The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer

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Applicable – You’ll get advice that can be directly applied in the workplace or in everyday situations. Happiness becomes untethered to income, because once we can meet our basic needs, the lure of all the stuff it took to meet them, begins to lose its luster. Once extrinsic drivers start to fade, intrinsic drivers take over.” Start by writing down twenty-five things you’re curious about. And by curious, all I mean is that if you had a spare weekend, you’d be interested in reading a couple of books on the topic, attending a few lectures, and maybe having a conversation or two with an expert. In 1977, when Edward Deci and Richard Ryan were both young psychologists at the University of Rochester, they bumped into each other on campus.1 Deci had just become a clinical practitioner, and Ryan was still a grad student. They shared an interest in the science of motivation, which led to a long conversation, which led to a fifty-year collaboration that overturned most of the foundational ideas in that science of motivation.

The Art of the Impossible: How to start a political party The Art of the Impossible: How to start a political party

The outdoor retailer Patagonia routinely ends up on lists of the best places to work in America.7 If you drill down into the particulars, employee autonomy is one of the most frequently cited reasons.8 But Patagonia isn’t really giving their employees all that much autonomy. Instead, they’re giving them very particular types of autonomy.

Put differently, at the Collective, we have a saying: “Personality doesn’t scale. Biology scales.” What we mean is, in the field of peak performance, too often, someone figures out what works for them and then assumes it will work for others. It rarely does. The research found that creatives outperform their noncreative counterparts in several respects. For starters, creatives tend to feel significantly more fulfilled than noncreatives, reporting 34 percent higher happiness levels. Creatives also make more money than noncreatives –⁠ 13 percent more, to be precise. 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.

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As discussed, only two strategies are available. Either you fight over dwindling resources, or you get creative and make more resources. Thus, when we talk about drive from an evolutionary perspective, what we’re really talking about are the psychological fuels that energize behaviors that best solve resource scarcity: fight/flee and explore/innovate.

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First, dopamine is a powerful focusing drug. When it’s in our system, attention is laser-targeted on the task at hand. We’re excited, engaged, and more likely to drop into flow. This is also why we started our exploration of drive with curiosity, passion, and purpose. This trio establishes interest and enjoyment—via curiosity and passion—and then cements core beliefs and values via purpose. In other words, this trio of drivers came first in this book because they’re the foundation required to maximize autonomy.

The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer eBook

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.Purpose shifts our attention off ourselves (internal focus) and puts it onto other people and the task at hand (external focus). In doing this, purpose guards against obsessive self-rumination, which is one of the root causes of anxiety and depression.18 By forcing you to look outside yourself, purpose acts as a force field. It protects you from yourself and the very real possibility of being swallowed whole by your new passion. To put this more technically, purpose seems to decrease the activity of the default-mode network, which is the brain network in charge of rumination, and increase the activity of the executive attention network, which is the network that governs external focus. Since 2004, Google has tapped autonomy as a driver with their “20 Percent Time,” wherein Google engineers get to spend 20 percent of their time pursuing projects of their own creation, ones that align with their own core passion and purpose. And this experiment has produced incredible results. Over 50 percent of Google’s largest revenue-generating products have come out of 20 percent time, including AdSense, Gmail, Google Maps, Google News, Google Earth, and Gmail Labs. Yet the neurochemistry of reward isn’t simply about how individual neurochemicals work, as we’re often motivated by combinations of neurochemicals. Dopamine plus oxytocin is the blend beneath the delight of play. Passion—including everything from the passion of an artist for their craft to the passion of romantic love—is underpinned by the pairing of norepinephrine and dopamine.14 This combination tells us something critical about the amount of autonomy required to utilize this driver. If Patagonia’s example holds true, then the answer is very little autonomy, provided that very little is well deployed. Let’s examine the two categories at the center of their efforts: scheduling and surfing.

The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer

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!Peak performance is an unusual kind of infinite game. It may be unwinnable, but you can definitely lose. The brilliant Harvard psychologist William James explained it like this: “The human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in coordination, in power of inhibition and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject—but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us, it is only an inveterate habit—the habit of inferiority to our full self—that is bad.”13