Steven Kotler

Bestselling author and peak performance expert Steven Kotler decodes the secrets of those elite performers—athletes, artists, scientists, CEOs and more—who have changed our definition of the possible, teaching us how we too can stretch far beyond our capabilities, making impossible dreams much more attainable for all of us. What does it take to accomplish the impossible? What does it take to shatter our limitations, exceed our expectations, and turn our biggest dreams into our most recent achievements? We are capable of so much more than we know—that’s the message at the core of The Art of Impossible. Building upon cutting-edge neuroscience and over twenty years of research, bestselling author, peak performance expert and Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective, Steven Kotler lays out a blueprint for extreme performance improvement. If you want to aim high, here is the playbook to make it happen! Inspirational and aspirational, pragmatic and accessible, The Art of Impossible is a life-changing experience disguised as a how-to manual for peak performance that anyone can use to shoot for the stars . . . space-suit, not included.

A Peak Performance Primer

The Art of Impossible

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Neurobiologically, purpose alters the brain. It decreases the reactivity of the amygdala, decreases the volume of the medial temporal cortex, and increases the volume of the right insular cortex. A less reactive amygdala translates to less stress and greater resilience. The medial temporal cortex is involved in many aspects of perception, suggesting that having a purpose alters the way the brain filters incoming information, while a larger right insular cortex has been shown to protect against depression and correlate with a significant number of well-being measures. 

“The single biggest motivator,” explains author Dan Pink in Drive, ”by far, [is] making progress in meaningful work.”

Drive is the psychological fuel that pushes us to obtain resources. We have the greatest chance of obtaining those resources if we have a plan for chasing them (curiosity, passion, purpose), the freedom to chase them (autonomy), and the skills required for that chase (mastery).

Just the goal setting itself without any further incentive for teaching them.

Latham and Locke found that setting goals increased performance and productivity 11 to 25 percent. 

The act of telling someone about your goal gives you the feeling that the goal's already been achieved. It releases the dopamine you're supposed to get afterward, prematurely. And with that neurochemistry comes the feeling of satisfaction. This is the issue. Once you've already felt that high, it's difficult to get back up for the hard fight required to actually earn it. As the saying goes, real bad boys move in silence. 

In the early 2000s, Angela Duckworth replaced zeal" with "pas. sion" and capacity for hard labor" with "perseverance." It's the combination she famously calls "grit." In a series of studies, Duckworth discovered that this combination was twice as important to academic success as IQ. 

Passion showed up earlier a concept related to curiosity. Now it’s an aspect of persistence. Which is it? Both?

When researchers tease "persistence" apart, they find three psychological traits: willpower, mindset, and passion. Again, there are no shortcuts. You need all three for sustained high performance.

Quite often, passion feels like frustration on the inside and looks like obsession from the outside. Peak performers must learn to tolerate enormous amounts of anxiety and overwhelm, which is what pas- sion feels like much of the time. Passion doesn't make us gritty. Pas- sion makes us able to tolerate all the negative emotions produced by grit.

David Foster Wallace, This is water; boredom, routine, and petty frustration; the need for thought control.

Twenty years after my own graduation, l have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. ... And I submit that this is what the real, no bull- shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, im- perially alone day in and day out. 

University of North Carolina's Barbara Fredrick son discovered "the positivity ratio," or the fact that it takes three pos. itive thoughts to counter a single negative thought. "Three-to-one" she wrote in a recent journal article, "is the ratio we've found to be the tipping point beyond which the full impact of positive emotions becomes unleashed. 

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