more quickly than I thought. So that is why I'm such uh a cheerleader for flow states. And by the way, you can achieve it completely. You don't need our app. You can, if you study it, you can, like an athlete, learn how to do this for yourself, and it's kind of magical. You don't want to go back once you've done it. And if you can create those conditions for your team, which we can talk about, you will see the change not in the output, but also in the energy.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah. I think there's a couple of things that I just want to highlight here too. Um, and and then let's get into some of the application. How do we get to this flow state? What do we do? Um, you know, what brings us to that that sense? Because here's something that we have found in our research. We do a lot of research in the burnout space. Yeah. And the thing that we have, I'm gonna call it literally, I'm gonna say a conclusion. And I don't say that very often. A conclusion is it's not the amount of work that's creating burnout. It is the feeling of isolation, devaluation, or resentment that comes from the work that you're doing. And what you just said about getting into that flow state, the challenge, but probably not so challenging that it's impossible to do. And now I feel resentment that I've been put in this situation. How you put you set me up to fail, right? So challenge, but not video games do this perfectly, right? It's just enough challenge that you want to keep going, you want to keep going, but it's not so much that you know get frustrated by it, right? Yes. Um, a sense of purpose, a sense of like meaning to the work. You know, if I if I tell you just push this button once every five minutes, that doesn't have any meaning. But if I say if you push this button every five minutes, that is gonna send the right signal to the satellites that are gonna keep every plane in the air, you're gonna be saving lives. Not all of a sudden there's a meaning behind pushing that button, even if it is somewhat monotonous, like there's an importance to it. If I don't push this button, bad things happen. GPS goes down. Yeah, you know, so like having that sense of purpose and you know, the sense of autonomy, being able to essentially say, I have this ability to be who I want to be here. I can bring my talents, my unique uh, you know, impact to this space. I think that's so important because flow really can be the antidote to burnout if we look at something like what are those moments in burnout where I'm depleting my energy? Is it really because of the amount of effort or energy put into it? No, it's probably more of the emotional state that's behind it.

Steven Puri:

May I pick up on that and then I'm gonna give you a talking step back to you, which is this was an interesting conversation I had early in the development of Suka before it was even called Suka. Was there was an engineering manager who had contacted us because several of his devs were using us, and he's like, What's this thing? You know, so like when they first heard of Slack, they're like, What's Slack? Do I need to get it for the company? Right. So we had this conversation, and his entire team is interesting. They his entire team were developers that ran a um water shuttle service across New England, right? But he had developers that were not just like all in Concord, Massachusetts or something like they were spread all over the place. So he was dealing with some of those fears around remote. And as we talked about this, he said, I just I want to have some way of letting go of that fear because I'm so accustomed to if we're not under the same fluorescent lights for eight, 10 hours a day, I don't know what anyone's doing. And the thing that unlocked it for him is I said, could you in your mind redefine work like output instead of time? If that shuttle thing, that whatever it is you're working on to make the water source go, if if that's done, do you honestly care if it took Jay 15 minutes or 15 hours? If you can let go of that, you're gonna have a happier Jay. Because honestly, what you want is a staff meeting where I'm using you, of course, as the example because you're right in front of me, but you want the staff meeting where Jay walks in and goes, Hey guys, yesterday I was kind of thinking about this, dot, dot, dot. And everyone turns their heads, like, oh my God, we should do that now. Like that changes the trajectory of our company. You don't want Jay to walk in and go, like, hey man, you know, I spent the time, all my emails were returned, my inbox is empty. I just returned my Slack messages. Uh, you know, I clocked out on time. Like, who no company wins because their Slack messages are returned. Yep, you know, they have reflection, like you said, and it's about output. It's going, go do something brilliant. If you spend the entire day with your dog at the beach, but you come in tomorrow and you go, I thought about this, and everyone's like, oh man, win. Stop, full stop, right there. Huge, huge.

Jay Johnson:

I you're gonna laugh at this, and I'm sorry, we're we keep you know jumping down the rabbit holes, but it what you said has so much meaning, and and and leaders and managers take this into account. Now, I'm not saying do this as I'm gonna say as confidently. I'm gonna use a kind word for myself. Uh, the unkind word would be as cocky as I was, but I mean, we're talking, we're talking 15 years ago. My my entire business started as a side hustle, and then it got bigger and it got bigger and it got bigger and bigger. And then finally, it was one of those where I had a beautiful position uh where I was very happy, great salary, super great benefits, all these other things. And then I had this side hustle that was just blowing up that I wasn't going to be able to do both. And I remember having the conversation with uh my boss at the time, basically saying something along the lines of, look, I can do a lot of the value proposition that I do for you in very short order. I, you know, would you be open to negotiating whether I can, this was before COVID, whether I can work remotely, whether I can do what you need to do based on the value, because you can either pay me for my value or my time, and you can't afford my time anymore. Wow. Well good. So did that go down? Uh they continue to pay me for my value because you know, and and that's the thing is ask any leader if you've got a salesperson that can generate a million dollars by only working $10 for 10 minutes a day. Yeah, are you okay with that? And all of them are gonna go, well, yeah, if they're generating that kind of return, okay, then you're paying for value. I don't give a, I don't care. Set the metric, set it higher, do what you gotta do. Yeah. But yeah, uh you're so spot on, Annette. And I think way too often we try to pay for people's time. And if if people figure it out, time is the most precious resource, and it's one of the few things that people don't negotiate for.

Steven Puri:

Yeah, but time is also very easy to measure. It's easy to go, well, Jay was here all day, as opposed to Jay's idea was worth its weight in gold. Because then you actually have to apply yourself to evaluate the output, the value as you said.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah. So and that, yeah. Oh gosh, so brilliant. And thank you for bringing that up. I think that's such an important lesson for leaders to think about is am I paying for time or am I paying for value? Because there we go.

Steven Puri:

Should we dive back into flow states? Because I know it's a little diverse.

Jay Johnson:

Yes. Let's do that.

Steven Puri:

Okay. So the those who are listening, why should you care? I hope we've established the reason the reason you should care, whether you are an IC, you're a leader, you hopefully you're a leader of people. Is you can create these conditions where the people you are leading are doing their best work in a way that gives them more time and energy and they feel uplifted, and that leads to retention, that really leads to better work, a whole bunch of good outcomes, right? So flow states, and this is a a concept uh related to that, is flow states are something where uh you need to drop in. Like you don't snap your fingers and say, I'm in flow, I'm deeply thinking right now and doing great work, right? It is a way in which your brain sort of drops into it, and research shows 15 to 23 minutes to get in, right? From the time in which you sit down, often music helps. We can talk about that, you know. Things help blocking distractions. And then if you get interrupted right in the middle, I'm like, hey Jay, uh, let me slack you real quick. And I need that thing from yesterday, but then I've destroyed the next 15 to 23 minutes. You're gonna need to get back into flow, right? It's it's that. So what does that mean if you lead people and you go, hey, well, I want to experiment with what if we all did this practice? It means you're gonna have to set aside some time on your team, your team of three, eight, fifteen, whatever it is, and say, Hey, if we want to try this, we're gonna need to set aside an hour a day or three days a week or something so we can do deep work, like the meaningful work that moves us forward, not the returning emails and you know, doing Teams messages. And in that time, let's just treat it as sacred. Don't don't bug someone if you don't need them right now. Don't set client meetings in the middle of it, you know. And in doing that, suppose you get buy-in. So suppose people are like, hey man, I would love Monday, Wednesday, Friday to have an hour to actually do work that I would be proud of that might contribute to the T more. You need to factor that the the notion of chronotype, which you brought up early in our conversation. This thing is like, you know what, I'm tomorrow from 9 to 11, I'm going to be locked into this thing, right? No, I'm gonna mention this, and this is a little bit of a Hollywood story, but it's short, which is when I was a young Turk coming up, my first brush with this was a screenwriter who's way above my level at the time, Ron Bass. And this was you know, guy who wrote Rain Man, my best friend's wedding, all this stuff. Infamous for not talking to his family in the morning. He's like, I'm not the dad who's gonna be like, Who wants pancakes? You know, like who needs to ride to school? Like, he's like, I can't because when I start talking to you, I can't hear my character's voices in my head anymore. And that's you know, he gets paid one to two million dollars of script. That's why he writes the words that Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman, eight-list actors say yes to, right? Yep, and his family, of course, is like, Dad, you go, you go make the two million bucks, like you make the pancakes. We're good, you know, we got you. And he was very regimented about this. He's like, he would get up at three, four, five in the morning, right until nine, dialogue. He knew in the afternoon he could do studio meetings, interactive stuff with other writer, you know, like stuff like that. And I remember thinking, wow, this dude, like he's intense. How like but he's like, I'm self-aware, I've spent the time in reflection. I go, this is how I work. So that is a very extreme example of chronotype. He's like, at this time of day, I'm more adept at this, and at other times of the day, I'm more adept at that. But you can for free, and you know, your team can get a sense of your chronotype. As simple as take a piece of paper or pencil, draw a quick grid Monday, you know, through Friday, morning and afternoon. It doesn't have to be complicated Excel, you Google Sheets, you know. Just jot down what did you do? How'd you feel? Oh, Tuesday morning, worked on blog posts, smiley face, you know, Wednesday afternoon, coded, felt top. You look at that after five or ten days, the patterns will stand out to you. Yes, and then you can start optimizing your day.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, audience, take this into account. You've heard me say before if you want to change something, you have to track it. And being able to track this and and even and again, people over, I think they overthink tracking sometimes. Like, I've got to input this for every 10 minutes, or no, no, no, no, no. Make it simple. If it's simple, you do it. If it's not simple, you probably won't. Bingo. Track it so that way you can look for those patterns of behavior. So, well said, Steven, continue on. I just wanted to really emphasize that point. I think it's so important.

Steven Puri:

I love that. And I'll mention this is something with Suco, which means happiness. Our company is called Happiness Company, that we are launching right now, which is you will get the morning after you do a session. Suppose you say, Oh, I want to be in a flow state for now. You hit play in our website and run it in the background while you, you know, are doing whatever work you do. The next morning, you'll get an email that helps you understand. Very simple, but it says, Do you realize, you know, in the past week or two, you're more productive when you listen to this playlist? Or do you know when you're coding in the afternoon, you close tickets more slowly? Maybe we should schedule more time in the morning for you when you're doing coding, or copywriting, or designing. Like the biggest cohorts in our platform are um writers, engineers, and developers and designers. And that kind of feedback where it's always there in the background, and then it's giving you that. You know, the same way it's like my mother-in-law loves her Apple Watch. If I hear about the rings one more time, I'm gonna puke. Like it's it's effective, it works, right? But it's a passive sort of thing. Just saying, like, yeah, I'm just watching you. You can glance down and just say, Oh, how my rings doing, right? And having those little cues, like saying, Hey, what uh what are my patterns in my session? Suppose you do like a two-hour session, right? With Suka, we give you like a productivity graph. You can run your cursor over it, and every five-minute increment, you can see what apps did you use? Did you touch your phone? Did you close, you know, open tasks, things like that? And I'll tell you this is an admission about myself. Once we launched this, even as I thought I was pretty good about managing my productivity, I noticed once I looked at my graphs day every day, I would always have this dip about 35 to 45 minutes in. And when I'd scroll over and highlight that, it was usually when I grabbed my phone. And I thought to myself, okay, there are two ways to respond to this. One, I need to lock my phone even harder. I can't, you know, or I need to acknowledge that must be a point where my brain just wants a break. So I set my pomodora timer to 45 minutes instead of 25. I was like, that's maybe more me. And that's just that kind of thing we want to give people. So the next morning you're like, hey man, do you realize like your pattern is kind of like you should probably do a pomodora that's 35 minutes long, or listen to listen to Sonic Caffeine playlist in the morning because you close more tickets or you know, things like that. Um, that's one of the things that really gives me joy. And we're about to launch that publicly for everyone. It's in beta right now.

Jay Johnson:

That's pretty amazing. And, you know, for those listening at home that don't know what Pomodora is, it's a certain amount of time in and working and focused, and then giving yourself a break. And there's actually some really good cognitive neuroscience behind this of uh, you know, when we are working, giving ourselves those breaks can actually do a number of things. It can help with the transition from short-term memory to long-term memory. Uh, it can help with everything from like mood affect, uh, happiness, et cetera. So there's a lot of really science. Yeah, there's a lot of powerful cognitive effects to essentially taking a break. Um, so I actually do this as well. Usually in my little either five or 10 minute breaks, it's something as simple as getting outside, walking in nature, doing a little breath work, a little meditation, whatever those pieces are. And I'll tell you, I come back in and that energy is almost like right back up. And I'm excited to get back to work as opposed to just being like, oh, do I have to keep going on this? It's it's such a powerful technique.

Steven Puri:

Okay, if we're if we're bringing in the science a bit, let's talk about brain fuel essentially and glucose levels and things like that. So, yeah, and matter of fact, there's a good Huberman episode, Hubert and Live about this, talking about, you know, after 120 minutes, your brain fuel, your glucose level essentially is pretty depleted. So that notion, and when I was in the valley, when I was in SF, this was absolutely part of the hustle culture. It's like if you're not grinding it out all night till 3 a.m., blah, like you're not in it to win it, you know, no, no, no. Yep. And the reality of that is that marginal output you get in hour five without taking a break is so low relative to what it was from 60 minute 61 to minute 120. And I would find that when I did that, I'm in I'm in a deep, but I'm staying up late. The code I would write the last part of the night would invariably be what I would have to refactor or rewrite later because you're like, actually, that was the least efficient way to write. That was such a hacky waiting, you know what I mean? And oh, it doesn't work on iOS. I forgot when I was coding it. I yeah, iOS has that weird thing, you know. So what you just said, super true, as counterintuitive as it may seem from the grinded hustle culture, is doing a pomodoro, which I have to add this just so it's amusing. The reason it's called Pomodoro Tomato in Italian is because uh Francesco Trulo, who came up with this, was using a kitchen timer. Look that look like a tomato, right? So he's like, What if you worked 25 minutes and took a five-minute break and repeated that cycle, you know, eventually did a longer break. So when we structured Suko, we built it around that for exactly what you said. And when your little bing, like yoga ding comes up and goes, Hey, you've been working for 25 minutes, we offer you in your face points for going to get a glass of water, points for going for a walk. We offer you videos you can play of just desk stretches. Hey, man, you don't even want to get up, you just want to stretch a bit and feel better. Breathing exercise. You want to do some box breathing together? Here's five minutes of box breathing. And you're right, you come back to it after that break, the water, the box breathing, whatever, and you're like, okay, I got this. Let's do it.

Jay Johnson:

So I'm gonna toss this out there. Trainers and coaches for all of you that are doing 90-minute trainings, 120-minute trainings, more breaks than you think you would normally do. I design all of my stuff now: 40 minutes of content, 10 minutes a break, 40 minutes of content, 10 minutes a break, because people will remember more, they'll be happier, and they will be far more productive and engaged. So uh this is great for leaders, managers, teams, individuals that want to be more productive, and for you trainers and coaches out there as well.

Steven Puri:

So and the irony is we've not given them a break as we've been talking about another thing, Jay.

Jay Johnson:

Hit pause, hit pause, go get some water, come back to the conversation. We'll be ready when you come back. That's true. I know, but this has just been so fascinating.

Steven Puri:

This is super fun. We can do another episode support if you want.

Jay Johnson:

I mean, there's so much to talk about. Yeah. So uh yeah, let me let me ask one other quick question. And then, you know, I want to be respectful of time here, and we've already, you know, definitely extended this beyond, but I think it's been such a powerful question. If you were to, if you were to look at at Suka and you were to say, what was your uh, you know, what was your what was your groundbreaking learning once people started experiencing this? Like once they started to do this, use the app, once they started to engage in this, what was that sort of like okay highlight moment?

Steven Puri:

This is gonna sound kind of weird, but go with me. So Suka is a focus app. It is a website. You hit play and it gives you all these little tools, blocks or distractions. It is like a single player game made for you to go deep, hour, two hours a day. I had a thought at a certain point where I was like, I speak to so many of our members like one-on-one, almost like a hub in spoke, and yet none of them know each other. They have no sense that there's anyone else because it's all these single player games that they're all playing with themselves, right? Would it be cool if they uh could talk to each other? Is there is there a community aspect to this? So I did what I love to do, which is speak to some members and go, hey, I have this idea. I don't know what do you think? Like, what if you guys had a a group chat or maybe private groups or things like that you could do? And there was one woman I spoke to didn't need to talk to anyone else after I spoke to her because she listened to me and I said, Would this be the most distracting thing ever, or would this actually be a value add to the platform? And she said, Steven, I can go to the Nike store, I can buy a pair of shoes, they'll sell me left shoe, right shoe, put them on my feet, I run, they work great. There's a reason why a hundred million people belong to the Nike Run Club because together you run further, you run faster, you're more accountable. The days when you suck and you're on the sofa and your friends come by, they're like, Come on, Jay, let's do this, and you go running, it feels great that they came by for you. And the day you do that for Steven, it feels even better. She's like, You should do it. I will tell you, is my favorite part of the platform the fact that people in there are all productivity minded. It is not like Twitter with people hating on each other and fake bot accounts, it's not Facebook just wasting time, it's not, you know, like Instagram. It is an interesting community of people who are all like, let's do something. Like life is short. I have something inside me that's great. And I'll tell you a uh closing story. There is uh in the group chat, you can share one thing a day that you finished. So you can post, hey, I finished my website, and someone will say, I post the URL to it. This spring, this guy posted uh his name is Roy King. He posted uh uh turned in my dissertation, finished my dissertation. And people in the group chat were like, hey man, that's kind of a that's kind of a big mic drop. Like you want to talk about that? He goes, Oh yeah, I've been you know using Suka the past year or two because I am an assistant vice principal at this high school in Missouri somewhere. I'm working my PhD in engineering. I have kids, I get maybe a 60 to 90 minute window in between school and family stuff. I need to use it really, really efficiently. So I use Suka to focus in that time, and that's how I got here. But he said, Don't get too excited because I still have to defend my dissertation, right? This let's step. So he said, like it's like two weeks from Monday or something. I will tell you, leading into that Monday, that Saturday, Sunday, people around the world that I know don't know him, Japan, South America, they post in there, hey Roy, you got this. Good luck, Roy. We're pulling. And I was like, This is really this is a great feeling of being part of something. I know these people do not know him, like their only connection is through we are all pulling, trying to do something in our lives. And Monday, nothing from Roy. We're finally someone posted, Hey, anybody here from Roy King today? Like, need the end of this story, Roy. What happened, right? And Tuesday morning, he drops in, he goes, You may now call me Dr. King.

Jay Johnson:

Ah, congratulations.

Steven Puri:

Went ape shit. Yeah, but that is a thing I didn't know would be part of this.

Jay Johnson:

That's incredible. And how important it is, especially in now and the time that we're in, to be connected and to be supported and to be seen and valued, yeah, and to support each other. So, Steven, there's been so much great that has come up.

Steven Puri:

Thank you for moving the conversation forward.

Jay Johnson:

Uh, we could most certainly probably spend another hour and a half, but I I we'll we'll hold true to you know, taking a break here.

Steven Puri:

If the audience, we're gonna have some water, we're gonna do it some breath.

Jay Johnson:

That's right. If the audience wanted to get in touch with you or learn more about the Suka app, how would they do so?

Steven Puri:

Oh, super easy. If there's anything that I've said that someone has a question about, doesn't have to be about, you know, my app, welcome to email me. Who is that Hungarian guy? What is Cal Newport doing? Steven S-T E V E N at the Suka.co for company. So T-H-E-S-U-K-H-A.co, the Suka Company, right? And if someone wants to experiment with this or try it for their team, it is obviously at the sukha.co, th-e-su-k-h a.co, the suka company. Suka means happiness in Sanskrit. So that's ultimately what we want is people to feel self-fulfilled. So we think that's a virtuous cycle of like you're doing great work, you feel great about it, you want to do more.

Jay Johnson:

It's incredible. And uh, you know, we'll make sure that's in the show notes so people can access it easy. I will be trying this out myself. I can't wait uh because it is very much aligned with how I like to do work. So this is definitely something I'm gonna look into. Um, Steven, you spent this has been one of the longer episodes, to be perfectly honest.

Steven Puri:

No, I'm sorry about that. I could talk faster.

Jay Johnson:

Yeah, no, no apology. This has just been so full of great insight, incredible stories. I just want to say thank you so much for being here, sharing your knowledge and wisdom and experience with the audience. It's really truly been meaningful.

Steven Puri:

I appreciate that. And thank you to everyone who's listening. In addition to you, Jay, like anyone who's stuck with us and found value here that makes it all worthwhile. And I appreciate that.

Jay Johnson:

Yes, absolutely. And yes, thank you, audience, for tuning in to this episode of the Talent Forge, where together we are shaping workforce behaviors.

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Jay Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Behavioral Elements

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