From Hollywood to Freelancers: How Steven Puri’s Sukha App Helps You Focus and Get More Done

Steven Puri went from senior executive at two Hollywood studios — working on films like Independence Day, Braveheart, True Lies and Seven — to building Sukha, a flow-state app designed for freelancers and solopreneurs who work from home. In this episode, he explains why most productivity tools fail freelancers, how Sukha uses gentle nudges instead of locks to block distractions like doomscrolling, and why focus is a skill you can train. He also shares hard-won lessons from two failed startups, his take on hustle culture, the truth about AI and large language models, and the one habit he recommends every freelancer try this week: wake up knowing the single task that matters most.

Welcome back to the Freelance Insider Show!

In this episode of The Freelance Insider Show, I sit down with Steven Puri—former Hollywood executive turned founder of Sukha, a workflow productivity app built to help freelancers and solopreneurs. The Sukha app helps you focus and get into flow. Steven shares a treasure trove of information, so you’ll want to stay tuned right to the end!

Some of the topics of discussion include why most productivity tools fail freelancers, how Sukha helps you block distractions & reclaim your day and the truth about hustle culture.

Let’s get going!

From Hollywood to Freelancers: How Steven Puri’s Sukha App Helps You Focus

Watch the Episode

Listen to the Episode

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why most productivity tools fail freelancers: They manage tasks or time, but they don’t address the distractions of working from home — the laundry, the kitchen, the kids, the dog and the phone — or help you reach a flow state.
• How Sukha blocks distractions with nudges: A QR code locks your phone, a smart assistant asks whether you really need it, and a browser extension gently prompts you when you drift to a distracting website.
• How to structure your day for deep work: Learn your chronotype, protect your best hours for focused work, and stop expecting deep work in 15–30 minute gaps between meetings — it takes 15 to 23 minutes just to drop into flow.
• The truth about hustle culture and busyness: Hustle for your own goals, not your team’s; busyness is not productivity — focus on the 20% of the work that produces 80% of the results.
• One habit to try this week: Wake up each morning knowing the one task that matters most, and use the Eisenhower matrix to delegate or delay everything that gets in its way.

From Hollywood to Freelancers: How Steven Puri’s Sukha App Helps You Focus Episode Highlights:

🎧Enjoyed This Episode? Keep the Momentum Going!

If you found this episode helpful, there’s plenty where that came from.👉Check out another episode here and keep building your freelance journey one step at a time.

Full Interview Transcript

Welcome and Introducing Steven Puri

Al Calder: Hey everyone, welcome back to the Freelance Insider Show. Today I got a really cool guest for you, Steven Puri. He’s a former Hollywood executive, so he’s got plenty of behind-the-scenes stories, but now he’s shaking things up in the productivity world with his focus app, Sukha. Yes, there are a lot of productivity apps out there, but Steven’s has something different. It’s a great tool for freelancers like us that want to take their business to the next level. Today we’re going to be talking business, creativity, and maybe a little Hollywood gossip. So, grab your coffee and let’s get into my chat with Steven Puri.

Al Calder: Welcome to the Freelance Insider podcast, the podcast where we take a close look under the hood of the freelance world. I’m your host, Al Calder, a freelance writer and audiobook narrator. I’m here to help you with your freelance journey. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to ramp up your freelance game, you’re in the right place.

Steven’s Story in Film and Tech

Al Calder: All right. First off, I have a confession to make. This isn’t the first time that we’ve done this interview. The first time we did it, it didn’t save. So, I just want to thank Steven for taking the time to do this again. I appreciate it. I want to believe it was so good, it was beyond the ability to capture in digital. So, let’s start off with the basic question. What’s your story? Tell us a bit about yourself.

Steven Puri: As it relates to the world of freelancing, the thing that’s probably most germane is I have seen really great performers in both the world of film, where I was a senior executive at two studios, and in tech, where I’ve raised over $20 million of venture, run three companies, had one successful exit, two failures, and a lot of those tips and techniques that I have seen I share now. I built a platform around it. I speak often about how to use those in your life and really find a way to healthy productivity. You know, accomplish the things you need to accomplish to move your life forward, but also don’t get burned out. So, that’s why we’re here. Let’s hopefully have some helpful, actionable tips.

From Hollywood to Productivity Apps

Al Calder: So, what led you from the entertainment industry into a productivity app? How did you make that leap?

Steven Puri: You know, I started out as an engineer. Both my parents were engineers at IBM. My mom was a software engineer. Dad was a hardware engineer. So, you know, like your mom’s a great ice skater, you probably learned to ice skate when you’re little. I learned to code. So, when I went off to college, I was making money as a Watson scholar. I was working as a junior software engineer at IBM.

Steven Puri: So I fell into film because film became digital and I started producing digital effects for movies, like using the computer to create film images, and then that led to, well, actually working on all of the film, helping to develop and package films. At a certain point I was a vice president at 20th Century Fox. All of my movies that were moving forward were sequels — you know, studio franchises. And I was like, is this my life? Which, on one hand, is I’m grateful that I had a job and, you know, could feed myself and all that. On the other hand, when you’re just like every movie you’re working on has a five or six behind it, you’re like, is this a great use of time? And so I thought, what else do I know how to do? The only other thing is engineering, so why not go back into the startup world and find problems that are meaningful to me, see if I can solve them, and, you know, sometimes you succeed, sometimes you fail.

Steven Puri: Happily, what I’m doing right now seems to be catching on, which is a lot of people are distracted, dealing with procrastination, overwhelm, and, you know, it’s helpful to have some tools that help you block that out, hear beautiful music, and get into a flow state.

Hollywood Films and Studio Stories

Al Calder: So, before we go into it too much further, what are some of those movies that you were involved in? I mean, people are going to be curious, of course, right?

Steven Puri: Oh, sure. When I got into digital effects, the first movie I think I worked on was Last Action Hero or Demolition Man or something like that. And then that led to some better films, where I produced the titles and the effects for David Fincher’s Seven. Jim Cameron’s True Lies, Carlito’s Way with Brian De Palma. Did Braveheart and Immortal Beloved with Mel Gibson, and, I don’t know, a bunch of others. Worked on some Woody Allen stuff with Sweetland Films, Jim Jarmusch with Dead Man with Johnny Depp, and then I went on production to do Independence Day with Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, and, you know, we won the Academy Award for the visual effects on that movie, and, you know, it takes a village to make a movie that size. It was amazing for all of us.

Steven Puri: And then from there I started a company with Roland and Dean. That was my first company, was to do computer graphics. I was about 23, 24 at the time, and we raised a bunch of money, which is helpful when, you know, the last movie you worked on won some Academy Awards, and then got into, you know, being a studio executive. And that was more the era when I was working at DreamWorks as executive vice president of DreamWorks for Curts Manors, that was Transformers one and two, Star Trek 11. In fact, I die in Star Trek 11, if you ever watch that movie. Spock calls to Bones during the siege of the attack, and he needs to talk to the chief medical officer, Dr. Puri. And Bones is like, ‘Dr. Puri died on deck six.’ So Spock is like, ‘Well, you’re chief medical officer now, Bones.’ You know, and, uh, you know, deck six is the Leo deck, so it’s not a very noble death. I was probably playing shuffleboard.

Al Calder: One of those guys wearing the red uniforms, a red shirt. Yeah, a red shirt. I know. Didn’t get beamed down to the planet.

Steven Puri: Transformers, Fringe, Y50O, you know, that sort of era. So, a bunch of films, they’re all huge collaborative ventures. I have one small role to play with a thousand other people, but you were all pulling to get hopefully something good made. I think some of them, Star Trek 11 was actually a good film. I think Transformers one started out really well and then sort of becomes a little bit just robots fighting, right? And, you know, there are some of them that are kind of cool. So, kind of fun.

How Sukha Serves Freelancers Differently

Al Calder: So, how does Sukha serve solopreneurs and freelancers differently than traditional productivity apps?

Steven Puri: I’ll tell you, I have run now a couple companies that are distributed teams. So, all the upside is true. I found an amazing designer in Dubai, get to work with her, an engineer that, you know, full stack guy in Montreal. I get to work with him. And the ability to be flexible in terms of how you source talent, how you organize your day, you know, is amazing.

Steven Puri: But there are definitely challenges when you’re working freelance and you’re working from home often, you know, or working digitally nomadically, right? And what I wanted to address is how can people find, you know, that zone, that flow state, when they are in those really distracted environments. Like when you’re in the office, there are a certain number of distractions. There’s the weird guy at the next desk next to you, you know, there’s the water cooler chat, there’s that sort of stuff. But at home it’s like I could be doing the laundry, I could go to the kitchen, I could, you know, my kids are here, the dog’s here, you know, all sorts of stuff, and wanted to look at those and say, ‘Okay. How do we handle that?’ Like phones distract me. Do they distract you?

Al Calder: Oh, 100%. I mean, it’s the scrolling through the doom scrolling, right? It’s right. Boom. It takes away so much of our productivity. You’re just going to do it for a minute. It’s never a minute. It’s 10 minutes. It’s 30 minutes. It sucks you in.

Steven Puri: So, in Sukha, which is a flow state app, the goal is to get you into flow state. You need to spend 30–60 minutes in there to drop in and be in the zone, as Michael Jordan would say. You can, at the start of your session, there’s a QR code. You can lock your phone. You just pull out your phone, shoot it, put your phone down, and if you pick up your phone while you’re working, which is my number one distraction, the smart assistant talks to me and says, ‘Hey, Steven, do you really need to be on your phone?’ And it just gives me that moment of who do I want to be? Do I want to be the guy who’s done earlier in the day, or do I want to be the grumpy guy who’s at six o’clock complaining about how did the day go by, and I’ll finish stuff up after dinner, you know, like all those horrible things.

Al Calder: That sober second thought to sit back and go, ‘Oh, I should keep.’

Steven Puri: Yeah, exactly. So really geared it towards what are the distractions at home and how do I, you know, create something that will help all of us, you know, block those out, because we can finish our work, you know, in a more mindful, quicker way. Why not?

Focus Can Be Trained

Al Calder: So what do you say to those people who say, ‘Well, that’s great, there’s an app, but I’m just not very good at this focus thing.’ Do you think focus is a skill that can be trained, that you can learn over time?

Steven Puri: You know what it is, is you can have the most amazing, like, pots and pans, and if you don’t actually want to cook well, if you’re not interested, you just want to microwave frozen dinners, I mean, the pots and pans are not going to help you, right? You know, so I do have a very strong thesis that all of us have something great inside us, and the question of this lifetime is are you going to get it out or not? Right?

Steven Puri: And there are enough trillion-dollar companies whose business model is very plainly steal your life. Period. Full stop. They’re pulling on that tug-of-war for you to sit on the sofa and be the guy or the girl at 80 years old that’s scrolling away. ‘I could have been somebody. I could have written a book. I could have started a company. Oh, I had that idea. I could have done that.’ And you don’t want to be that person. And your friends don’t want to be around that person, right? So, it’s a matter of finding that willpower.

Steven Puri: Yeah. We’ll help you, but you’ve got to find it yourself. Hopefully, you have that moment of just going, ‘You know what? I do not want to die with the great thing inside me,’ right? And then that starts your journey.

Nudges, Not Locks

Al Calder: So, one of the things, listening to previous podcasts you’ve been on, and that you talk about nudges in your platform. Can you explain what they are and why they matter for solopreneurs?

Steven Puri: There’s a wide spectrum of how do you help someone help themself, right? And there is the dictatorial: ‘I have locked your browser, you can’t open Facebook or YouTube or ESPN or Amazon or whatever,’ right? And then there’s the more gentle, which I like to call the nudge, which is, you know what, when you install the Chrome extension, it will watch your browser, and when you open up something that you say is distracting — like you can customize, like these are the websites that distract me, right? You open that up, you get a little popup just goes, ‘Hey, you know what, Al, seems like you’re being distracted. Do you want to get back to work?’ And you can say, ‘Yep, close this. Get back to work. Thank you for reminding me who I want to be.’ Or you can say, ‘No, you know what? I really want to waste my time on ESPN or NFL.com or Etsy or whatever.’ And it’s just a nudge to say, ‘Stop for a second. Just going to elbow you like a buddy.’ Be like, ‘Hey, man. You want to do this or no? It’s up to you.’

Structuring Your Day for Deep Work

Al Calder: Nice. So, how do you personally structure your workday for deep work and creativity?

Steven Puri: Okay. Really, really good question. I’m glad you asked that. And it ties into a concept called chronotype. And chronotype — what’s implied, what’s sort of packed into that word — is that different times of day, you’re better at different things, right? So, I’ll give you a famous example in film, which is Ron Bass, who’s a screenwriter, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Rain Man, tons of stuff, like million-dollar screenwriter, right? He famously would not talk to his family in the morning. ‘I’m not the dad who’s gonna say, “Hey, do you want pancakes? Uh, you know, who needs a ride at school?” Nah.’ He said, ‘When I talk to you after that time, I can’t hear my characters in my head. So, I have to write that dialogue before I talk to someone.’ And his family understood that. They’re like, ‘Dad writes million-dollar scripts. Like, we should afford him this ability to write the dialogue, right?’ So, he blocked it out. He said, ‘I’m going to get up in the morning, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00 a.m., whatever.’ He got up early. And from that time until, you know, 8 or 9:00 a.m., you’re just not going to see me. In the afternoon, he could do story breaking, which is more like development work, like batting ideas around, and collaborating, collaborating on, uh, you know, story, right?

Steven Puri: And it’s that knowledge of, like, your own biorhythms. So, you asked me about me. I answered with a story about Ron Bass. I also recognize that I’m really good. When I get up at 5, I do some sort of exercise, yoga or go to the gym, right? An hour of sort of like breathing, sweating, moving, and then I have two or three really lucid hours where I want to work alone. I want to do the things that move my career forward or are meaningful.

Al Calder: Right. Right.

Steven Puri: With my team, we usually block some time in the morning for, hey, let’s not bug each other. And we try not to, like, massively Slack each other with stuff, because it pulls you out of flow. When you’re in a flow state, when you’re in the zone, it takes between 15 to 23 minutes to get in, to sort of drop in, listen to the music, like get in the vibe. And then if you get interrupted, ‘Hey, Allan, can you send me that report from yesterday?’ ‘Sure, Steven.’ It takes you another 15 to 23 to get back.

Al Calder: Right. Right.

Steven Puri: So we structure our days so that we’re not expecting to be in flow in little 15–30-minute chunks, like, oh, we’re going to do Zoom meetings every hour or two and expect you to do deep work in between. Doesn’t happen. At best knock out some emails, return some Slacks, do some housekeeping, right? So that’s kind of how I structure myself, and then more collaborative stuff like, you know, Zooms in the afternoon.

Al Calder: Nice. So, finding what works — it’s different for everybody, obviously — but what works for you, and getting a structure there.

Steven Puri: Exactly right.

Hustle Culture and Working Smart

Al Calder: Okay. What’s your opinion on hustle culture? Like, do you think freelancers should push harder into this whole idea, or should they kind of sit back and try to stay out of the fray a little bit?

Steven Puri: There are a couple answers to that, because there’s hustle for a larger team where you are a piece of it, right? And then your hustle. Now, I’ll give you an example in Sukha, our focus platform. I noticed a guy the past year or two that works at night. Usually see him online, you know, in the evening working, sometimes on weekends.

Steven Puri: One point this spring, he posted in the group chat, because you can post once a day something you worked on. You know, people know like, oh, you know, Allan finished his website rebuild in two hours, you know, right? ‘Hey, Allan, share your URL.’ This guy posted he finished his dissertation. People are like, ‘Hey, man, what’s that up?’ He goes, ‘Well, I’m an assistant vice principal at a high school in Missouri, but what I’m passionate about is I’m working on my PhD in engineering. So nights and weekends, my side hustle is I got to focus on this, and I can’t do it five hours a night.’ Like, I have maybe 90 minutes of focus in my brain at night when I get home from school. And I use Sukha to sort of block everything out and use that. Well, now that’s a really important hustle for him, because I’ll tell you this, when he posted that, people were like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ And he was like, ‘Give me two weeks.’ I think it was two weeks, because I still have to defend it. Like, I’m not a doctor yet. Right? Two weeks later, the people in the Slack were like over the weekend going, ‘Hey, man, I heard you’re doing this on Monday. You got this one. Go, Roy.’ And on Monday, he didn’t post anything. Tuesday morning, he came into the group chat. He said, ‘You may now call me Dr. King,’ which was amazing, right? And people were just like super happy.

Steven Puri: So that I give you as an example of, like, yeah, man, sometimes when you’re doing your side hustle, yeah, it is nights and weekends, and it’s figuring that out because you have your eye on the prize, right? You may be working in a high school during the day or whatever you do. There’s something else. Now, if it’s hustling for your team or you’re one part of 15 people, 500 people, whatever, right? There may be a different commitment to that. You may say, ‘Hey, I want to make a meaningful contribution. I want to hold up my team. I want to contribute, but I’m not going to burn myself out working all day, all night, through the night.’ Right?

Steven Puri: If you’re an AI engineer working at Meta and you’re getting $100 million a year, maybe that changes. Maybe you’re like, ‘You know what, I’ll do this for two years. Pay me, mofo, right?’ And then I’m retiring right at 20. So, uh, I don’t think, to answer your question, I don’t think hustle culture in and of itself is like, ‘Yeah, man, you got to work all night and all day to be real.’ I think you need to work very smart on what moves my career forward. So purpose me working at night.

Al Calder: Makes sense. Makes sense.

Busyness Is Not Productivity

Al Calder: So what role do you think mindfulness or wellness plays in doing great work, like turning that solo project into something that’s next level?

Steven Puri: Here’s the thing. There’s so many ways to be busy, and I really think people conflate busyness with productivity. And productivity is finding the things that, like, you know, like the Pareto principle, where it’s like these 20% of the things produce 80% of the results, right? Productivity is going, ‘I’m going to mindfully go, what’s on my to-do list? What moves my life forward, or this project, or this team, this company forward? Let’s do those.’ Busyness is, ‘Man, I was cranking stuff out all day.’ It’s like, there is no gold medal for returning emails, slacking everybody back, right? It may be polite, but if you go into the staff and you’re like, ‘Uh, I finished those designs, I want to show everyone.’ People are like, ‘Oh, my god, like we should do what Allan just showed us. Like, that changes the trajectory of our product.’ That’s what you want to be doing.

Al Calder: So, changer.

Steven Puri: Yeah. It’s that kind of work we have to isolate, like what changes things here, not how do I just, like, get through with busyness. And when you do that, then it becomes more clear. You know, some eggs will break. There’ll be some emails. It’s like, ‘Hey, man, I’m really sorry to get back to you for 4 days, but I launched this thing that was really important for my company, you know. Right? So I’m not going to be super responsive on, you know, maybe when I retire at 35 and I’m a billionaire, uh, I’ll write you back. I’ll be hanging out on the beach going like, ‘Oh, I wonder who wrote me today.’ You know? But right now, just respect that. I’m trying to do something with my life.

Al Calder: Nice. Makes sense. Yeah.

Be Intentional Every Morning

Al Calder: So, on the flip side of that, if we’ve got listeners that are listening today, they’re feeling kind of burnt out right now. What do you see as one practical shift that they could make today that could turn things around for them?

Steven Puri: Straight up. First thing and only thing that I bring up is be intentional. If your intention is, ‘Hey, man, I just want to live an easy life. I want to scroll. I want to double tap.’ Admit that to yourself. Find the appropriate job. Find happiness elsewhere. Maybe your happiness is playing with your kids or being part of the kickball league at your, you know, local field, whatever it is, right? But if your intention is like I want to leave my mark on the world, or I want to retire at 35, or I want to, like, then go like every morning be intentional. Go, ‘What should I do right now that’s going to get me closer to that?’ Everything falls into place once you have intention. If you don’t have intention, no tool, as you said early on, no tool is going to give you the intention, right? No tool is going to make you feel disciplined. So if you’re all over the place, yeah, if you’re sure you want it, man, go for it, you know, right?

What Makes Sukha Different

Al Calder: You’ve launched a startup in the productivity space, where competition is really fierce. What helped you stand out? What do you think makes Sukha different?

Steven Puri: We are a straight-up flow state app. There are a ton of to-do lists. Oh, you want to task manage? There are awesome task managers. We integrate with them. You can pull your tasks in from them, right? So great task managers. Oh, you want a Pomodoro timer? There’s some great Pomodoro timers. Many of them are just free. You know, kids in college build them and post them to the app store. You know, you can go and find a lot of these tools, and they’re out there. But with Sukha, we really said, ‘Hey, man, if you study, like, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book, you know, where he talks about flow, like the guy who named this thing, he’s a Hungarian-American psychologist who said high performers get in this concentrated state. They seem to all talk about it in similar ways. There’s something to it.’

Steven Puri: And then, like Prometheus, he wanted to go up and get fire, bring it down to the rest of us. He wrote that book after he’d studied, you know, athletes and artists and inventors. He was like, ‘Here’s the deal. I’m going to name this thing flow. My book is going to be called Flow, because I think the best metaphor from what I found is you can paddle and move yourself forward, but if you align your boat with the river, the river carries you. It magnifies your effort.’

Steven Puri: So, like, that kind of technique, when you talk about hustle culture. Yeah, man. I’m out for hustling and working hard and doing that. But do it smart. Like, if you’re going to paddle, go three miles because you’re paddling intelligently with the river. You’re blocking out distractions. You’re not letting Mark Zuckerberg steal your life and sell it to advertisers. You know, yeah, Mark’s straight-up business model is, ‘Hey, man, can I take your life? I’m gonna sell it to these guys. I’ll keep the money, and I’m gonna give you cat videos. Cool. Or I’ll give you, like, some dancing videos. Is that cool? Or, like, these guys making fake AI. Is that cool? I just want your life. I’ll give you some little videos in return. Like, is that really what your life is worth?’

Al Calder: Those AI videos are crazy these days.

Steven Puri: Eh, I’m just saying, like, it is the fastest way to wake up that grumpy old guy or old girl. ‘I could have been somebody.’ Do you want that? Do you want to be the one that people are like, ‘Don’t hang out with him.’ He’s always grumpy about, like, ‘I could have written a book. I could have started a company.’ You know, I had that idea, you know, do the great thing you’re capable of. Like, change the world. Have people go like, ‘That’s amazing. How’d you do that?’ Well, you know what? I focused. And at least if you tried and failed, like, you feel — I think you feel better about yourself, right? You gave it that shot.

Al Calder: Yeah. You’re not sitting on that couch wondering, right?

Steven Puri: Totally with you. Like, yeah, I had one successful exit, and then when I got back into tech, I had two companies that failed. I was depressed when those failed. I was like, ‘Man, what did I do wrong?’ And I’ll tell you, I learned a lot from them. It made me — it’s true, all the clichés — but it made me really stop and think, like, okay, what did I learn? And that’s probably why Sukha is going so well, because I reminded myself you have to listen. Like, I talk to our members in the group chat every day. What can we do better? What would you like more of? What would you like less of? And that’s a commitment to say, like, how can we create the most beautiful place to work together? That’s what we do.

Learning From Startup Failure

Al Calder: Nice. Yeah. I think it’s one of the biggest stumbling blocks for a lot of early freelancers, right? They have one failure, it sets them back, and they’re like, ‘I’m just not cut out for this.’ Well, you know what? Everybody fails. Just pick yourself up.

Steven Puri: Right. Exactly. And focus on what is the thing you want to do? Like, if you’re a leader, and eventually, you know, your startup, your side hustle is going to become a company, and you’re going to have people who work there with you, you have to do two things. You have to articulate a vision. Why are we here? We’re here to make cold fusion available to the world. We’re here to cure cancer, right? Whatever it is, like, articulate the mission. And you need to articulate the values, the culture, like, how do we treat each other? How do we treat our customers? How do we treat our competitors? And if you do those two things well, if you articulate this is why we’re here and this is how we operate, you will attract the right people to your company. I’ve seen hiring. I have made mistakes in hiring, and I’ve seen how hiring mistakes are really hard to unwind, you know. So, sorry, you’re about to say something.

Al Calder: Yeah. So, you talked about that you’ve had these fail — like, you had a fail. You had a startup that failed.

Steven Puri: Two. I had two that failed.

Al Calder: What got you back up? Like, what was your mindset once that happened? Like, that you got yourself back up and just kept doing it.

Steven Puri: I’ll tell you, when I left Fox, I went to do, uh, this startup. I raised about $3.1 million for that, right? Had a picture of what it was, painted it for the investors. ‘This is where we’re sailing,’ right? Did not get there. Got to about 60,000 monthly actives. We needed hundreds of thousands to millions to get to the next round of financing, and had to have that conversation with the investors. I know I painted this picture. This is what I wanted. This is not where we’re going to be. I’m sorry. And gratefully, all the investors except one were like, ‘Hey, man, we saw how hard you tried. What do you want to do next?’ Which kind of surprised me, because I thought they’d be like, ‘Get out of my office. I hate you.’ There’s only one who was like, ‘Isn’t there anything else you could try?’ I was like, ‘Dude, you put in $10,000. You’re the smallest investor, and, like, you’re beating me up more than guys put in, like, $1.5 million.’ So I was very depressed, because I thought, man, all my friends were watching, you know, from film, like, Puri left to go do a tech startup, which now is very common, but, you know, wasn’t 10 years ago, and I was like, I felt embarrassed, I felt ashamed, and I hated bumping into friends. Like, you’d go to dinner at my favorite restaurant or go to the dry cleaners, and you just, you know, you bump into Al, you’re like, ‘Hey, man, like, how’s your startup going?’ ‘Oh, terrible. I’m probably going to close it. I want to kill myself, you know. Feel terrible. Thanks. Thanks for asking. How are you?’

Steven Puri: You know, I moved to New York, and I spent a bunch of time. I didn’t even tell, for probably three or four months, didn’t even tell my friends in New York I was there. I was helping a friend with a commercial real estate deal. I did yoga. I ate and I slept. You know, like work on the deal, yoga, lunch, sleep at night. And I just thought a lot. What did I do wrong? What would I do differently? And, you know, eventually started having ideas, and started, you know, coming out of that. I met my wife. Had I not failed in that company, I would have not been in New York, wouldn’t have met my wife in yoga, you know. Things happen for a reason, right? They do. It was a painful one. So, we’ll see, you know, there, I’m still going to have failures in this lifetime. I want to believe that each one I sort of stop and go, ‘You know what, this doesn’t define who I am.’

Steven Puri: Everyone makes mistakes. It is about how well you recover from them. Right.

Steven Puri: You know, the old boxing thing about it’s not how many times you got knocked down, it’s how many times you get up. It’s true. It’s hard to remember when you’re on the mat, the canvas, whatever it’s called.

Al Calder: Yeah. Doesn’t feel like it. Yeah, for sure.

Steven Puri: Right. Just, it just feels like painful, and your jaw hurts, but, you know, eventually you’re like, you get up. So, uh, that for me was a lot of the process of just, like, reflecting and, like, processing it, and kind of Kübler-Ross, the stages of grief, you know, right?

What Sukha Means

Al Calder: Thanks for asking. So, one thing that is obvious, and I didn’t ask you earlier, but what does Sukha mean? Where does that come from?

Steven Puri: Sukha is a Sanskrit word. It means su means good and kha means place — a good place. And it means, when put together, when you are feeling self-fulfilled, you’re in a good place, like you are in command of what you do, you’re in command of your life, you’re doing the thing you’re meant to do, and you’re good at it. And it came from yoga. Okay.

Steven Puri: The original idea, which was to help people get better at deep focus, music was a real focus area. They like the music, the little smart assistant, the little task list. And ultimately, you know, so I said, okay, so what about over the course of a day? Right? It’s like basically just a website with a play button in the middle, like has timers and, you know, little modules you can use. Right.

Steven Puri: So about a person, third person I spoke to. And he said, ‘Steven, you asked the wrong questions. You know, here’s what I want. I want to feel in control of my life.’ And he said, ‘Here’s what I want. I want to feel in control of my life.’ And then he listed some, like, or I think, like, he just wanted to be able to do something about the schedule. Yeah. There’s a lot of things he wanted. And I said, ‘Wait, what about this?’ And he said, ‘I’m not asking you about that.’ He said, ‘Why do you pay me?’ And he said, ‘Well, I pay you because I want to feel in control of my life.’ And I said, ‘Okay. So, what does that mean? What does that mean to you?’ And he said, ‘Well, there’s two kinds of days, Steven. There’s the day where it’s 3 o’clock and I’m playing with my kids, and I’m like, you know, this is awesome, I have this awesome job, and I can play with my kids.’ And there’s the other day, where it’s 6 o’clock, and I’m now in the back of my head, I’m like, oh, my God, I spent today, I didn’t do anything. Tomorrow is going to be hell, because I’ve got to do all these things. And I’ve got to work all night, and I can’t spend any time with my kids. And you know what? I’m going to be cursing myself. And then I’m going to be cursing you.’

Steven Puri: So I get to check, you know, I can have 60,000 users, whatever. And I went to check the domain from my phone. It was available. I put it in the cart, and it was like $12. And I bought it. And then I said, ‘Oh, my God, I just bought the domain.’ And then I said, ‘Well, I guess I have to do this.’ And so I told Michael, my partner, and I said, ‘We’re going to be the Sukha company.’ And he said, ‘Match made in heaven.’

Steven Puri: Yeah. And it’s memorable. The nice thing is, like, people hear it, they go, ‘Oh, okay. That’s cool.’ Sort of like, you know, Amazon, it’s not really called bookstore. Nike is not really called—

Solve a Painful Problem

Al Calder: Like we make shoes, you know, 100%. So, just switching gears a little bit. Yeah. You know, we’re looking at focus and workflows and things like that.

Steven Puri: Yep.

Al Calder: But for someone who’s just getting started as an entrepreneur or a freelancer, as it may be, and they’re looking at the changes, you know, we’ve talked about AI, things like that.

Steven Puri: Yep.

Al Calder: And there’s a bit of uncertainty there. Where do you see the next five years for—

Steven Puri: I’m gonna open this. This is water, not a beer, but it’s going to sound like I’m opening a beer. Okay. Miller time. No, I’m kidding.

Steven Puri: Well, let me first give a bit of advice that I found very helpful, and then we’ll segue into your answer. Okay. Okay. The first bit of advice is this. Make sure the problem you’re solving is painful.

Steven Puri: And I’ve been guilty of this, and I’ve seen a number of entrepreneurs who have come to me, you know, for advice or funding, be guilty of this, which is sometimes you develop a solution and it’s in search of a really painful problem, as opposed to, ‘Here is a painful problem. I think I have a better way to solve it than what exists,’ you know? So, that is my first bit of advice: be able to articulate the problem you’re solving. Make sure it’s painful, and talk to people. Ask them how they’re currently solving it. And if the way they’re solving it sucks, you have an opportunity, my friend. You know, so when you ask — and I know you’ve done some recent episodes where you’ve talked about how the world is changing, how AI is being integrated and all that. So I will say this: AI, which is in most cases, in entrepreneurial life, conflated with LLMs, right? Large language models, right?

AI, LLMs, and the Next Five Years

Steven Puri: Large language models are basically glorified Google autocomplete. You know, they operate on a large scale, but they’re basically just guessing, like, Allan typed this, 62% probability the next word is going to be this, and the next word is going to be ‘rainy,’ and, you know, they’re just doing an autocomplete with ideas. So they’re not, even though it has the presentation of thought, it’s not really thought. It is probability, right?

Steven Puri: So it is true, like, I use a coding assistant when I code. I used a, you know, Claude 4.0, whatever it is, and it’s definitely helpful, because it recognizes the patterns, like, ‘Oh, you’re writing a carousel. I remember scraping some GitHub open source repo that had a carousel. Here’s kind of what I saw,’ right? So, it’s very good in recognizing patterns and saying it’s probable you’re going to want a carousel like this, right? Which I happen to be working on just before our podcast. So, there is a great amount of work that we do as humans that is kind of that, you know, and going back to, like, film, like, I’ll tell you this, there are a few writers I worked with that are great, like, on the Hemingway level of understanding people. I’m writing from an understanding of humanity.

Steven Puri: And there are a lot of screenwriters who, you know, write from having seen a lot of movies. ‘This next scene is sort of like that scene in Die Hard, you know, where he’s on the roof with Allen, and because it was sort of that scene, but here they’re on a submarine.’ Or, ‘The next scene after the girl is in King Kong’s hand is always the scene where the pilot in the plane sees King Kong.’ It’s very predictable, ‘42%, you know, probability it’s this thing.’ And those are jobs that are served really well by a probability engine, an autocomplete-your-thought kind of thing.

Steven Puri: There is a debate, I think it’s around this oak, which is like original sort of thinking and knowledge, where I’m trying to remember, there’s a scientist who’s been talking very intelligently about this, saying, like, they have a lot of LLMs doing these dog tricks, where they can be trained to look like they’re thinking, but they’re not actually, and there’s actually a deeper way of doing this, which is starting with no knowledge and having the AI actually learn and make mistakes the way a human would, and that’s actually where super intelligence may come from, is, like, that process of learning, as opposed to being trained on a huge data set of probabilities assigned, you know, weights and biases. So, that said, yes, in the next 5 years we are going to see smart entrepreneurs take advantage of the LLMs, you know, and MCP, you know, the protocols to sort of like knit things together so they can be agentic and do things for you. Super valuable. Is there still going to be, for freelancers, this marketplace for great ideas? Yeah, we haven’t really seen that.

Steven Puri: Wrote stuff, let it go. You know, people say, like, ‘Oh, well, LLMs don’t write blog posts as well as, you know, humans do.’ Check back on Tuesday, because everything you’re complaining about, the guy is training the LLM and assigning the weights and biases, they know, and they’re doing a new version for this weekend, and they’ll do a new version on Tuesday, and it’s going to catch up really, really, really quickly. I think you talked about that in one of your episodes, you know, it’s like, yeah, check back Tuesday, right?

Al Calder: Yeah. And, you got to be willing to pivot, right? I mean, like you said, the LLMs are going to change. They’re going to adapt. They’re going to get better.

Steven Puri: But as human beings, we have that almost like that step ahead. We can always pivot to something new. And I think if you use the LLMs as, you know, for freelancers who are solopreneurs, there’s a lot of things that you couldn’t do in the past, right? You needed a whole team of people. Now you can do it using them as a magnifier, a force. Yeah. Agreed. So, yeah.

Steven Puri: And you need to know it. Like, even if the current idea of how LLMs work may not be the way we end up in 5–10 years, it may be a window technology, and we evolve to something that does actually learn. You know, the same way, like, fax machines were very valuable for a certain window of time. ‘Oh my god, I can send this paper somewhere else,’ and then the internet came along, and you’re like, ‘That’s useless,’ right? You know, but everyone is faxing everything, and people still do fax medical records because of HIPAA, right?

Al Calder: Mhm.

Steven Puri: So toward that end, it’s important to understand how this works, even if there’s a good chance five or 10 years the models have evolved to a different, you know, sort of framework.

What People Get Wrong About Time

Al Calder: So what do you think most people get wrong about optimizing their time and energy?

Steven Puri: I think people overestimate their ability to block distractions. You know, if you were actually given a list of, ‘Here’s how you spent yesterday,’ like, right, every 15-minute increment, I think almost everyone would be astonished to go, ‘Oh, man, really? Oh, I forgot. Yeah, I watched that one YouTube video, and then they recommended another one.’ So, while I was on it, I watched that one, and then while I was there, there was that cool — ‘Oh, I spent 45 minutes in YouTube. Really?’ I think that thing, right? I’ve seen it for myself, and I’m like, ‘Oh, yeah, wow, that’s how I spent my time. Oh, man, I could have been done hours earlier if I didn’t click on that stupid link on Twitter, and it might start out innocently. I need to look at this video so I can figure out this software. Oh, look at this cat video.’ Like you said before, right?

Al Calder: Spot on. Spot on.

Steven Puri: And guess what? The trillion-dollar companies have the most money. The best paycheck, if you are an engineer, a behavioral psychologist, a designer, is to go work for one of those trillion-dollar companies. They’ll pay you a ton of money. And if you come up with a way to get, like, a tenth of a second more time on site across a billion people, your grandchildren won’t need to work. So, yeah, the smartest people are working there to go, ‘How can we make that sound so that Allan can’t resist it? How do we make it look so that Allan can’t resist it? How do we get him to want to do this gesture?’ And who’s on the other side of that war? Like, you have trillion-dollar companies and the smartest people in the world going, ‘Can I steal your life? Who’s protecting you?’ Right? So, I don’t think people realize how well those companies are stealing your lives until you actually see it and you’re like, ‘My god, that’s how I spent yesterday. What?’

Al Calder: Well, it’s like, you know, my wife the other day, she says she was searching for something at Costco, she wanted to get at Costco, and then, you know, scrolling through her Facebook page. It’s like, okay, how do they know what I was talking about five minutes ago? It’s because, yeah, you don’t realize what you’re searching for, right? And all of that is tracked, right? And it’s like you said, they can take your time away very easily if you don’t get back on track.

Steven Puri: Fantastic how well they know. As a matter of fact, for several years Facebook denied that they were listening on your camera, on your smartphone microphone, right? They’re like, ‘No, no, no. We don’t do that.’ And then Andrew Bosworth was at, I think it was Recode or something, and someone brought this up, saying, like, ‘Hey, we understand that you guys were measuring — they were coming up with the idea of second screens, where it’s like, oh, you’re watching TV, and there’s audio and video coming out of the TV, but you’re on your phone at the same time.’ And they were using the microphone to see what the audio was on the TV, so they could measure what you were watching. Right. So someone knew this and knew that’s how they got the phone manufacturers to give them access to the microphone, even if you didn’t grant them explicit permission, because they were helping to measure this, right? And when confronted about this thing, saying, like, ‘Hey, you’re using people’s microphones when they don’t grant permission,’ and up until this point Facebook had denied it, and Bosworth slipped up, and he said, ‘Oh, no, no, we don’t do that anymore, anymore.’ And they were like, ‘Oh, anymore?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, we—’ ‘Yeah. Next question.’

The Surprising Lesson About Focus

Al Calder: So, what would you say the most surprising lesson is you’ve learned about human focus or motivation since starting Sukha? Something that you didn’t expect.

Steven Puri: Everyone says that they want to focus and live a healthier life. And it’s very hard. It’s harder than I imagined for people to resist the allure of social media. I think — I hope — that the way my generation looks at my dad’s generation with cigarettes, where it’s like, ‘How could you do that? You all have emphysema and lung cancer, and four of your friends have died of lung cancer.’ My generation is like, ‘You know what, everyone in the movie, the movie stars were smoking, and the tobacco companies were doing studies with tobacco is healthy for you.’ And so you got to understand it was a different time. We didn’t know that it was, like, lung cancer. I kind of wonder if my kids’ generation is going to look at our generation and be like, ‘How could you be on social media like that? Like, y’all lost your lives?’ It was like you had brain rot.

Steven Puri: I hope that we wake up to that, because, oh, my god, else we’re headed for WALL·E World, you know, like, uh, the movie where you’re just sitting around being fed by robots. I don’t know if you’re a Doctor Who fan, but there’s one of the later episodes recently, uh, maybe a year or two ago, and basically it’s this social media world, and they’re wrapped in this bubble around their head. They don’t see the real world. It’s kind of scary. Yeah. Think that could be where we’re going if things don’t change. So, I hope your version of the future comes to pass, because we will see.

Steven Puri: There’s a really good Charlie Rose — I think it was Keanu Reeves on Charlie Rose, maybe — and he was relating a story. He said, ‘I was at a friend’s house who was a director the other night, and he’s got two daughters, teenage daughters. Over the course of, you know, a little family dinner, casual dinner, one of the daughters very honestly said, “Hey, I know you’re really famous for this Matrix movie stuff, but I’ve never seen them. What are they about?”‘ Right? And Keanu sort of chuckles. He goes, ‘Oh, you know what, it’s about a guy who wakes up, realizes that he’s living in a simulated world that the computer has created, and he’s escaping to get, you know, back to the real world.’ And she’s like, ‘Oh, why?’ And he’s like, ‘Well, you know, ’cause when he wakes up, he realizes the world that he thinks is real is just a computer simulation. It’s not the real world.’ And he wants to get to the real world. And she’s like, ‘Why?’ And Keanu’s like, ‘Oh, my god.’ Wow.

Steven Puri: So, there could be that. There could be that generational thing where it’s also like, ‘So, you guys are so obsessed with reality, and why not just live in a sim?’ I don’t know. We’ll see. My kid’s not getting a smartphone until he’s 13.

Al Calder: I guess only time will tell. Only time will tell. Yes.

One Habit to Try This Week

Al Calder: So, if you could think of one habit or system that a freelancer could try this week, what would you recommend?

Steven Puri: Easy. First thing in the morning, have one task in mind that you need to do. Be super clear. Wake up and go, ‘You know what? Today’s big goal is this.’ It’d be great if you have three and you prioritize the thing, but, you know, easiest thing is just say, ‘You know, today I need to launch my blog. Today I need to, you know, finish this slide deck for this client today.’ Wake up, be intentional, and anything that gets in the way of that, see if you can push it aside, delay it. You use the Eisenhower matrix of, like, ‘Can I delegate this? Can I do it later?’ Whatever it is, but just go, ‘This will be done when I walk out away from this desk today. This will be done, and it’s going to feel great.’ And that’s like a good kind of, like, dopamine positive reinforcement thing, where you go, like, ‘Tomorrow I’m going to do that again,’ you know?

Al Calder: Yeah. I think that’s huge, because it’s, you know, people say, ‘Oh, I’m going to create a product, and then develop an automation for emails to send out this product, and then I’m going to work on my podcast and my blog, and people just get lost, and they right suck. Just find one thing, one reasonable thing you can do tomorrow morning when you wake up. Just go, “Tomorrow I’m going to write that blog post,” and do it.’

Where to Try Sukha

Al Calder: Nice. So, it’s been a great interview. I really loved talking to you.

Steven Puri: Better than our first one. I’m trying to remember.

Al Calder: It’s going to get recorded and saved this time. So, well, you know, put that in the win column.

Al Calder: Where can listeners try Sukha and connect with you?

Steven Puri: Okay. First off, two things. First off, anyone who has a question about anything that I said, they’re like, ‘Oh, I want to read more about this, or who’s that Hungarian guy mentioned,’ you don’t have to ask me at all about my company. I just want to help. Email me [email protected]. Ask a question. I’ll email you back. I get back to all my emails in 24 hours, if I’m not sick or traveling. It won’t be a long email. It might be like, ‘Oh, here’s a blog post about deep work,’ or ‘Here’s a blog post about, you know, how to get into a flow state.’ Go for it. I will not write you back the story of my life. I don’t have time. You don’t care to read it.

Steven Puri: And if you decide you want to try a flow state app, find that one thing you have to do that will take you, like, half an hour, an hour, like something meaningful, because you can’t go get into a flow state in five minutes, right? And go to sukha.com — free for 7 days, no credit card. Try it. If you love it, sign up. If you don’t, don’t. Everybody wants your credit card these days. So that’s the thing, is I know that trick of, like, ‘Well, some people won’t cancel and won’t get their money.’ I don’t want your money. If you do this and you’re like, ‘Man, this changes my life. Like, why would I not do this every day and get done earlier?’ Sign up for 10 bucks a month. Great. You can do that. But you have seven days to try it every single day, as much as you want. And if it’s magic, pay for it. I don’t even collect a salary for this. Tony and I do it for free, just because we think the world needs this. So, we just want to pay our server bills and, you know, pay Amazon and Firebase bills. But give it a shot. That — that’s where to find it.

Steven Puri: And it’s, uh, it is meant to give you that feeling when you look up and go, ‘I didn’t realize the time went by, but this is done, and I’m maybe closer to having my side hustle launch, or I’ve done something great.’ So go do something great, man.

One Mindset Shift for Solopreneurs

Al Calder: Couldn’t agree more. One more quick question before we wrap up.

Steven Puri: Sure.

Al Calder: If you could leave solopreneurs with one mindset shift to build a more sustainable and satisfying business, what would it be?

Steven Puri: It’s the one I already gave you. It is tomorrow morning, wake up, know the one thing you want to get done more than anything else that’s going to change the course of your life, your day, your company, your team. Focus on that. Don’t just bounce around between, like, like you said, oh, I’m going to doom scroll a little bit, and I’m going to lose some time in YouTube, and then I go check out something in, you know, ex Twitter, whatever, you know. No, wake up and go, ‘What I need to do is I need to X. I’m going to make that happen. Do it.’ Starting tomorrow, pick one task, and then pick a different task the next day, and so on, and just, it starts with you. No one’s going to make you win. You have to make you win.

Al Calder: 100%.

Closing Thanks and Outro

Al Calder: Well, Steven, thanks a lot. I really appreciate it, and, again, thanks for doing this.

Steven Puri: Thanks. We’ve got to spend more time together. Have a great evening. Okay, cool. Have a great night. You too.

Al Calder: What a fantastic conversation. Steven shared so many gems about carving your own path, staying adaptable, and building good habits through focus and workflows, and maybe a little nudge here and there. Whether you’re running a business or going solo as a freelancer, I hope his advice gave you fresh ideas and a little extra motivation for your own journey. Remember, success often comes from mixing creativity with consistency and learning at every step.

Al Calder: Thanks for tuning in to the Freelance Insider Show, and until next time, keep hustling and stay inspired.

Al Calder: Thanks for tuning in to the Freelance Insider podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review. It helps more freelancers like you find the show. Got questions or topics you want covered? Reach out to me at remoteofficeworld.com. You can also find the link in the show description. Until next time, keep on freelancing your way to freedom.

Frequently Asked Questions

Ready to take the next step? Download the free Freelance Reset Checklist at remoteofficeworld.com and subscribe to The Freelance Insider Show so you never miss an episode.