IN CLEAR FOCUS: Hollywood executive turned tech CEO Steven Puri of The Sukha Co shares his playbook for leading remote creative teams. Drawing lessons from producing special effects for blockbuster films like Independence Day, Steven reveals the science behind “flow states” and how to create conditions for deep, meaningful work. He discusses overcoming procrastination, the creative power of working on “the other thing,” and why leaders must protect uninterrupted time for their teams to thrive.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS
Steven Puri: Flow states are this concentrated state that are often characterized by you don’t notice distractions, you are doing something meaningful, you lose track of time and it’s a kind of magical unlock when you get there
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Bigeye’s Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. The shift to hybrid and fully remote work has fundamentally changed how creative teams operate. While many organizations have adapted to distributed work, the challenges of maintaining productivity, fostering collaboration, and keeping teams engaged remain significant hurdles for leaders across the marketing and advertising industry. From managing creative flow states to preventing burnout, the demands of leading remote creative teams require a completely different playbook than traditional office-based management. Our guest today brings a unique perspective to these challenges, drawing insights from two decades in Hollywood, followed by years building technology companies. Steven Puri is the founder and CEO of The Sukha Company, a productivity platform designed to help remote workers achieve focused, healthier work experiences. Steven’s career spans roles as Vice President of Production at 20th Century Fox, Executive Vice President at DreamWorks Pictures for Kurtzman-Orci, and Digital Effects Producer on Academy Award-winning films like Independence Day. Now, as a tech entrepreneur, Steven applies lessons learned from managing creative teams on multi-million dollar film productions to help remote workers and their leaders thrive in distributed environments. To discuss the unexpected lessons from Hollywood about remote work, the science of flow states, and practical techniques for leading creative teams, I’m delighted that Steven is joining us today from Austin, Texas. Steven, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Steven Puri: Adrian, that is a lovely foreshadowing of what I hope we talk about. And for those playing at home or listening in the car, I hope we give you some actionable ideas about how to block distractions, be more focused, be healthier, and feel like you’re doing the thing you’re meant to do.
Adrian Tennant: Love that. Well, Steven, your career path is fascinating. From producing visual effects for blockbuster films to becoming a studio executive and now running a tech company focused on remote work productivity. What initially drew you into the film industry?
Steven Puri: I’ll tell you, I fell into it. And if there is a spine for my life, it is similar to like Forrest Gump, where like extremely lucky things drop in my lap. And I would like to believe I worked very hard to make something of them. But let’s not, you know, underestimate the power of things happen. So I was in Los Angeles going to USC, University of Southern California. And my parents were both engineers at IBM. So I knew how to code. I was a junior software engineer. I was a Watson scholar. So I had a job at IBM to make money during school. And when I was at USC, it has, you know, arguably the best cinema and TV program in the world. So a lot of your friends in the dorm want to talk movies all the time and go out on Tuesday night to see the late show and stuff like that, right? So you have a lot of creative conversations. I happened to be in Los Angeles at that moment when film went digital. Computers like RAM CPU, GPUs being powerful enough to go “We can manipulate a film here, instead of in photochemical world.” And I spoke engineer, so I knew computers, and I kind of spoke creative. So I fell into this because there were opportunities when I was getting out of school to work in digital film. And that led me to do, as you mentioned, “a lot of digital visual effects,” which means when you’re doing that, you know, some people may not understand this is the kind of directors who get budgets of 50, 100, 150, 250 million dollars, like they’re not first-time directors. So when you’re working in digital visual effects and you’re submitting budgets for eight, $10 million as a portion of it at larger films budget, you get guys and girls that are, you know, three, four, five studio movies deep. So I got to work with Cameron on True Lies, produce the titles and the effects for Seven with Fincher, did Braveheart with Mel, did Carlito’s Way with DePalma, like a lot of interesting stuff came from that. And one of it was Independence Day. where I produced the digital effects for Independence Day, we won the Academy Award for the visual effects, which, not gonna lie, a rising tide lifts all boats. There are many people who slaved on that. It was a great thing for all of us that we got recognized by the Academy for what we did. And I set up a company with Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, the director, producer, writer, and we ran that doing visual effects, digital effects for people’s movies. did it for four years, got an offer. And we were bought out by this company called das work, just like a large German media conglomerate, right, sort of a Liberty Media of Germany. And so in my late 20s, suddenly, I had exited a company at a six times multiple, which is a respectable exit, I had some cash in my pocket, you know, as one thinks in their 20s, that they’re smarter and better looking and more successful than they actually are, right. So I was like, “This is great. What do I want to do next?” I was like, “You know what? I think instead of making a little portion, the digital portion of someone’s movie, I’d love to learn how to make a movie. Could I do that?” And that’s when I set out to get on a new ladder because, it’s strangely very different to develop scripts and you know, no talent actors. It’s a very different world than being the guy on set helping to make the digital effects. So I got on a different ladder, worked my way up over the next few years. And that’s when I became an executive at DreamWorks for Kurtzman Orsi, and 20th Century Fox, stuff like that. So a long answer, but it’s sort of a strange path that I don’t know anyone else kind of like fell from like an engineering background into being a studio executive.
Adrian Tennant: This is super interesting. Now, when we were preparing for this podcast, you did mention to me that your first job transitioning out of USC was actually at an advertising agency.
Steven Puri: Oh, you remember everything. I’m very flattered. Yes.
Adrian Tennant: Well, how did that experience influence your later work in Hollywood and then in tech?
Steven Puri: Okay, so to fill in a little bit of the details here, while I was still in school, I was making money by working at a company that did trailers, music, videos, commercials, things like that, basically an ad agency, but solely on TV and movies, right? Now, the two guys around the company, the two principals, were established like Mad Men of Hollywood, very well known, been in a number of places, and they teamed up to form this company. I was lucky to be there at the inception because they were like, “Hey, kid, we need a warm body. Can you get coffee?” I’m like, “Yes, I can.” “Come here.” Right. So I worked my way up. One of the things that I learned there, which was from Jeff Cownan, the two guys were Greg Cassidy and Jeff Cownan. And Jeff, who is still a friend is an amazing director, commercial director. I remember there’s one thing I learned from early on is my job at that time was to assign movies to writer-producers. So when studios would say, “Hey, we have the rough cut of next spring’s romantic comedy, could you work on a trailer and a flight of TV spots for this?” Right – we would get that in. And I would, you know, look at “Oh, you know what, Adrian’s was great with that rom com last year for Sony, they love him, let’s have him do it,” right, that sort of thing. So Jeff comes in my office one day, he goes, “Stevie,” by the way, he calls me “Stevie.” No one in my life has ever called me “Stevie.” Just Jeff, don’t know why. But to this day. So he comes to my office. He’s like, “Stevie” I’m like, “Yes, Jeff.” “Do you know Bart?” I was like, “Bart, the guy works in the vault. Yeah, yeah. I’ve been in the elevator with a nice guy.” “You ever give Bart a movie to write trailer for?” “Jeff, we’re talking about the runner who gets like tapes delivered around Hollywood, right? No, I have not given him a movie.” He’s like, “I have an instinct about him, Stevie, give him something.” “Your name is on the door, Jeff.” Like, got it. Two days later, Jeff’s in my office. “How’s Bart doing?” “Jeff, I gave him his first movie two days ago. I’m not gonna stress about and ask him how he’s doing. I’ll wait until Monday.” He’s like, “Okay, okay. What else did you give him?” “Jeff, he’s never written a trailer before I gave him one thing.” He’s like, “Stevie, let me explain to you how creativity works. It’s always about the other thing. You give Bart one thing to focus on. He’s going to stare at that movie and write the most obvious B version of that trailer as little beads of sweat come down his temples, right? The party of rain that does the I don’t know, chocolate and peanut butter. Maybe that’s interesting. That is not the part you think you’re thinking with. So if you don’t give them another movie to work on, you’re going to set them up for failure.” And can I tell you, in the intervening 20-plus years, how many times I’ve seen Jeff proven correct, both in film and in tech. And there’s a great book on the neuroscience of this, which I did not obviously know when I was 20 years old, nor was the book written. But Olivia Fox and Judah Pollock wrote a book called “The Net and the Butterfly,” talking about the executive mode network and the default mode network, and how you need to occupy your executive mode with activities. So the default mode can do that childlike association of things that maybe the adult in the room would not put together, you know, like the adult would never say, “What does a cell phone taste like?” Right? But the baby would ask that. And then that turns into a campaign where you’re like, “What if the people were tasting their stuff, you know, like that sort of like crazy idea?” So it’s interesting, if you’ve ever experienced this, I have, I will have some of my best ideas driving, washing the dishes, showering, walking, when my executive mode network is executing some action that allows my default mode to go, no one’s watching, let’s come up with cool stuff. So there’s one example of ye olde time at the ad agency that has served me through both of these fields.
Adrian Tennant: Well, you also said to me during our preparation for the podcast that the film industry has essentially been doing remote hybrid and in-person work for decades, but they don’t call it that. Steven, can you just explain to us what you meant by that?
Steven Puri: Yes, I’ll tell you exactly. For many verticals, the pandemic was the shock to the system. Zoom became a verb. We couldn’t be in the same room without killing each other. It was very like, oh God, how do we work if we can’t see each other under fluorescent lights eight to 10 hours a day, right? The funny thing is, for 100-plus years, film has naturally had an evolution through these different stages. Early in a film’s life, it is fully remote, you have writers writing from home from each other’s writing partners, living rooms from coffee shops, right? Hopefully, one of those ideas gets some traction. A small production office opened a couple days a week, you’re hybrid where you go in for meetings to hear Oh, Brad would star in the movie if you rewrote it this way for him. And then the writers go off for three days a week and, you know, do the rewrite to see if they can hook Brad, you know, costumers come in, location scouts want to know what does it look like, and then everyone goes off to find costumes to go travel and do location scanning. And then of course, you’re on set at a certain point, and it is, you know, RTO, it’s all day all night, you’re living together for months on end, then it goes back to hybrid and then remote, some picture editors, sound editors, foley artists working and through each of those eras, those stages, they’re established ways for leaders to lead in them and ICS to contribute in them. But you would never in film say like, “Oh, we’re in the remote period of this film,” people be like, “What do you like? Oh, you know, we’re developing, we’re in pre production, or in post production, you know,” and that was something I found very interesting in the way it just naturally has evolved or wasn’t incredibly hard thing. Now, admittedly, during the pandemic, hard to shoot movies, there were a lot of TV shows. And it’s not like this was solved in a way that pandemic did not aggravate. It was rather you go into these movies and as a producer, as a studio executive, you kind of know how to lead, you know, through each period.
Adrian Tennant: You decided to leave Hollywood and transition into the tech world. You actually founded The Sukha Company. Can you tell us what Sukha means and what your platform is designed to do?
Steven Puri: That is a very generous question because of course I’m very proud of what I do. As you know, when we met before, I mentioned I’m having my first child in a couple months and it’s changed my thinking a lot because I never really wanted children before I met my wife. And now I do think a lot about what is the world that I’m handing off to them, you know, and is there anything I can do to help make it better? I don’t know that Die Hard 5 made it better. I’d like to believe it did. So that said, I set out with a friend to explore this area around productivity and we started making like a to-do list sort of task manager and evolved and really the thing that hooked me was flow states. And I’d had an experience of a flow state before I knew what the term was. I just had this weird like, wow, that was kind of amazing. And then of course, you know, you read the books by all the smart people, and you’re like, oh, they’re established, like conditions precedent to get into a flow state here, what it is, let me just set the table, because I know some people in your audience are like, “I know what flow states are,” and others are like, “I’ve heard of it, not really clear.” So let me just get everyone on equal footing, which is there’s a Hungarian American psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I spent some time learning how to say that. And he had a strong thesis that high performers seem to have very similar ways to get into the concentrated states where they do the work for which they’re famous, you know, that move the world or their lives forward. And he said, “I want to study that. I’d like to understand how they do it.” And you know, like Prometheus, he wanted to bring down fire from Mount Olympus to everyone to say, like, “here’s some tools you can use.” And different high performers use different terms. Like you have that great quote by Michael Jordan, where he talks about what “I’m in the zone is just me and the ball,” right? And he’s saying, like, “distractions fall away. There’s no time, there’s no clock, there’s no scoreboard. I just am focused on what happens between me and the ball, right?” And Picasso had another great quote along those lines and things like that. So flow states are this concentrated state that are often characterized by you don’t notice distractions, you are doing something meaningful, you lose track of time, and it’s a kind of magical unlock when you when you get there. My first experience, as I mentioned, I didn’t know what they were. I was on a plane, the Wi-Fi was out, so there were no incoming slacks or emails, you know, no WhatsApps to check. And I had a bunch of designs I wanted to make to illustrate to my team, uh, an idea for a feature. When I got to SF, the plane took off from Austin where I live landed about 15 minutes later, I was certain there was some emergency engine had fallen off or something. And I looked down in two hours and 40 minutes had gone by. I don’t know if the drink cart came by. I didn’t go to the bathroom. I didn’t talk to my seatmate. I had no concept of it. My designs were strangely done. Like I’d really created something where I was like, Oh, I could go to dinner when I get to SF instead of running to the hotel room to try and finish the figma designs, you know, that sort of thing. And that was a magical moment. So to bring it all back, to answer your question. What I’ve spent the past few years working on is sharing some of these ideas, these techniques around how to get into a flow state. And we developed a website, it’s called, you know, the Sukha company, the Succa.co. And it puts together a lot of the tools that help you get there. And this is not meant for, you know, casual work people who just want to spend their lives scrolling through instagram like it’s not for that it is for the people who raise their hand and go i have something to do i want to do it meaningfully i want to do it well and that is how we named this is. Laura my wife and i we met in yoga in new york i married the girl on the mat to my left right we have a daily yoga practice it’s a very happy part of our day like it’s a spiritual physical kind of like commingling and for our honeymoon i had two three years ago We went to Bali, which is a great place to go do yoga, chill with your new wife, hang out on the way there. I said to her, “listen, I know we have a working title for this thing I’m working on, but I really like to find a great brand. Like something that just stands out the way Amazon is not like called like bookstore, you know, Nike is not called like shoe seller, you know, running shoe place. something that stands out that’s not like flow state app.” And she said, “Great, I wish that for you.” So the first day there, while she was in the pool, I did three quick zooms with members. And I said, “Hey, can you just tell me what do you love about what we’re doing? Like, there’s flow music, there’s smart assistance, there’s timers, like Pomodoro and all this stuff. It’s like, what’s your favorite thing, right?” So I spoke to three people and sort of wrote down notes, what they said, “thank you.” The third guy, when we’re done our 10 minute chat, I was like, “Oh, hey, Adrian, thanks for your time.” The guy said, “You asked the wrong questions.” And I was like, “Okay, I’ll take the bait. What was the right question?” He said, “You should have asked me, ‘why do I pay you?’” And I said, “We charge like 30 cents a day. I didn’t think that was a big deal, but I will ask, okay, why did you pay me?” And he says, “I find now that I have two kinds of days. At three o’clock, I could be playing with my children. They’re two and four. Or at six o’clock, I can be down to myself and feel like ‘Where did the day go?’ I was busy, but I didn’t get the things that I need to do done. And the difference is, I found your website, I started using it. And the days I forget to use it, I have the 6 pm. So I’ll tell you, I pay you because my kids are not going to be two and four forever. And I want that time with them.” And I was like, “Thank you. Wow.” So I went to dinner with Laura. I was like, “I spoke to this gentleman today who’s more articulate about what I’m doing than I am. This is what he said.” She’s like, “That’s really good. You should hire him as a copywriter.” I was like, “Okay.” And we went to bed that night, and Laura looked at me. She said, “You know, in our yoga practice, we hear all these Sanskrit terms about like, you know, Dharma, what is your duty in life? Prana, your life force. That guy said to you, Sukha, the feeling when you were in your lane doing the thing you’re meant to do, you’re good at it. It feels good. You can do it with ease.” It is like Michael Jordan. When you watch him playing and you go, that is grace. That is command of what you do. That’s what he wants. He wants to feel in control of his life, so at three o’clock he can say, “I’ve done the important things and now I want to watch my children grow up.” That is what we aspire to.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Steven Puri, founder and CEO of The Sukha Company, about leading remote creative teams and productivity techniques from Hollywood. When we spoke earlier, you mentioned something you call the cold start problem that many remote workers face. What is that and how do you help people overcome it?
Steven Puri: Okay, so this is Steven talking about how he is personally fallible and broken. So let’s enjoy this part of the talk. I, you know, as many people do invent things out of pain and necessity. And I found that one of the things that was causing me stress in my life that led to that 6 p.m. Like that guy was talking about where I’m like, “I suck. Why didn’t I get this done? You know, what happened to the day sort of feel.” It really began at 9 a.m. And I would make some deal with myself of like, tomorrow at nine, I’m going to start on this thing, I have to write up, you know, the notes for the focus podcast or whatever. And at 915, I’d still be returning a couple emails or 9:30. I’d be, you know, checking the news just to know what’s going on or something. And I realized I was just procrastinating, which of course leads you to ask why? Well, Why I’m procrastinating turned out to be I felt overwhelmed. I would either be looking at my task list in Sucre and there’d be too many things to do, even though they all had to get done. It was just kind of paralyzing to look at them, or there’s something on there that was too big. I’m not going to write my book this morning before the 11am, you know, zoom meeting. And why start? It’s just too daunting. I’m not gonna make a dent in it. And one of the things we did is we just said, you know what, when you prioritize your task list, and there’s a smart assistant that can help you. we’re going to choose the top three things. And then when you press play, and you know, the music begins, we help you get into flow state, we’re going to hide the other 14 things gone, because you don’t need to see them. It’s paralyzing at times. And the funny thing is, it didn’t just work for me, but our members are 77% more likely to finish all three things when they can only see three than when they could see all you know, however many they have 15, 17, 40 items. And it also kind of restricts you from multitasking, which is not really a true thing. It’s just a waste of time, you know, any that jumping around and kind of context switching. So that for me was a really painful thing where I, I had enough days at the end of the day, I felt, why didn’t I get stuff done? Where did the day go? And I was like, “is it me? Am I just broken or bad at managing myself?” And the answer is kind of, I needed a tool to help.
Adrian Tennant: You mentioned music. Can you tell us a little bit about the music that you use in the platform?
Steven Puri: Yes, this is something where I’m going to say, you know, research leads us to believe and someone out there is going to be like, Well, you know, I or my best friend actually listens to like heavy metal or gangster rap or something to get in the zone. Right. So let me just acknowledge right now, there are outliers. For most people, the research shows 60 to 90 beats per minute, certain key signatures, ambient, non vocal, melodic music, helps people sort of lull their brains into that focus state. We offer, you know, three lo fi playlists that are like that we offer, you know, a bunch of up tempo, down tempo, some people listen to classical. So it’s a lot of variations. Probably one of my biggest learnings in doing this was we had launched like 1,000 hours of music because obviously I have a bunch of friends who are film composers with time on their hands. So this is an interesting challenge to be like, “Hey, man, do you think you’d write me a whole bunch of like 20 minute tracks that are kind of like this?” So that was super fun and got to work with some old friends doing that. And one person said to me, “you know what? I really miss,” they’re a blogger, they’re a writer. He said, “I really miss the experience of being in a coffee shop.” I was like, “we could try that.” And we found someone had recorded the Walla of a coffee shop in Vienna, Austria. So we threw it up, just this two hours of hearing espresso machines and plates clattering. And it became very popular. And then a sound engineer, whom I know back in the Marin, he was in Kathmandu. He’s in the Himalayas with his family. And he said, “I happen to bring some recording equipment. And one day it rained and it was this beautiful lush rain. It’s like, I just recorded a couple hours of it. I don’t really knowing what to do with it. And it occurred to me, maybe this would make another one of those like, soundscape naturescape kind of playlist as opposed to a music playlist. What do you think?” And I was like, “you know, it’s just a choice we can give. We’re not forcing anyone to listen.” So we called it “Himalayan dream rain.” And we threw up the playlist. It’s like our third most popular playlist. And it’s just a two hour loop of rain in the Himalayas. So yeah, the AURL part, A-U-R-L, super cool. Understand how it does help your brain just get that state where you’re like, wow, everything’s done and it’s not like midnight. This is cool.
Adrian Tennant: Well, we talked about music to help get into flow state. Community is also a core component of the Sukha platform. So even how do you balance the need for individuals to focus with that sort of social connection as well for remote workers?
Steven Puri: I did not know because when we launched this, it was a single-player game, you know, I work here. So I speak to Adrian, he’s using it. I speak to Tony, he’s using it. I speak to Jenny, she uses it, but you don’t have any sense of Tony or Jenny, right? It was just like playing Pac-Man alone at home. And I had this idea where I was like, “You know what, there is something about co-working. There’s something about, you know, social facilitation. There’s something about being part of a group of people trying to do something with their lives.” And I’m very grateful that the people in Sukha are very like cordial and friendly and supportive. Like it doesn’t feel like being on Twitter or some of these platforms where people just kind of like shout post at each other, you know? And I thought, “What if there was some sort of a group chat? What if there was some way for people to know about each other?” So I talked to a couple members as I like to do, and I was like, “Hey, I’m floating this idea.” Would it be, you know, as you just said, Adrian, a horrible distraction and like, I’ve destroyed the platform. Everyone’s gone. I’m so sorry. You know? And there was one member I spoke to, she said something to me very concise. She said, “Steven, I can go to the Nike store and buy a pair of running shoes. They’ll sell me a left shoe and right shoe, put them on my feet. I can go run – works great. But there are a hundred million people in the Nike Run Club for a reason. Because when you run together, you run further and you run faster. And the days that you’re in bed or just lack motivation, your friends come by and you’re like, ‘Okay, let’s do this.’ And it feels great to have people who lift you up. And the days you get to lift someone else up, that feels even better.” So we tried it. I announced, “Hey, we’re going to give this thing a shot. Please let me know. We can pull it out. If it’s a horrible idea, there’s going to be a group chat where you can post about what you’re working on. You can talk to other people. Give it a shot.” And it’s turned out to be one of my favorite parts of platform. I like, you know, in the morning when I wake up, just opening it up to see like, well, you know, who’s signed up and who’s posted, they finished something and post questions or, you know, who’s reporting a bug, in which case we better get on it, you know, things like that. Um, so yeah, I think community – it’s magical.
Adrian Tennant: Well, for marketing and agency leaders who are managing remote creative teams, what are some of the most important practices they should consider implementing to help teams stay productive and engaged?
Steven Puri: I’ll tell you, there are some practices that are free there, you don’t need anyone’s website or app, you don’t need to buy a book, you don’t need to do anything, right? If you’re talking about distributed teams, remote teams, they’re based in the belief that you have hired well, because I don’t think you can fix hiring with any sort of stick or carrot. So as a leader is incumbent upon you to articulate a vision, we are here to cure cancer, we’re here to, you know, create moon missions, and do whatever it is, we’re going to make the coolest ads for the best products, whatever that may be. And you’re there to express a culture, which is how do we treat each other? What are our values? Like, how do you treat your colleagues? How do you treat our competitors? How do you treat our customers? And if you do those two things well, then you attract people Well, you don’t really have to wonder I can’t see them all day long. What are they doing? You know, if I happen to know you are passionate about graphic design, you got out of RISD or whatever. And you like already had mocked up alternate versions of 17 brand logos and had ideas on how to improve, you know, Frito Lay and, you know, Hershey’s and really, like, this is you want to sing your song, I’m here to lead you into singing it in a bigger way and in a very, you know, revenue generating way, right? So foundationally, hiring is important because you can’t solve those problems. Now, let’s assume you have hired well, to talk about your question directly. something that research has proven is that to get people into that flow state, a state where you really do the meaningful work, you need to allow people blocks of time to do that. You can’t do that in between an hourly zoom, you know, it takes 15 to 23 minutes, it seems to get into a flow state. And when you get interrupted, even it’s like, a slack message asking for “Hey, where are those boards from the meeting last week?” and you can take them out and go back takes another 15 to 23 minutes to get back into that state. So if you as a leader want to create the conditions precedent where people can do great work, like the work where they walk into a staff meeting, and they say something, and everyone shuts up and goes that we should do what Adrian just said, like that changes the trajectory of our company do that, as opposed to, hey, I returned all my slacks my emails, there’s no gold medal for that. And the company’s not gonna move forward because you return all your emails, you know what I mean? So to do that kind of deep work, you as a leader have to say, “Hey, okay, I respect the fact it takes you an hour or two to do that. And Why don’t we look at our chronotypes, which is an important idea, like, as you become more sensitive to how you work, you start to recognize that at different times of day, you’re better at different things, you know, and you might like I do recognize that shallow work is” Cal Newport would say, “I’m great, like after lunch, like, that’s my time when I can just bang out, I have 20 emails to return and couples things, whatever, right. But if you want to ask me a case, Steven, like we were thinking of renaming the company. Could you, you know, work with me on that? Or we’re thinking of there’s a new client that needs this thing.” That to me is early morning work. It’ll be yoga at five or 6am. And then before I start talking to people, having that moment, and I’ll give an example from Hollywood, like Ron Bass, who’s a great screenwriter, he was an attorney turned screenwriter. He famously did not speak to his family in the morning. He would get up, go to his office. And he’s like, I’m not the dad who’s going to ask if you want pancakes or eggs, or did you do your homework? I’m not that guy. Because once I speak to you, I can’t hear my characters in my head. I can’t write dialogue in the morning. Once I’ve done that. And of course he’s earning a million, $2 million a script. And he wrote best friend’s wedding, you know, rain man, like, you know, tons of stuff. And his family respected that there’s like that stance process. Now in the afternoon, he said, “I can do story breaking, like development work where, you know, he sit around like, okay, Adrian’s got the bowl of destiny at the end of the second act and the dragons in the cave next door. And what we do, you know, like that sort of collaborative stuff.” He’s like, “I can do that all afternoon.” But as that applies to leaders in a space that is, you know, creative, but commercial, is should you want your designers, your copywriters, like people on the accounts who are doing that sort of like, “Oh, wow, I hadn’t thought of that.” You need to have an agreement on your team. I’ll tell you in our company from nine to 11 in the morning, I don’t slack anyone. There’s no “Hey, give me this real quick,” because I know that throws someone out of flow. And not every flow session is going to yield some ground-shattering idea. But if you believe in flow, if you believe in deep work, as cow would say, then you have to experience that repeatedly. And one of those days, you are going to have the idea where you go, I can’t wait to share this. And, you know, maybe you use the other thing technique, whatever, maybe in that two hours, you know, it’s at your desk, maybe you go for a walk through the park. But somewhere in there, you discover things saying, Oh, I should email run this. So those are some ideas.
Adrian Tennant: Excellent. Great conversation. Steven, if our listeners would like to learn more about The Sukha Company or try your platform, what’s the best way to do so?
Steven Puri: Oh, I’ll give you two answers. One is if there’s any reference I’ve made to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Cal Newport, near, you know, anything that someone wants to read more about or find out more about. My email address is very public. You don’t have to care about my company at all, or ask me about it. I’m happy to get your email and send you a blog post. Oh, you want to read about, you know, deep work. Here’s a great blog post about that. It is Steven at the Sukha dot co for company. So T-H-E S-U-K-H-A dot CO, (steven@thesukha.co) I will not write you back 18 paragraphs, I don’t have time to do that. But I will get back to you. And then should someone actually want to experiment with flow states, first thing to do, find a task you need to do something that’s meaningful to you. it’s going to take you half an hour, an hour, two hours, something like a real task. Go to our website, the sukha.co. You can sign up in 20 seconds, no credit card and you get seven days free all the features. Go in there. You can if your phone distracts you, you can set your phone distraction stuff. If websites distract you can set that up all happens the onboarding we ask you like what are your challenges, and we can figure it for you and then work for an hour and see if after an hour you look up you go up my god, How did I get all this done? Why do I feel good? And if you don’t let me know if there are things we improve the platform every day, every week, let me know.
Adrian Tennant: Perfect. Steven, thank you very much for being our guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Steven Puri: This is awesome. And thank you for everyone who listened.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Steven Puri, founder and CEO of The Sukha Company. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com, just select ‘Insights’ from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00: Introduction to Flow States
2:24: Guest Introduction: Steven Puri
3:01: Steven’s Journey into Film
6:41: First Job at an Advertising Agency
10:29: Film Industry’s Remote Work Evolution
12:29: Founding The Suka Company
15:28: Understanding Flow States
20:07: The Cold Start Problem
22:11: Music for Focus and Flow
24:41: Balancing Focus and Community
26:59: Best Practices for Remote Creative Teams
31:52: How to Try The Suka Platform
33:13: Conclusion and Thanks
