Doing Deep Work In A Distracted World

Q1: Software Engineer to Studio Executive

Stephen, I just was looking at the work that you’ve done and I wanted to really kick off with one curious question I had. How did a software engineer become a studio executor?

Steven Puri (00:38.415)

You know what? I appreciate that you’ve looked at deeply at my bio. Okay. So here’s the funny story. My father, engineer…Banaras Hindu university, right? Came to his masters in this country, started working at IBM. Met my mom who was a software engineer at IBM. So I am the son of a chip designer and a software engineer, right? Born in a company town, an IBM company town in New York called Poughkeepsie where they have a they had big installation, right? 

So I learned from a young age to be a software engineer. That’s what my mom taught me. Went to USC in Los Angeles, and I’m telling you, this was just the luck of the draw. I was in LA at the same time that film became digital.

ContraMinds Podcast (01:27.256)

Mm-hmm.

Steven Puri (01:28.891)

So I had a lot of friends who were in the cinema TV school. USC has a very strong cinema school. So I was there and just happened to be someone who understood how to speak to an engineer, but also was personal enough and creative enough to speak to a director or a writer or producer and say, you know, what are you looking for? And sort of be a go-between, a producer between those two. And that is how I got into film because film went digital and I understood digital.

Q2 Leaders in Tech Program Learnings

ContraMinds Podcast (01:57.838)

Brilliant. So you also went to Stanford and you did a, think, leaders in tech program. so what did you learn out of that program, which you continue to use even today?

Steven Puri (02:04.377)

I did the Leaders in Tech program there, which was awesome.

Steven Puri (02:16.367)

You know, I’ll tell you, one of the practices, one of the principles they have is this idea that you can sit without a topic and conversation organically grows out of this. So you do these particular kinds of exercises where there is no assigned agenda. And the things that arise out of that are sometimes surprising, sometimes very mundane, but sometimes they’re absolutely revelatory.

Probably my biggest takeaway was this. I realized that being an executive, I’m very goal-oriented. You know, conversations have a purpose, actions have a purpose, there’s a goal, all that stuff. And sometimes in these explorations where you didn’t have a goal, you discovered things you wouldn’t have if you were very goal-oriented. And… I’m not going to say that that’s something I apply every day, all day long, just having, you know, goalless conversations, but I do appreciate now when it is that kind of creative exploration of what is it that we’re thinking? What is it we’re talking about? As opposed to what do we have to get done? 

That’s probably my biggest takeaway from the leaders in tech, which, which I loved actually one of my very good friends from leaders leaders in tech was in town this week. We just had dinner. He’s a CTO of Contra, which actually this is very similar name.

They’re a freelance marketplace for engineers and designers and stuff like that.

ContraMinds Podcast (03:44.824)

Tell me little more about that. So it’s interesting that you are saying having an agenda-less conversation and something that touched you deeply. So what does it do to lead us?

Steven Puri (04:01.381)

I can say that I have been lucky to have leadership roles in film, which is where you are taking a very creative pursuit and making a business out of it, right? Like the joke goes, it’s not called show art, it’s called show business. And I’ve also run a couple of tech companies. I’ve had one exit. I’ve raised like $21 million of venture capital. I’ve had two failures. I learned more, probably more from the failures than the success. And in leading those teams, I recognize that when you are, you know, a CEO or a team leader, there’s a lot of what you do that is goal oriented. There are metrics assigned to that goal. It’s like, we have to get this kind of growth rate. We have to get this kind of profitability. The unit economics need to be that way. But that there are those times when you sit back and you say, you know what? Let’s just brainstorm what this could be. You know, what, what do we think are the problems in the world? What do we think are the movements in the world and those conversations, they go far and wide and they often don’t have a conclusion in one session. You don’t sit for 30 minutes and say, we’ve solved what direction the world is going, but it’s an ongoing conversation and it’s important to balance the two to say, hey, we have a goal, we have metrics, how are we gonna do that? As well as, hey, when we look to the horizon, when we look at the blue sky, what do we see?

ContraMinds Podcast (05:25.29)

Okay. And what does that do to people and how does it connect people to the objectives that you probably started off the conversation with and what kind of a bonding does it do with people?

Steven Puri (05:40.091)

Well, you touch upon an interesting thing, which is the last three companies that I’ve run have been remote and that affected my life a lot. was true. One of the things I experienced with the first one was, my goodness, there’s a global talent pool. You can’t be constrained to just the people who are like at half hour driving distance from your office. Oh, there’s an amazing designer, Montreal. Oh, there’s a great front engineer, you know, in India and that opened up the world of talent, you know, and then of course there are the mundane advantages of, you know, you don’t have to commute every day and lose it an hour two of your life just sitting in traffic and you know, things like that. You also save money on office space. 

But the interesting thing when you say that is that experience of going from a very, you know, in-person sort of experience to a remote experience… I looked around and during the pandemic, a number of other companies were forced to do that, right? A lot of the world was suddenly forced into how do you work when you’re not sitting next to each other in office? And that encouraged me to build tools as you know, you know, to help with that. But one of the deepest things that I found was it is that feeling of I belong to something. You know, there isn’t a feeling like I remember when I was, my very first job was at IBM. I was a little, you know, code monkey at IBM when I was tiny.

And I remember there was something exciting about going to the office and like seeing, you know, my mentor who is always, you know, correcting my code for me and teaching me new little tricks. And just that thing of like being there and seeing people, there is something to that. But there’s also the need for, you know, focus time for deep work. When I don’t want to be waving at people and having people drop by with coffee and you know, that, that sort of thing. And the team spirit, what I’ve noticed in my company and a lot of other companies now is that the team spirit, the cohesion, how it feels like a team is something that many people are seeking for. And there are definitely some CEOs, some very prominent ones that are like, you know what, we’re gonna get that back by everyone’s in the office every single day, you know, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and we’re going to do it that way. 

And there are others that have learned from the pandemic and said, maybe there’s a hybrid solution. You know, maybe we’re in the office part of the time, maybe it’s a few days a week, maybe it’s a few days a month, maybe we do retreats every month where we all get together and we do something that renews our bonds in person. And understanding how that applies for your organization, I think is super important. It is that whole spectrum. And I can talk more about that, but that was a long answer to your question.

Q3 Learnings from the Film Industry

ContraMinds Podcast (08:22.862)

Nice. So as a techie, when you moved into the film business, one of the things that the film business comes with is not everybody is employed. There’s no discipline to come and check in at 8 a.m. in the morning. So what are the learnings that you had out of that industry which you believe builds the flow state that you talk about.

Steven Puri (08:57.977)

You know what, I’m so glad you asked that question. That was perfectly teed up. Thank you for saying that because this is one of the real, you know they talk about when you’re a fish, you don’t really understand the concept of water because you’re like, it just is, right? You’re not like, I’m in water, I’m not in water because you’re always in water. One of the things that I learned when I got back into tech after my film career was… in tech, when the pandemic happened and people had to confront, we can’t sit next to each other. We might get each other sick, right? We’re gonna be working from home or working remotely. One of the things I noticed was in my film career, film already for decades has had the full spectrum of work from home, hybrid work, in-person work. And the way that happens in film is most films, and I did a couple of TV shows with mainly film, most films begin remote.

They are writers, creators, sitting alone in their apartments, their homes, or in coffee shops or something like that for days or months at a time working on something. And then once it gets, the project gets to a certain point, you start to have meetings and maybe there’s like a studio executive like myself interested. So maybe you have a meeting every week or two weeks where you sit, right? And it starts to become that rhythm. And then as the project gains momentum, you set up a production office and you probably go in a couple of days a week and suddenly there’s a production designer there designing, well, let me tell you what this looks like, you know, and you have a director and you have, you know, costumers, you know, what would these people wear? And you start to have that rhythm of like, well, it’s hybrid. Like I’m writing at home cause we’re still doing script notes, you know, we’re trying to get Swami to star, but he has notes. So I have to rewrite his role. Right. So you’re doing that as a writer. And then you’re also spending a couple of days in the office answering questions because people are talking about, know, what did you imagine here? The director wants to dig in with you and then you’re on set.

It is completely synchronous all day long, know, like RTO, here I am for several months, right? I mean, you couldn’t be more in the office than that. And then as you go into post-production, it goes back to, there’s an editor alone in a room with an editing setup and people come in and out of that thing until finally the movie’s kind of done. And then you’re just going to screenings and… that whole spectrum exists in film. And I was like, wow, there’s a great template for how things could work here that maybe not a lot of other tech CEOs had that experience being a senior executive at film studios or having been a producer in film. So that was really applicable to me to see what do you do at each stage of that remote to hybrid to in-person to hybrid to remote that keeps the team feeling energized and together and gives enough time for deep work.

Because let’s be honest, when you’re on set and it’s $125,000 a day to be on set, you’re not sitting in your trailer doing deep work for three hours. The time for that is really hard. It’s the early days when you’re sitting there going like, if you and I were writing a script together, that you and I would cloister somewhere and say, oh, what happens next? What do you think should happen next? 

And I’ll tell you, there are a number of writers I worked with that had very specific ways in which they did their deep work in places. Like for example, when we did Independence Day, Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, with whom I had started my first company when I was doing visual effects, they had this house down in Puerto Rico, started in Puerto Vallarta, where they loved to write. And that was like their special place. And they would go down there and it was really hard to reach them and they could do deep work, right? They would go write the entire movie there to the point where when they were going to write, I think it was Godzilla, that house that they would rent had been rented out to someone else. And Roland called his agent, his, his attorney and said, just buy the house, just buy the house. I need to go down there with Dean. I have to write this. I don’t care. Just get me that house. I need to keep the house and became, you know, his Puerto Vallarta house. 

Same thing with like Alex and Bob – 

Alex Kurtz and Bob Wurzee, amazing guys I worked with for four years. And you know, they did Transformers 1&2, Mission Impossible 3. Fringe – the TV show, Star Trek, you know all this stuff and they would go we had an office at Dreamworks. They would go across the street and have their assistant rent them a hotel room at the universal Hilton And they would go there and just not answer the phone just take the phone off the hook and sit there in this hotel room for several months and and write the next Transformers movie and that was their way of doing deep work just saying in this period of time it is complete it’s so remote we’re not even going to talk to anyone.

So I loved seeing that, seeing that. And I try to respect now more the creative process that I’ve seen how, you know, deep work works.

Q4 Film Industry Learnings to Corporate Office Ecosystems

ContraMinds Podcast (13:54.252)

Given that experience, what can the evolving office that you talk about learn from that industry? Because we are all increasingly working in a hybrid or a remote kind of a world. So what can you learn from that industry and start applying it in this new evolving office ecosystem?

Steven Puri (14:18.981)

Yes.

Steven Puri (14:28.781)

You know, this is exactly what I looked at as I developed my platform. I was thinking to myself, there are so many smart people who’ve written, you know, the books that everyone reads on these. Let’s go read all those books. know, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who wrote the book on Flow and Cal Newport and James Clear and go down the list. They’re like really smart people have written on this. 

If you read all those books, let us be super honest. They boil down to a handful of principles, right? And each person illustrates it with his own examples or her own examples. They have their own phraseology, but they come down to simple things that are true. Why? Because they’re true of humans.

And what I think is very interesting, what really inspired me to create something was, okay, those principles, how have I seen them work? And when we talk about film, right? I noticed that that is true. 

You can do the things everyone tells you, time box. I’m going to give myself 45 minutes to get to inbox zero, right? And the more you tell yourself 45 minutes, you magically get it done in 45 minutes. It’s weird, you know, it’s just that little thing. You don’t wander off, right?

Schedule time for deep work. You know what? Like my calendar, you can’t book time with me from nine to noon. Every day, nine to noon is my deep work where I actually do the thinking that is the more valuable thing in the day. And these principles, very true. So we encourage those, we help those and when you use the Sukha, you do that. 

But here’s the ingredient of community that I thought was kind of a new thing, which I hadn’t seen done so well, which is… The Nike Running Club was a good example for me, where Nike can sell you, Swami, a pair of shoes, right? You can lace up your shoes and go for a run, right? All on your own. Yet a hundred million people belong to the Nike Run Club. Why? Because when you are part of a group of people who are also high performers, you run faster, you run more regularly, you’re more accountable.

ContraMinds Podcast (16:12.92)

Yeah.

Steven Puri (16:39.387)

There is something about the energy of a group. Like I practice yoga, which you and I have talked about. It’s how I met my wife. She was in my yoga class. And I could practice yoga here at home, alone. But I go to a studio to practice because there’s something about being around the energy of a room of people who are all of a certain mindset, a certain energy, and they want to feel in their bodies a way, feel in their souls a certain way, and you’re in that room, and it is or more magical experience than me sitting with an iPad, watching a YouTube video of someone telling me, you know, to do down dog. Right. So that was something that, that I wanted to build. 

And that’s what we built into the Sukha is say, here, all the tools you need all in one, right. Helps you time box, block your calendar, block your distractions, turn off your phone, all that stuff. But more importantly, you can be part of a community. You can see people around the world also working. 

You can’t hear them. It’s not distracting that way.

But it’s almost like if you’re in a coffee shop and you look up and every now and you’re like, wow, this whole room is full of other writers writing the next great screenplay, you know? Or if you’re in study hall in college, I don’t know if that was something for you, where I used to go to the library to study, not because I would chat with everyone, but just every now and then you looked up you’re like, man, we’re all studying for finals. This is cool, we’re all in it together. 

And I think that feeling, we’re all in it together, is why the Nike Run Club has 100 million members. It’s why you go further more regularly when you’re with people who are also trying to do something great with their lives.

Q5 Sukha Company

ContraMinds Podcast (18:12.556)

Okay, so talk to me about the inspiration for the Sukha platform and you call it the coffee shop experience. So tell me a little bit about that.

Steven Puri (18:24.123)

Yes, we do call it the coffee shop.

Steven Puri (18:29.947)

I’ll tell you, when I decided that I wanted to be very focused on my life and get more done, and I realized, you know, I wanted to accomplish more things in less time and feel better. I told you, I read a bunch of books, cause I’m like, this is not a new problem. People have solved it. That was very informative reading the books. Looked at a lot of the apps out there. Cause there are apps that help you track your time. There are some great apps that play music for you. You know, Brain FM and Dell, like they’re a lot of options for this, but I didn’t find one that pulled together all of these things in one just said, you know what? Here’s one button. You don’t need to open your music app and do your website blocker and have a phone, you know, distraction apps. You don’t open WhatsApp or Tik TOK or whatever on your phone. Although TikTok you can’t get in India right now, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, Instagram or whatever. So there were all these different things. And I said, what if you had all of these with one button?

So when I go to start my day, click that button. My music starts. can choose, you we have over a thousand hours of different music, ambient, know, scientific best practices, 60 to 90 beats per minute, certain key signatures, no vocals, you know, like that. You can also listen to streams or surf or wind or rain or whatever you want. And you know, it puts your computer in focus mode, locks your phone, the whole thing so you can work. 

And then, adding to that was this sense of community we talked about, which is, the coffee shop, which I really thought the coffee shop was a great mental model to say, I’ve worked in coffee shops and there’s something kind of fun when you’re like around other people, not chatting, but just like we’re all doing something with our life, you know? And I’ll tell you, there’s this one coffee shop in West Hollywood that I loved when I was in film. It’s The Coffee Bean, the corner of Fairfax and Sunset Boulevard. And it’s right across from the director’s guild. And I would go there on weekends to read scripts because as an executive, people are always trying to get you by their projects, right? So you end up with a stack of scripts you have to read. And I would go there and it was a very popular coffee shop with writers.

And I love the fact that I would be there reading and I would look up and you would see the full spectrum of writers in that room on their Macbooks, you know, tapping away. And you would have, you know, in one corner, like the old weird guy who’s written like five studio movies and everyone’s like kind of afraid to talk to him. It’s like, oh my God, he’s here. You know, the guy who wrote Cape Fear and then you’d have sitting next to you two guys that just got off the bus from Iowa that are writing their first TV series. 

And it was fun to be in there because there was everyone trying to do something with their life. And that is really, that was the inspiration for me saying like, how can I make an all in one app that’s very affordable that takes all these principles?

ContraMinds Podcast (21:13.742)

Hmm.

Q6 Building Mastery & Excellence

ContraMinds Podcast (21:25.294)

Very nice, very brilliant inspiration and great analogy that you picked up from to build this platform. So one question that I had as you spoke, as you worked in the film industry, as this whole aspect of deep work, remote work, which you spoke about, what did you learn about mastery and excellence in the remote world versus a world where I come to an office where I am sitting with lots of people. So what did you learn out of these guys when they were really masters of their craft, right? So therefore, how did they build the excellence in this?

Steven Puri (22:14.059)

One word. This is what I’ve noticed. I’ve spoken to hundreds of our thousands of members of Sukha. That one word is discipline.

I’ll tell you here’s a funny thing.

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this or anyone listening has experienced this is sometimes when you’re in the office and you know, like the joke from the old movie about your boss comes by and is like, Swami, where’s the TPS report? And you’re like, I should do the TPS report. Right. And it’s given to you. This is what I’ve heard from a number of our members. said, as strange as it sounds, sometimes the hardest thing of my day is knowing where to start. look at my task list. And I’m like, oh, there’s 17 things on here. Which one do I start with? Oh, that one sounds too big. 

And sometimes there’s almost like a paralysis around that, which leads to procrastination, which leads to, oh, I should put that load of laundry in, or, you know, I didn’t wash the dishes from dinner last night, things like that. And you stall because sometimes it’s hard to get going. And that’s one of the things in the new version of Sukha that we’re working on is you have an assistant who looks at your task list and says, hey, you know what, this priority thing you’re working on yesterday. You’re almost done with that. Why don’t you finish that? Cause it’ll feel great to cross it off your list. 

So that the discipline thing in terms of like becoming a master, it applies from the first moment you sit down and say, let me get going. And then once you do that and you’re dedicated to it, many people have written, you know, the 10,000 hours of mastery and the many theories on this, but it starts with the first step. And that step is the hardest.

Q7 Is Discipline a Reality?

ContraMinds Podcast (23:53.42)

I always thought that the masters of the film industry, the fact that you worked so closely with them, there’s a real feeling that they just are not disciplined, right? They look for the moment and lots of time gets wasted. So is discipline a reality? Is it true?

Steven Puri (24:18.277)

I will tell you this, I saw this true both in tech now and in film. And it’s gonna sound a little crazy, but it’s my experience and I can give you a thousand examples of this. The most successful people that I know were not necessarily the most raw talented. They were the most tenacious. There were writers that I worked with back when I was in film that I see now are still making movies and doing the stuff. And they were maybe not the most talented ones that I knew, but they’re the ones who could take a hundred Nos and just keep writing the next screenplay and just trying to make the screenplay better, trying to make their TV series better. There was at South by Southwest this week, a writer director that I knew 10 years ago. He had his premiere. And I thought to myself, a friend who’s his agent was like, do you want to come to this premiere? We’re going to be in Austin. And I thought, wow, he really stuck with that through the hard years. He was just, he was so tenacious and he was not the most talented. He will tell you himself. He’s not the most talented writer. He’s not the most talented director, but he is tenacious. And I’ve seen the same thing in tech, you know, all the overnight success of like suddenly everyone’s driving of this or taking a that or ordering this SaaS product, whatever. 

You know – it was years of just like refining and failing, refining and failure and iterating. Most people give up, you know, they’re like in six months, Oh, this isn’t Instagram. didn’t go to a billion dollar acquisition with 14, you know, employees. It’s a failure. I’ll move on to the next thing. You know, I’m building the Amazon of India. Oh, well, you know, it didn’t work out this month. I’ll choose something else. Right. But man, the people who are just like, no, I’m going to keep trying to get it 1% better every day. That compounds. And those are ones that I’ve seen win. So the mastery, I know the writers and the directors that I worked with, the ones who making student movies, you look at their early films, they’re not always genius material, but they kept at it. They kept honing their craft because they were like, I’m just going to make another.

Q8 How Does Sukha Help Build Tenacity?

ContraMinds Podcast (26:31.636)

And how does that, I would say skill or that tenacity or the tenacious capability that you talk about, how do you make that come alive in the Sukha platform?

Steven Puri (26:46.363)

Well, I’ll tell you, Sukha is a tool. It is an assistant for you. It wants to give you the reward of feeling great. You know, the concept of Sukha, it’s just, it’s a happiness of self-fulfillment. I am executing the thing that I’m great at. I’m in my lane doing the thing I’m great at and it feels really good, right? So that hopefully becomes a reward. And I think it was Huberman who was talking recently about… the way our brains have changed because now we get dopamine simply by scrolling. Like you can lie on your back on the sofa and scroll and you get the reward of feeling good with no effort other than this, right? It’s terrible. So sometimes doing things that develop that dopamine reward requires some time. So with Sukha, we do a lot of gamification. We do a lot of things to make you feel like I’m making progress. This is my points for today. This is how well I block distractions and stay on task.

And we try and make it fun, but I’ll tell you, I’d be lying if I told you, Sukha is the end of the road. Sukha is the assistant, the tool to make you get there faster. But it is ultimately up to you to say, I want to do this. 

And I’ll tell you, this is one of the best things I ever heard from someone who was in Sukha, one of the members. I asked him one day, hey, listen, I want to understand why do you pay us? Because I work here and I’m inside the bubble, I don’t really see Sukha from the outside like you do. Can you tell me why do you pay us money? Minimal amount of a few dollars a month, right? And he said this. He said, at 3 p.m. I can be playing with my children. Or at 6 p.m. I can say where the hell did the day go? And the difference is, did I open Sukha in the morning? He said, that’s why I pay you, because I want to be playing with my children at three o’clock.

ContraMinds Podcast (28:42.082)

Lovely.

Steven Puri (28:42.371)

He has been with us for over a year.

Q9 What Lenny Loves About Sukha

ContraMinds Podcast (28:45.398)

I also saw that Lenny has given you a recommendation, right? So what was his take on Sukha and what did he find exciting about the platform?

Steven Puri (28:49.466)

Yep.

Steven Puri (28:57.271)

Lenny came in really early. There was an early version called Centered. There was this idea and Lenny really locked onto it because he understands, he may be technically a product manager, right? But he understands the world of distraction very well. And he has thought deeply about how do you be good at what you do? In his case, he’s a PM. My wife is a head of product for a bank here. It’s a different world when you are doing stories and epics and you know, when you’re sitting in coding or you’re sitting and writing a blog, but that I think was really his connection was saying like, this is a real problem in the world of how do we do great things if we are just distracted all the time.

Q10 Distraction

ContraMinds Podcast (29:40.27)

So I’m connecting the point that you said, which is to build tenacious capability, distraction, and ensuring that you’re not distracted is also a mindset that you need to build. And that’s very, very important. So what does distraction do to you getting worse or better? So what does it do in your experience?

Steven Puri (29:46.491)

Hmm. Yeah.

Steven Puri (30:04.655)

Well, I’ll tell you the research on this is that when you are distracted, you change what you’re thinking about. It can be either to something totally distract. I opened up YouTube for a minute, right? Or it can be, well, I decided I’m going go work on this other thing I need to do for a few minutes and come back to this first thing and, know, like multitask. Yeah. Yeah. Which I used to multitask a lot. And one of the things I learned, and I think, you know, Cal Newport talks about this. A lot of people talk about mono-tasking was that our brains really do not multitask. We’re not like a multi-threaded processor. We really are mono-taskers that context switch and say, okay, let me store where I was with this, reserve that in my mind, burn some mental brain energy, holding that in memory while I go to do this other thing, load the context for that, work on that, and then store that context and come back to the first thing, right? It actually burns a lot of time. 

And the research shows that when you do that, it takes you about 15 to 22 minutes to actually get back into a state of focus, a state of flow. You can’t just jump in between these things. And when I noticed that in my own life, that was one of my inspirations with Sukha to say like, what is everything we could do to encourage someone to say, I’m going to stay on this thing and then show them the reward of saying, wow, you finished this 30 % faster than your estimate because you just stayed on this. 

You didn’t jump around and then answer some emails and then, know, go check WhatsApp or whatever. You literally just did this. Doesn’t that feel great? It’s noon. You’re done. You know? And we really, I mean, for me, one of the things I really wanted to do is give people that sense at the end of the day of, it did something. I feel great as opposed to where did the day go? Oh man. Like I felt like I was busy all day, but I didn’t really cross anything off my to-do list. I’ve been there and it feels terrible.

Q11 Slack, Productivity and Sukha

ContraMinds Podcast (32:02.68)

So one of the questions that come up to me, Stephen, is that what

Steven Puri (32:07.865)

You are full of questions. This is great.

ContraMinds Podcast (32:11.096)

So, no, because I think you are making me think and ask a lot of questions. So clearly, is it not something like Slack? Because Slack does that to me. And I can be in my community, I keep talking to people. But does Slack really help you you know, move away from distraction? Does it build community? Does it make you more productive? I think you’ve got a view of productivity, which is very different from what the world thinks is productivity. So can you talk about that?

Steven Puri (32:47.003)

Yes. Okay. So I’m going to play this game with you. I’m going to make the argument like I’m Stuart Butterfield and I’m telling you why Slack is great for your organization. And I’m going to make the argument from the other side, the Cal Newport side of like, this is a massive waste of your time. Okay. So I hope this is fun. And I mean, this is not exactly what Stuart or Cal would say, but it’s generally the sense, right? Stuart would say, listen, before we came along, you know, cause he had that company, tiny spec that, you’re making games and Slack was their internal messaging tool, right? But eventually became the product and their games died. Right. 

So I think he would say, listen, you had emailed this clunky sort of like ping pong game back and forth with, you know, asynchronous kind of replies. it’s really a pain… and slow. We made that so frictionless…

 “Hey, so I mean, I’m just about to release this report. Do have that new number?”

“Yeah, it’s 16% for last month.”

“Great, thanks. I’ll put them on my board.”

 How beautiful I’ve made your work experience, right? And as we do that, we started to build community because you and Swami and Tony and you’re all sort of chatting about things and it builds a team spirit, right? More so than like saying an email distribution list of like, hey guys, who did something fun this weekend? Like, you know what mean? Like that. Okay, so I would respect that that is a true point of view. It’s more frictionless, faster responses, a little sense of fun and community, right? Now on the opposite point of view, I would say, listen, Slack is basically iChat dressed up in a business suit. And if this were a business tool, it would not give you animated emojis of Godzilla dancing and it wouldn’t allow you to pose GIFs of like, you know, tennis matches or ping pong matches.

And it is full of tools basically just to abuse you and waste your time and have long conversations that you would have an iChat, but now you can pretend you’re doing it and you know, work. So it’s a massive distraction and really you should live at the amount of time, just like, you know, Cal talks about like, this is the time to do email time block every morning. I do an hour of email. You don’t get a response from me the rest of the day. Similar thing. Just like Slack is just a slippery error, slippery slip, slippery error slope of how to get caught up in messaging that becomes waste of your time. How’s that for two points of view?

ContraMinds Podcast (35:19.342)

So, how have you plugged that in the Sukha platform in terms of the mental model, the concepts and so how have you ensured that this problem that you talk about is plugged in your product?

Steven Puri (35:42.639)

I’m gonna give you an answer you would not expect. So, something I learned in my film career, because I was very lucky to work with great writers. I worked with a number of the writers who get a million, two, three million dollars a script. They’re further along in their careers. They’ve established themselves as masters at this, right? And something that I noticed that they do was very applicable to me when I developed Sukha. And this is gonna sound crazy, but go with me for a moment and I’ll explain why it’s connected, okay?

Let’s talk about movies for a moment. Some of the biggest budget movies that have crazy explosions and CG creature thing, you know, all this stuff going on…if you boil them down to their heart, their soul, right? If you were to say, hey, Swami, I know you need $200 million to go make a Star Trek. I’m gonna give you $2 million. Can you tell the same story in a wway that’s compelling if you don’t get to have photon torpedoes and spaceships and Klingons? If you think about some of these movies and you do that, you do that exercise of what if I only had two million dollars? You find that most of these stories boil down to stories of family. So I’ll give you a couple examples. 

When we did the reboot of Star Trek, know, Star Trek had kind of died and then Alex and Bob said, I think we have an idea with JJ of how to bring this back. And if you watch that movie, which, you know, made a bunch of money, brought the entire franchise back, that movie is simply the story from the Bible of Kane and Abel.

Kirk and Spock are going to kill each other. They are two brothers who are going to kill each other. And if you watch that movie, they lose the movie until they have that fight on the bridge where they decide to get over their stupid animosity and team up and then they win the movie. So if you took all the photon torpedoes out, it’s a story you could tell with two brothers who are farmers. 

And you look at Mission Impossible 3, you look at a bunch of these other movies, they’re basically…Die Hard… these movies are basically the story of divorce. People understand that. There’s uniquely relatable about, my parents are having an issue. And many of us have divorced parents or our best friends are divorced or we’re divorced. And it is a model that you understand of like, mommy and daddy needs to get along, right? So when you look at True Lies, Mission Impossible 3, Die Hard but a lot many of those movies if you take out the bombs with the red LED counters and the planes and all that stuff, right you end up with it’s a story of divorce and it’s about a man and a woman who need to come together and They’ll win or they don’t and it’s a tragedy and they lose right? 

So I say this to you because that model I saw these great writers do where they would say I need to make sure that I know the $2 million version of this movie before I can write the $200 million version, right? 

Because it’s easy to add photon to a pre-… It’s easy to add Godzilla, but what is it before that, right? That is really when I was developing Sukha… I thought, what is the simple model of this? What is the thing that everyone understands that has already been established? I don’t need to be smart. I just need to say, how does this work in real life and how can I make that beautiful and online? And that is why I called it the coffee shop because I think most many people have the experience of going to a coffee shop and either quietly sitting or thinking or reading or pulling out their laptop and work on their laptop or work on their phone or do something. And it is not like you’re going to a networking event where you and I are chatting, exchanging business cards. It’s not that. It simply, it’s sometimes nice to be around the energy of other people. And you can maybe chat with them. Maybe you go to the register and you chat with the girl making the coffee or you chat with the guy in line behind you. So there’s a social element that’s okay. But… if you were to go up to every person at cafe, be like, how are you doing today? How are you doing? Everyone would be like, that guy’s gotta go. He doesn’t understand the decorum, the rules of being a coffee shop. Enough, you know? 

So that was my model is to say, as you’re working, just like if you were in the Nike Run Club, like you could talk to people, but it’s not a social hour. In Sukha, you can work, do your stuff on your break. You can see other people, is there group chat? You can go in there, see what other people are working on. Swami finished his dissertation, whatever. Post it. Hey, Swami, I don’t know you. I’m in Austin, Texas. You’re in India. You’re in Mumbai. What’s your dissertation on? Oh, it’s on this sort of like esoteric thing. Oh, that’s really, congratulations. I saw you just posted you finished it. 

That kind of feeling of like, oh man, you ran six miles today. I saw your Strava. That was awesome. It feels great when someone sees you for what you’re doing. And that’s what I wanted to give people the ability. 

I’ll tell you a true story. A couple months ago, there’s a guy in Sukha one the members, and he posted that he finished his dissertation. He was coding. I think by day, he’s an administrator at a school, right? But at night, he’s been working on his PhD in some sort of engineering. I don’t know exactly what kind of software engineering. And he posted in there, because now and then we finish something, you can post once a day, like, I finished this thing. And all these people around the world said, Roy, congratulations, we’ve been watching you for months in the coffee shop. You know, working away at this and like your discipline paid off. Today is the big day. And I run the platform. I know these people do not know him. They’re all around the world, but they felt a sense of like we’re in this together. So when he ran the Boston marathon, they may not be in Boston, but they’re all in the Nike Run Club. And they’re like, Roy, we saw you finish the marathon. That’s awesome, And that feels great. And that makes you run the next marathon.

ContraMinds Podcast (41:28.013)

Mmm.

ContraMinds Podcast (41:32.738)

Yeah.

ContraMinds Podcast (41:41.976)

That’s lovely.

Q12 Taking Sukha To Large Organizations

ContraMinds Podcast (41:46.808)

Fantastic. So one of the points that you made is this whole feeling of being as a community is really what you talk about. Generally what I find is the number of employees in companies, it’s so large. There’s a lot of indifference that starts to set in. Right? You become cynical, you’re not very motivated. So clearly, if I were to take the platform and want to it in an office environment, how would you apply that?

Steven Puri (42:35.707)

You know, this is actually what we do because we’ve been approached by a number of engineering managers. And I know that with small groups, 10 to 20 people, it seems to work where we set up a private group for them so they can have their own group chat. They can talk amongst themselves and feel like it’s not outsiders like listening on their company talk, but it gives them a way of like having, you know, productivity scores where they can look at each other and go like, Swami, had a great day today. You didn’t get distracted at all. I was distracted three times by, you know, WhatsApp or whatever. 

And it allows them to post what they’re working on and in a way that feels warm and friendly and builds a camaraderie more than, Hey, I finished my JIRA ticket and I posted to JIRA and I’m, you know, I’m going out now. There’s no emotion to that, but there is what it’s like, all that big bug that came down on the platform. I worked on it for four hours, I hit complete, it posted the group chat and everyone in the group chat was like, thank you for fixing that. We got so many complaints this morning from customers on that. 

That organizational sort of like tool to say within my team, this makes us feel connected and makes us feel proud to be here. That I’ve seen work. It may work for larger companies. We haven’t done that yet. It’s mainly been like a company in Netherlands, for example, is I think 22 people, which is the largest group that we’ve done.

Q13 Happiness, Fulfilment and Sukha

ContraMinds Podcast (44:02.318)

Interesting. So clearly, you know, you can use this within the company, you can use it individually if you’re remote, you get a feeling of being in a community and the concept of productivity and therefore feeling that I’m, you know, I’m a part of a larger group. So how do you define happiness and fulfillment if we start practicing something like this.

Steven Puri (44:33.891)

I will tell you this, and this is something that I learned as I, wouldn’t say I mastered yoga, but I would say my yoga practice feels to me something that is now part of me as opposed to this. If I play basketball, it’s, it’s comedy. Okay. There’s no part of me playing basketball. It makes me feel like, I was built to do this. I know the idea, but like with yoga, when I go into class, I fall into that flow state.I don’t know anything for that 60 or 90 minutes. Like there is no world around me. It just feels like this is me doing the thing that is so beautiful that I do well.

I want to offer that feeling to everyone for whatever they do, whether they are a writer, they’re writing, like there are a couple of people writing books. I see them on the little cameras writing books. There are bloggers. There are obviously a lot of coders, lot of engineers, developers, and there are a bunch of like UI, UX designers. People basically are at home, have a couple of hours of knowledge work to do, right? And that idea of of Sukha, that feeling of like, I’m doing the thing that I’m great at and it feels great. That I know comes from like you said actually doing things and having discipline.

And you can get a short-term dopamine hit by saying, I just scrolled around Instagram for an hour, but at the end of the hour, you feel bad about yourself. Like I wasted my time. I gave Mark Zuckerberg my eyeballs and my attention and an hour of my life that let’s be, you and I talked about this. The scarcest commodity is just time. We are all going to die. It is the one certainty. And when you give that hour of your life to Mark Zuckerberg, he’s happy to get it. And he sells it to advertisers. But you’d never get it back.

Q14 What is Success?

ContraMinds Podcast (46:33.208)

Brilliant. That’s a fantastic way to move into my rapid round, which is really the first question I have for you is, what does success mean to you?

Steven Puri (46:41.333)

Whoa, here we go, okay.

Steven Puri (46:51.275)

I’m going to have my first child this November.

And I’ll tell you a big part of how I decided to do this is at some point my child is gonna be like, this is what my dad does. And I wanted my son, we’re gonna have this November, and I’m hoping to have a girl in two years, Satya. I want them to feel proud about that. And I thought about, my daddy made Die Hard 9, or my daddy was on the Wolverine sequel. And it’s just.That’s not success. It may be a job that a lot of people are envious of, like, wow, you’re an Executive Vice President at the studio. But really, it’s the same as making soap. Here’s the Sears soap. It smells this way. It has this star in it.

But for me, success is someday my child is gonna go, you know my dad does? And it’s really cool.

Q15 Best Advice Steven Ever Got

ContraMinds Podcast (47:48.366)

very nice. What’s one piece of advice that you got which you really value even today?

Steven Puri (48:00.421)

I’ll tell you, this is gonna sound so simple, but I found it so true, which is in many democracies, we have a set schedule for voting, right? every two years in this country, we vote for this kind of office. Every four years, we vote for that. Every six years, we vote for this. In reality, we vote every day, 100 times a day for the world we want to live in. The way we treat the mailman affects how he is gonna treat the next person and you just all day long, were voting for how you want the world to be. 

It’s not every two years or four years or six years. It’s yes, we have, you know, presidents and prime ministers that come and go, but it is how do I treat, you know, the child whose baseball, you know, cracked my window. He didn’t mean to do that. If he does it every week, you know, we’re going to have a talk, but you know, by going to him being like, hey, you know what, this is what happened. You did this, this is the result. This is how we fix it. And you treat that in such a way where that affects how he’s gonna go forward and take risks in his life or her life. So that was it. It’s that we vote every day, hundreds of times a day for the world that we want.

Q16 Work Life Balance

ContraMinds Podcast (49:19.342)

Great. What does work-life balance mean to you?

Steven Puri (49:24.005)

You know, right now I I’m working a lot because I know as we get, as my wife gets more pregnant this year, there’ll be more and more, you know, visits to OBGYNs and you know, things like that. So right now I’m working a lot to get a lot of feedback from our members, trying to make this platform more beautiful every day, 1% more beautiful each day, because I know come November I’ll be, you know, not sleeping a lot. You know, so. I can’t give you a good answer on work-life balance right now because I am working a lot so that I can have life later in the year, a new little life.

Q17 Intensity and Work Life Balance 

ContraMinds Podcast (50:02.03)

When you think back and looked at some of the craftsmen that you worked with in movies, what does work intensity mean and what does work-life balance mean?

Steven Puri (50:08.891)

Yep.

Steven Puri (50:18.541)

Okay, I’ll tell you the the intensity in my mind is really goes back to those ideas of discipline and tenacity and that is the writers with whom I got to work where I was honored to work with them like I became smarter because I worked with them. They were tenacious about learning and you know reading and not just going to see other people’s movies, but getting the screenplay and reading it on the page, what did that look like on the page that it could become that? Or what did it look like on the page that we could get Swami to star in it?

 What does it, screenplay, look like that gets Brad Pitt to do the movie, you know? And the discipline of saying, I’m gonna sit down every morning for three hours and write. think Ron Bass, he has a practice where he says, in the morning, I write for several hours before I even talk to my wife. Because he said, once I start talking to my wife, my children, I hear their voices and I can’t hear my character’s voices anymore. So he said, when I wake up, I just go to my little work, you know, his work area, his office. And he said, that’s when I write. And then once I feel like I’ve gotten out my writing for the day, I can go and interact because now those voices have already spoken. And you know, with the work-life balance, I think everyone needs to strike it for themselves. 

Like I said, I acknowledge that this year, my work is heavily loaded in the first six, eight months. And then the back half of the year will be a lot of life, but that’s up to everyone else. But the thing I saw with the great writers and directors do is they’re tenacious. have a voracious, you know, sort of hunger for, for learning and they’re disciplined every day, every day, nine to noon. I sit here and I work quietly.

Q18 Avoiding Distraction

ContraMinds Podcast (52:10.158)

How do I stop being distracted?

Steven Puri (52:16.459)

I don’t know if you know, Nir Eyal who writes a lot about internal and external triggers and has written some brilliant stuff. And he and I have spoken a few times while he’s been in Singapore. And you, I know you say that question with a smile and you laugh as you, ask it because it is about mastering your internal triggers. You know, what are the things like we talked about? Sometimes you look at your task list and it looks so long. You don’t know where to begin.

So you go to do the laundry or you go to wash the dishes, right? Cause your internal triggers like, can’t this. And sometimes there’s the external trigger of, that notification on my phone from WhatsApp. I should see what they’ve said. Right? So I think part of the solution, and you know this part of the solution is you make a decision to, you know, lock your phone while you work or, know, do whatever. And the other part is, you know, tools and I make one tool, but there are other great tools out there like freedom and forest and stuff like that, you find the tool that works for you and assists you. You can’t do it solely by a tool, but it sure can help.

Q19 What does AI do to Distraction?

ContraMinds Podcast (53:26.84)

brilliant. What does AI do to this world of distraction?

Steven Puri (53:32.869)

What does AI do?

ContraMinds Podcast (53:34.316)

this world of distraction and focus.

Steven Puri (53:36.699)

You know what the sad part is?

AI, because it self-optimizes so quickly. You know, the distractions that we talk about, the other ones we were just laughing about the, my, know, my push notification on my phone just came up, right? Imagine how that gets better and better and better. Now, right now it’s kind of a joke. It’s like, my phone’s dinging, you know, like it’s done that for 10 years, right? 10, 12 years. What happens when it knows exactly the right moment? So it’s not digging where I’m not going to answer it. It’s learned me and it knows exactly the weak moment, you know what, before Steven goes to bed that’s the right time to show him shoes that he’s going to buy. And I get the push notification for shoes at the moment where I’m like, I’m tired, but I, you know? 

So it’s a dark answer, you know? And I hope AI, you know, it’s better mouse and a better mousetrap at the same time. But Swami, I can’t tell you, yeah, it’s going hard.

Q20 Advice to College Students

ContraMinds Podcast (54:38.392)

Great. Great. What would be your advice to an 18-year old in a university?

Steven Puri (54:45.371)

You know what? It would be two things. One thing is that, and this is my dad speaking. Okay. It is that..

… if you understand the first principles of the thing that you’re passionate about that will always serve you. So, you know, now with being a software engineer, developer, there’s a lot of vibe coding, right? There’s a lot of like, well, let me just die. Why don’t have an app clone Airbnb for me and it clones Airbnb for you. Right. You know, lovable V zero bolt and all these things. Right.

That is great in that it gives you lot of leverage to magnify your own efforts so you don’t have to go write the whole thing. But fundamentally, you should understand the framework by which that’s done. Maybe it helps magnify your efforts. You don’t need a team of 10 people to build something. Maybe you and your partner can do it, right? But that is one thing, which is whether it is philosophy, whether it is linguistics, whether it is coding, whatever that thing is, design.

Go back to the first principles and learn why these things are the way they are, because that will serve you down the road. Even if later you use the tools to magnify your effort, you will understand what they’re doing. You’re just saving time. Right. And the second thing I would say is as it regards the thing everyone’s talking about right now, which is understand the different generative AI tools that are available in your area, which for a lot of people, it’s LLMs, right?

Oh, this large language model helps me to write or code or write things, whatever, whether it is image generation, video generation. Like I’ll tell you, I was in LA a couple of weekends ago and saw a bunch of friends, some of whom are still in film. And it has absolutely reached that point where they’re like, most of these screenplay, you look at most of the Marvel movies, they could be written by a computer, you know, it’s not surprising. It’s like, here’s what Iron Man does.

Here’s his flaw. Here’s how the enemies always try to get him. Here’s what the Hulk does. Here’s his flaws. Dream up a character that does this thing that annoys them, is gonna destroy the world with some unique weapon and then…

It’s not going to be long. And the Writers Guild and, you know, is trying to hold off as long as they can saying, well, you know, it has to have a certain percentage of human input….know, is something copyrightable if it doesn’t have human input, that’s changing so rapidly where, you know, you need to understand how these tools work, whether it is generative text, image, video, whatever the thing is, or even like if you’re working on DNA or a protein synthesis or some sort of drug discovery.

Understand how it is iterating through those thousands of different molecules to say here might be the one that helps with this kind of brain plaque, you know. So this is my two first principles and understand how AI is going to affect your business. Those are two things I would say to 18 year olds

Q21 What Failure Taught Steven Puri

ContraMinds Podcast (57:48.782)

What did failure teach you?

Steven Puri (57:52.655)

You know what, number one, humility. I’ll be super honest. I sold my first company in my mid twenties. I thought I was brilliant. I thought I was way smarter than I am. Not that smart. I just work hard, right? But man, saw me like failing. can I tell you, when I left my job at Fox, which was a pretty well regarded, you know, prestigious job, and I said, okay, I see what’s happening at my studio. It’s all just sequels and stuff like that. And I don’t want to be the guy at 40 years old, 50 years old, making diehard nine. Right? So was like, I’m to go back into tech and build something. And a lot of my friends in film, they were all watching.

What’s Puri doing? How’s it going? Is this going to work? What’s he doing now? Has anyone spoken to him? You know, it was that kind of scrutiny and that fail. I raised $3 million of that, which I lost and I felt really bad. I like three quarters of a million of my own money in and two and a half plus of a -ish of other people’s money. I felt terrible losing their money, terrible at failing. And I was so embarrassed and so ashamed.

I moved to New York. I just had to get out of LA because everywhere I bumped into someone, they’re like, oh, how’s it going with your company? Oh, it went bankrupt. Thank you for asking. Yeah, I feel miserable. Okay. So I moved to New York and one of the lessons was humility. I was like, okay, this is what this feels like. And I tried as hard as I thought I could. Did not work. And another was, 

…and this was given to me by a friend of mine who actually he was a IIT guy who now runs a large business. 

Matter of fact he did all the stone work for the Indira Gandhi airport and the Mumbai airport and Bahrain and the causeway in Saudi Arabia. 

He’s done huge, done very well for himself. But he gave me this advice when I was going to close the company. He said, while it’s fresh in your mind, sit, take out a pad of paper, not your phone, not your computer. Take a pad of paper and a pencil. He said, on that pad, write what you learned. He said, It’s going to go away. You will forget in six months. You will completely forget in a year or two. Write the things you want to remember for next time. And I keep from both of my failed companies, I keep that paper and I look at every now and then as I proceed forward, like with the Sukha company and say, am I making these mistakes again? So that is what I learned from that failure.

CLOSING

ContraMinds Podcast (01:00:25.518)

Great. So fantastic conversation. Fantastic conversation. I must tell you that the nuggets that you shared were really, really, I would say, authentic. There was lot of honesty and integrity that I could see and spontaneity. That was something that was, that was something oozing out of the conversation that we had.

It was lovely and I really love your platform. That’s the reason why I thought this conversation made a lot of sense. I’m sure people who want to look at building mastery, wanting to build productivity and focus need these kinds of tools. And you’ve really thought through it from industries that are really diverse and adjacent.

Steven Puri (01:01:06.021)

Mm-hmm.

ContraMinds Podcast (01:01:19.284)

And that is really what I can see in the product. I wish you the very best and thanks for taking time to talk to me.

Steven Puri (01:01:25.147)

It is such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for having me on. And if I can help with anything in the future, you know I’m here.

ContraMinds Podcast (01:01:31.704)

Thanks.