0:00 There's a concept the highest performers in the world understand that allows them to produce 10, 30, 100, a thousand times more than you in a single hour. And it's not what you think. There are only 90,000 productive hours available to anyone in life. To use them effectively and optimize your lifetimes output, you got to understand this one concept. Let's dive in. Now, I'm Rian Darus, founder and CEO of flowstate.com. We've trained everyone from Audi, Asenture, and the US Air Force to access flow states and peak performance at will. Now, at age 20, me and my three best friends from Ireland jetted over to the US for a classic Irish lads working summer. I was teaching standup paddle boarding near Huntington Beach when I spotted a rusty old ice cream cart at the back of the paddle boarding shop. And I managed to convince my boss at the time to let me dust it off, fill it up
0:46 with ice creams, and take it up and down the beach to try and make a little bit of extra cash. Now, by the end of my first day, I had about $600 cash in hand, more money than I'd ever made in a day. And that was the day that Irish Ices, my first venture, was born. Now, for the rest of the summer, I pounded up and down Juniperro Beach down in Long Beach. The same beach, funnily enough, where Snoop Dogg actually learned to rap. And I was selling ice cream under the hot baking sun. But then something started to gnaw at me. I made the same amount on day one as I did on day 60, on day 70, on day 80. I could try and sell a little bit faster, move a little bit quicker, maybe squeeze in a couple of extra hours, but at the end of the day, my ceiling was more or less $600 per day. I was stuck in a one:one productivity ratio. One hour equaled a
1:33 fixed and predetermined outcome. Every dollar I made required me to be physically present, to move the cart, to ring the bell, singing, "Anybody want an ice cream? Ice cream. Ice cream." I started running numbers in my head. If I got another cart, I could double my earnings. That's when I started to daydream. I imagined a fleet of carts lined up along the beach, employees selling ice cream while I handled the bigger picture. But every time I thought about stepping back just for a day or even for a few hours to figure out how to make something like that happen, my brain resisted. It resisted hard, taking even half an hour to create a checklist to be able to get my ice cream inventory more quickly. That was time that I wasn't spending selling ice cream, writing a job post, or training someone to push the cart on my behalf. Well, that meant missing out on real money
2:19 right now. I knew logically that these kinds of actions would help me earn more in the long run. But in the moment, every single part of me fought against it. It was like my brain chained me to that cart, skipping even one day of guaranteed money made my stomach turn. I was trapped by my own cognition. Meanwhile, about a thousand miles north of me up in Portland, a woman by the name of Kim Malik was uninhibited by this cognitive trap that was plaguing me. Kim cash in her savings and bought an ice cream cart not that dissimilar to mine. And at first, her grind probably mirrored my own. Long hours, manual effort, and a daily cap on earnings. But at some point, Kim managed to override the impulse that had kept me trapped. She stopped doing the selling herself. She likely streamlined her process,
3:04 built out a checklist, hired someone to take some of the work off her back so she could do increasingly more valuable things. Each change meant more output without more input for Kim. Instead of just another $600 day like me, Kim built a company known as Salt and Straw. It became a multi-state, multi-million dollar empire with hundreds of employees. She escaped the time for money trap that held me tight in its grip. She was able to handle the anxiety of stepping back and taking a short-term hit to her immediate productivity, the amount of ice creams she'd sell on any given day, without increasing her hours. Now, why couldn't I do the same? It wasn't that I didn't want to grow Irish ices. It was that something in my biology wouldn't let me stop. My brain kept screaming, "Keep selling. Keep
3:50 pushing. Don't slow down. You'll lose out on cash." Now, amateurs think productivity is about how much you do. But that's factually incorrect. Productivity isn't about input. It's what you get out for what you put in. Technically, productivity is defined as input cost relative to output value. This means that counterintuitively, one of the simplest ways to boost your productivity is to actually work less or better yet produce dramatically more while working the same amount. For example, how fit and strong can you get the output value with a daily workout input cost. How much revenue can you generate output value from a new marketing campaign input cost. The greater the output value relative to the input cost, the greater the productivity is now with Irish is my input cost was 8 hours of physical effort. My output value was about $600 daily. But I was
4:37 making the amateur mistake, equating hours worked to productivity. I didn't realize that productivity was a ratio. Not just total output, but output relative to input. The typical view of productivity is inputbased. Under this misunderstanding, a productive day is often measured by how hard we toil, how many hours we put in, how much we grind. But if hours worked were the only input cost we had to increase our productivity, you could only work and produce about twice as much as anyone else. Even if you grind yourself to the ground by trying to triple your hours, you'll hit a hard ceiling defined by physics. Your body requires sleep. Your mind needs rest. The good news is there's a way out of this limitation. There's a way to alter the ratio of input to output so that you can get way more output for increasingly less input.
5:23 And it's the core mechanism behind the most productive people on Earth. Now what is this thing? It's called leverage. Leverage is that which improves the ratio of output value relative to input cost. It's the thing that multiplies results without increasing your effort or time inputed. You often hear the phrase you only get out what you put in. But that's not fundamentally a great way of thinking about things because when it comes to productivity, the goal is to maximize what you get out while minimizing what you put in. And the way you alter that ratio is through leverage, through gaining leverage. This is why people's output varies by hundreds, thousands of times or even more. Even though we all have the same 24 hours in a day. Yes, the hours you work are one input cost. However, the input cost is not always time. There are many things that could be a source of input to a given project
6:09 or initiative. Capital, time, people, effort, attention. Leverages what you gain by sharpening an axe before cutting wood. If you swing a dull blade, you'll hack away at the same log with minimal output in the form of chopped wood. But spend a few minutes sharpening that blade. Suddenly each swing gets significantly more output in the form of chop wood for the same input cost for each swing. That's leverage in action. If there were a productivity superpower, it would be leverage. Take this extreme example. At Amazon's peak, every hour of Jeff Bezos's decisionmaking directed the equivalent of 750,000 hours of employees work. That's 390 years of effort across the entire employee base at Amazon compressed into a single hour of Bezos's input. Bezos wasn't working more hours or putting in
6:55 more effort. He was stacking leverage on top of leverage year after year, compounding the productivity equation. While Bezos is an extreme case, it's important to understand that leverage isn't just about hiring people. Leverage is anything that improves the amount of output you get for any given input. The same principle applies to you. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a solopreneur, an employee, a knowledge worker, a musician, an athlete, whatever it may be. So the rule is obsess over output, not over hours worked. Obsess over output and the leverage that enables you to get more output from every unit of input. And this is where leverage connects to something even bigger, which is your ability to access flow state consistently. You see, flow state itself is a form of biological leverage because flow state is the highest performing state human beings can access. In flow, time dilates, distractions fade, and you
7:43 operate at your absolute peak. But what makes someone prone and susceptible to being able to access a flow state? Well, we have strong anecdotal evidence supported by underlying mechanisms that gaining leverage is one of the most direct ways to increase what's known as your flow proness. Now, this is described by flow researchers Marty Doug and Smelech and they define flow proness as your tendency to experience flow states frequently. Now, how does gaining leverage impact your flow proness? Well, think of it this way. When you take an action, your brain is constantly calculating and asking itself a single question. Is what I just did worth the precious effort my physiology had to expend. This calculation happens below conscious awareness, but it fundamentally shapes future behavior. Now, at Princeton, Nick Young and Alan Sanfrey studied how the brain processes
8:28 rewards. Now, Young and Sanfrey's research prove something critical. The brain doesn't just track whether something is rewarding. It tracks how big the payoff is for any given exertion of effort. The stronger your brain's reward response. Meaning, the bigger a reward you get for any given action or exertion of effort, the more susceptible to accessing flow state you become. But it raises a critical question. How do you crank up your brain's reward response? Well, the answer is reward magnitude. When the rewards grow large enough, suddenly you crave the work. focus becomes increasingly automatic and flow becomes closer to our default mode of operation. And the fastest way to increase your reward magnitude is through leverage. For example, consider me with my ice cream cart. Without leverage, I spent hours pushing through
9:15 the sand covered footpath, making one sale at a time, grinding away. with leverage out of systems running multiple carts, employees reporting results, rapid growth across the operation, effort relative to reward is low because the reward magnitude is higher. More flow as a result is almost guaranteed. Now, here's the cool thing. Flow itself is a massive form of leverage. When you're in a flow state, you can get up to five times more done in the same amount of time. So, this creates a virtuous compounding feedback loop where leverage makes you more flowprone. So, you get into flow more, which makes you more productive, which allows you to gain even more leverage. And around and around it goes. is the ultimate force multiplier. So, if leverage is the key to multiplying your output and a key to increasing your ability to access flow state, why isn't everyone obsessed with gaining leverage and improving their productivity equation all the time?
10:01 Well, the answer is simple. It's neuroysiologically hard for human beings to gain leverage. And you probably know exactly how this feels. It's annoying sense that you need to step back to leap forward, coupled with a paralyzing feeling that you can't possibly justify doing so. Everyday's demands feel too damn urgent. Taking your foot off the gas seems unthinkable for me. This sounded like, "What if all this effort to gain leverage fails and I've wasted precious time I could have spent selling ice cream and just making money now?" And there's a name for this paralyzing feeling that keeps you locked in timebound productivity. It's called the output dip. The output dip is the temporary drop in output and results produced when you stop grinding and you start building leverage instead to amplify future outputs. Your results improve in the long term, but in the
10:47 short term, your immediate output stalls. This happens because instead of grinding out more work right now, you're investing time and energy into things like proficiency, becoming more skilled so you can do things faster and better in the future. People, so you've got others operating and executing on your behalf, or processes so that things are systematized and boosting your output for any given unit of input. In the short term, working on these things feels like a setback, but in the long term, it's the only way to break free from timebound productivity and unleash superhuman results. Think of chopping wood with a dull axe. You know, you should stop and sharpen it. You know, each swing would become exponentially more effective afterwards, but sharpening means no firewood being produced while you go off and you work on that blade. Your freezing family needs warmth now, not the promise of more output from chopping tomorrow. You
11:34 have to increase your inputs and decrease your outputs in the short term to gain leverage. But over time, as you decrease short-term output for long-term leverage, you'll get dramatically more output value for less input cost with no ceiling at all. And because of the increased reward magnitude that you'll get from all the actions and effort you'll exert, you'll also get into flow state more easily, frequently, and effortlessly. And here's the comforting reality about the output dip. The output dip always has a certain amount of hours associated with it. It's easier to leap into the output dip once you realize that it's just one step backward to gain leverage, not 20. Let's look at this visually with a graph. The x-axis is time, hours invested. The y-axis is output, leverage gained. The output dip is the initial flat part of the curve where time is going in, but output is
12:20 still low or even lower. The breakthrough happens when you push past this flat zone. The curve slopes up, meaning your output scales dramatically without increasing input cost. That's what we're aiming for. a brief step back that lets you gain exponentially more output. The key point is the output dip always has a measurable cost. And once you train yourself to see this math clearly, resisting leverage stops being an option. The mistake amateurs make is they don't quantify the output dip. They just feel it. And their feeling stops them. Now, why is it so damn hard for us humans to handle the output dip? Well, the struggle I faced with Irish ISIS is my inability to step back from immediately selling and grabbing the fast cash so I could set things up to increase my output for less input in the future was a consequence of how our brains handle rewards specifically
13:06 through the dopamine system. Now, dopamine is the neurotransmitter released when we experience or anticipate rewards. In studies by Wolf from Schultz, monkeys were trained to expect rewards of juice after seeing certain cues. When they got juice right away after seeing a cue, their brain's dopamine neurons lit up like fireworks. But when the same juice came later or came unpredictably, sometimes coming and sometimes not, those same neurons barely responded at all. Even for larger delayed rewards, the brain stayed quiet. And these studies confirm that our brains are strongly influenced by the certainty of a dopamine reward. And this is what kept me stuck with Irish ISIS. This is the underlying mechanism behind why most of us can never enter the output dip and gain leverage. Because I wasn't choosing between $600 a day and nothing. I was choosing between $600 now
13:54 and potentially $1,200 or $2,000 a day. But my brain didn't see it that way. It saw $600 now as guaranteed and $2,000 later as a mere gamble. This is what stops amateurs from gaining leverage. It's not laziness. It's not just ignorance. It's a fixation on guaranteed dopamine. And nothing is more certain than the reward of grinding out work today to get a predictable and proven output that you've gotten in the past. But when we enter into the output dip, we rob ourselves of this evolutionarydriven impulse for guaranteed rewards that our brains crave so dearly. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. In the ancestral environment, guaranteed rewards were often essential for survival. A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, as the saying goes, because the future was uncertain. But
14:39 today, this evolutionary programming works against us. Here's an analogy for this. It's been said that hunters sometimes use a simple trap to catch monkeys. They place a nut or a piece of fruit inside a container with a narrow opening. The monkey can easily reach inside to grab the treat, but it finds that its clench fist is too big to withdraw from the container. But the monkey doesn't let go. That was me with my ice cream cart. My fist was clenched around that $75 an hour. too hooked on now to let go for more later. You have to overcome the craving for certain guaranteed dopamine in order to enter and tolerate the output dip and gain leverage. We have to bet on future dopamine that's less certain but has a higher reward magnitude. We have to be willing to let go of the fruit in the container so we can ultimately get far
15:25 more fruit later. But how do we actually do this? Well, there are a few steps to tolerating the output dip. And you can also download our free guide to building leverage below. Just click the link in the description and we'll zip it straight to you. So, step one is to build what's known as your leverage muscle. You see, leverage isn't a magical one-time decision. It's not something you get around to and eventually do as a separate task or project when your workload finally lightens. That's the mistake that amateurs make. They think leverage is something extra, something separate from the doing of the work itself. But in reality, peak performers integrate gaining leverage into everything they do all the time. This was the key difference between myself and Kim. Kim didn't wake up one day and say, "I'm going to take some drastic action that's going to turn this thing into a multi-million dollar ice cream brand. Rather, gaining leverage for her was
16:11 likely an almost invisible habit integrated into the way she did every task. She would just take an extra minute here, an extra 40 minutes here to gain leverage alongside the doing of the work. When I refused to miss a day of selling, Kim maybe stepped away for 3 hours to interview potential employees. While I counted cash alone in the apartment, she built spreadsheets tracking costs per scoop. What Kim did that I didn't was she built her leverage muscle. The leverage muscle is your brain's ability to resist the lore of guaranteed dopamine that comes with guaranteed rewards and instead take everyday actions that multiply future output for the same or less input, even if it means delaying or not completing work in the moment. And even when you feel like you don't have the time to do it. Just as your body tries to conserve energy, making it easier to skip the gym, your brain seeks guaranteed
16:58 rewards, making it easier to get tasks over with and complete rather than to build leverage. Changing this requires consistent practice, like physical training. A weak leverage muscle sees work and leverage building as separate. Defaulting to execution under pressure. Someone with a strong leverage muscle doesn't even perceive sharpening the axe and cutting the tree as separate activities. It's simply how they work. They sharpen the axe first and then they do the action. and do the work in the highest leverage way possible. For example, an amateur programmer just dives straight into writing the function they need to write right now. A pro peak performing programmer with a strong leverage muscle spends 5 or 10 minutes saving the function, optimizing it as reusable code, and then executes the work itself. The amateur sees those extra minutes as extra. The pro sees them as a fundamental part of the work
17:44 itself. Amateurs fail to focus on leverage because they're up against invisible forces that keep their leverage muscle weak. You know how it goes when you face these opposing forces. Just imagine this scenario. It's 9:00 a.m. Your inbox is overflowing. You got notifications piling up. You got a meeting in 10 minutes. You should automate repetitive tasks like email sorting, data entry, and follow-up messages. But you think, "I don't have the time right now." That's time pressure. One of the biggest enemies of gaining leverage. By 3 p.m., your brain is slush after backto-back calls. You default to whatever requires the least effort. This is your physiological state. Another enemy of leverage. Another key opposing force against your ability to gain leverage is the degree of reward uncertainty. Think about it. Creating a simple email template has moderate leverage with low uncertainty. You'll definitely save time, but hiring a CEO to run your entire company on your
18:31 behalf so you can focus on the bigger picture. That's massive potential leverage, but with extreme uncertainty of the outcome. What if it doesn't work out at all? What if trying to hire them eats your whole year? The guaranteed win of pushing through and incrementally moving forward beats the murky unknown of the high leverage enormous potential reward. And just like that, the moment passes. You pick up the dull axe and keep swinging stuck hacking at the tree with incremental output occurring day after day. And this creates a paradox. The greater the potential leverage, the harder it is for a weak leverage muscle to pursue it or even to see the leverage you could gain in the first place. Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison spent over two years recruiting Clare Hughes Johnson as COO to join Stripe. Each outreach came with uncertainty and risk rejection. She already had a secure role
19:17 at Google, but Collison saw her potential and the potential leverage she could bring to him clearly and he kept at it despite the uncertainty because he knew the reward magnitude was so high. It was a long output dip. Every time he would reach out to her, have a conversation with her, no immediate output would occur. and he'd lose output that he could have done or gained on something else. However, in 2014, she finally said yes. And you know what? Johnson went on to build teams and systems that scaled Stripe from a $5 billion valuation to a $20 billion valuation in just four years. Collison's leverage muscle and his ability to tolerate the output dip and pursue a reward of high magnitude but low certainty paid off. So, how do you build your leverage muscle? The way you build your leverage muscle and cultivate a strong one over time is that you train
20:04 it in the moments where you think it doesn't count so that you have it in the moments where it does count. For example, the other night I had a friend staying over and I was going to let him sleep in my room instead of me. I plan on sleeping on the couch upstairs before heading to bed. I noticed that we had an extra mattress downstairs. I was tired. I just wanted to go to bed and I was already past my bedtime and it seemed like a hassle to move the mattress up. But because I decided to move it, I slept twice as well as it would have on my couch. And the next day I was 25% more productive. But the bigger win was that I trained my leverage muscle in that moment, making it stronger for future decisions, especially for bigger future decisions like Collison being able to persist in hiring Johnson and as a result transforming Stripe and adding 15 billion in enterprise value. This little example is one of exercising the leverage muscle, which is what separated
20:49 Kim from me and my single ice cream cart. It's taking the time when you're packing for a trip to turn your packing process into a checklist. even though it makes packing take five or 10 minutes longer. It's automating your calendar bookings so clients schedule themselves. Even though it takes 20 or 30 minutes to do that when you could just quickly schedule each person individually, it's spending two weeks mentoring a junior employee so they can close deals you used to have to invest time in closing yourself. These seem like small trivial examples, but these are the exact kind of moments that make the difference between someone who gains leverage and has a strong leverage muscle versus someone who stays stuck in timebound output. Amateurs with a weak leverage muscle only think about leverage in the big obvious moments. Should I hire? Should I automate? Should I systematize? But again, leverage isn't built in big
21:36 leaps. It's built in the moment when you're tired, when you're overwhelmed, when you're incredibly pressed for time. Every action is either doing the work now or doing work that makes doing the work in future higher output for the same or less input. Do you dive in and execute directly hacking down the tree or do you build leverage first sharpening the axe? The dopamine glutton amateur just pushes through their work. They solve the same problems over and over again like Seisphus pushing the boulder up the hill. For the peak performer, every repeated action is an opportunity to reduce future input and amplify what they can create with a future hour of their life force. Of course, it's easier to just push the cart than to take the time to create the systems. It's easier to plop on the couch than to carry the damn mattress upstairs. But if you always take the lower leverage route, you train your
22:22 brain to resist leverage. Your leverage muscle becomes flabby as you become increasingly addicted to the dopamine certainty you get with immediate execution. Instead, you want to train yourself to always find the highest output way to do anything. What you're trying to do is ensure your leverage muscle is strong enough to withstand a weak physiological state and to be able to withstand extreme time pressure. Both of which make gaining leverage and taking the higher leverage action increasingly challenging. You want your leverage muscle to become so strong that with time executing doing the work immediately and building leverage conjoined to one unified thing. You always execute and gain leverage in parallel without hesitation and thought. It's just how you work. And as a result, your default way of working compounds your output per hour for every future
23:07 hour. The strength of your leverage muscle dictates where you can even spot opportunities for leverage. The first time you build a tiny bit of leverage alongside knocking off an item on your checklist, it feels like a waste of time, like it's just slowing you down from getting the work done. The 50th time, you realize you save hours per week. The 500th time, you can't even imagine where you'd be if you operated any other way. This is what separated me and my single ice cream cart from Kim with her salt and straw empire. The professionals who get 10 times or 100 times or a thousand times more done with less input have built their leverage muscle. Now leverage is the productivity superpower. It's what separates high output people from everyone else. From Da Vinci, Ford, Edison, Bezos, Musk, Jobs, Carnegie, Rockefeller, the pioneers who've transformed industries,
23:52 altered the trajectory of civilization have one thing in common. They built leverage into everything they do. Leverage fundamentally alters your productivity ratio, breaking the chains that bind output to hours worked. When you stop obsessing over hours and start obsessing over output and the leverage that enables you to get more of it from every input, your brain rewires itself to seek highreward magnitude activities. Flow becomes more frequent. Your vision expands and suddenly the impossible feels inevitable. So here's the rule. Find the output dip and step straight into it. This is how you move mountains. And again, if you want to overcome the output dip faster, you can grab our free guide below showing exactly how to quantify and quickly move through your personal output dip and gain leverage on the other side. You've just learned why dopamine certainty keeps you tethered to timeband productivity. But until you master your brain's dopamine system
24:38 directly, gaining leverage will still feel like swimming upstream. And in this next video, I'll show you exactly how to reset your dopamine sensitivity, transforming boring tasks into highly rewarding work, and making your brain crave leverage instead of guaranteed short-term hits. Click the video on screen
