The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer

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Of course, describing flow as an “optimal state of consciousness” doesn’t get us very far. More specifically, the term refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption when you get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Action and awareness merge. Your sense of self vanishes. Time passes strangely. And performance—performance just soars. 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?

The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer

This book is a tour de force of high performance. It’s an essential resource for those looking to align their curiosity, passion, and purpose to have not just a little more flow and creativity in their lives but to have a lot more flow and creativity. Want to learn how to take your innovation to seemingly impossible heights? Steven Kotler will teach you how. Scott Barry KaufmanConcrete Examples – You’ll get practical advice illustrated with examples of real-world applications or anecdotes. Applicable – You’ll get advice that can be directly applied in the workplace or in everyday situations. Guilford also realized that divergent thinking wasn't entirely free wheeling: It had four core characteristics. Fluency, the ability to produce a great number of ideas in a short time-frame; flexibility, the ability to approach a problem from multiple angles; originality, the ability to produce novel ideas; elaboration, the ability to organize those ideas and execute on them.” So I took my obsession with this question into other domains. In the arts, sciences, technology, culture, business—pretty much every area imaginable—I went hunting for the formula. What does it take for individuals, organizations, even institutions, to significantly level up their game? What does it take to achieve paradigm-shifting breakthroughs? And, in a phrase, if we can get past the hyperbole and unearth the practicality, what does it take to accomplish the impossible?

The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler | the !n BOOK REVIEW: The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler | the !n

As it happens, if you’re not a professional athlete, and you spend all your time chasing professional athletes around mountains and across oceans, you’re going to break things. I broke a lot of things. Two shattered thumbs, two broken collarbones, three torn rotator cuffs, four broken ribs, both of my arms, my wrist into six pieces, each of my patellas, sixty-five fractures in my legs, my tailbone, my ego. While the rating tells you how good a book is according to our two core criteria, it says nothing about its particular defining features. Therefore, we use a set of 20 qualities to characterize each book by its strengths: Endorphins and anandamide, our final two pleasure chemicals, are pain-killing bliss producers. They’re both heavy-duty stress relievers, replacing the weight of the everyday with a euphoric sense of relaxed happiness. It’s that “all is right in the world” sensation that shows up during experiences like runner’s high, or when we catch our second wind.By publishing your document, the content will be optimally indexed by Google via AI and sorted into the right category for over 500 million ePaper readers on YUMPU. Think of evolution as a video game with two main levels. To win on level one, a player must obtain more resources—food, water, shelter, mates, and so on—than the other players in the game. On level two, the player must turn those resources into children and help those children survive, either by having so many that there’s no way predators can eat them all (which is what fish do), or by keeping those children safe and teaching them how to obtain resources for themselves (which is the human method). According to Deci and Ryan, we’re tapping autonomy correctly when we’re doing what we’re doing because of “interest and enjoyment” and because “it aligns with our core beliefs and values.” Put differently, the seeking system likes to be in charge of exactly what kinds of resources it’s seeking.

The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer|Paperback The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer|Paperback

The existence of reservoirs of energy that habitually are not tapped is most familiar to us as the phenomenon of “second wind.” Ordinarily we stop when we meet the first effective layer, so to call it, of fatigue. We have then walked, played or worked “enough,” and desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction, on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a new level of energy. There may be layer after layer of this experience. A third and a fourth “wind” may supervene. Mental activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own—sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points.37” It’s FLOW — the biological formula for the impossible. Flow is defined as “an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform the best.” This is another reason why peak performance is an infinite game. But it’s also why the quartet of skills at the heart of this book matters so much. Motivation is what gets you into this game; learning is what helps you continue to play; creativity is how you steer; and flow is how you turbo-boost the results beyond all rational standards and reasonable expectations. That, my friends, is the real art of impossible. Learning. The ingredients of impossible ; Growth mindsets and truth filters ; The ROI on reading ; Five not-to-easy steps for learning almost anything ; The skill of skill ; Stronger ; The 80/20 of emotional intelligence ; The shortest path to superman Motivation is what gets you into this game; learning is what helps you continue to play; creativity is how you steer; and flow is how you turbo-boost the results beyond all rational standards and reasonable expectations. That, my friends, is the real art of impossible. Welcome to the infinite game.”

The technical language that surrounds a subject is the second place to put your attention. Why? Jargon, while annoying, is annoyingly precise. Often, large chunks of the explanation of a subject are contained within the technical language that surrounds that subject. The obvious example is “human” versus “Homo sapiens.” Both terms point in the same direction, but the Latin version not only contains the thing (a human) but also its evolutionary history (genus and species), plus a little color commentary (apparently, someone once thought we were “wise apes”). Thus, understanding a subject’s insider parlance allows you to see the ideas and the connective tissue that holds these ideas together. Homo sapiens not only names the thing but tells you that the thing descended from apes and is smarter than apes, or, at least, thinks it’s smarter than apes. Next, look for spots where your core passion intersects with one or more of these grand, global challenges—a place where your personal obsession might be a solution to some collective problem. The overlap between passion and purpose, that’s what you’re hunting. If you can zero in on that target, you’ve found a way to use your newfound passion to do some real good in the world. That’s a legitimate massively transformative purpose. Holding the ball in the fingertips of his right hand, he calmly placed it in his left, balled his fist around it, and held up the now-closed appendage for all to see. Someone—maybe me, maybe Mom—was asked to blow on it. Mom did the honors. And then my brother opened his fingers and blew my mind. The ball was gone. I mean poof. Gone. Curiosity, passion, and purpose are a launching pad toward the impossible. They’re the moves that get your pieces on the board, the place where this game begins. But the impossible is a long game, and if you’re interested in seeing it through to the end, then the boost you’ll get from these three initial drivers isn’t nearly enough to carry you through.