The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer

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The Art of Impossible is consistently fascinating. There aren’t many writers I would follow on an intellectual journey as ambitious as this to examine peak performance; fortunately, Steven Kotler is one of them.”— David Epstein, New York Times bestselling author of Range and The Sports Gene What did I learn in all of that work? The same lesson I learned doing magic. Whenever the impossible becomes possible, there’s always a formula. But there’s also a lowercase i impossible. The same rules apply, as this is still the stuff beyond our capabilities and our imagination, just on a different scale. Lowercase i impossibles are those things that we believe are impossible for us. They’re the feats that no one, including ourselves, at least for a while, ever imagined we’d be capable of accomplishing. When the brain wants to motivate us, it sends out a neurochemical message via one of seven specific networks.9 These networks are ancient devices, found in all mammals, that correspond to the behavior they’re designed to produce. There is a system for fear, another for anger/rage, and a third for grief or what’s technically known as “separation distress.” The lust system drives us to procreate; the care/nurture system urges us to protect and educate our young. Yet, when we talk about drive—the psychological energy that pushes us forward—we’re really talking about the two final systems: play/social engagement and seeking/desire. One way to think about this question is from an evolutionary perspective. We know that scarcity drives evolution. Any problem regularly encountered on a quest to gather resources is a problem that evolution already spent millions of years driving us to solve.

The Art of Impossible Free Summary by Steven Kotler - getAbstract The Art of Impossible Free Summary by Steven Kotler - getAbstract

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. In our book Bold, Peter Diamandis and I introduced the concept of a “massively transformative purpose,” or MTP for short.20 Massively means large and audacious. Transformative means able to bring significant change to an industry, community, or the planet. And purpose? A clear why behind the work being done. An MTP is exactly the kind of big dream you’re hunting. Evolution shaped the brain to enable survival. But evolution itself is driven forward by the availability of resources. Scarcity of resources is always the largest threat to our survival, making it the largest driver of evolution. And there are only two possible responses to this threat. You can fight over dwindling resources, or you can go exploring, get creative, innovative, and cooperative, and make new resources. Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, my desire to become a writer was a lowercase i impossible. Other than putting pen to paper on a daily basis, I had no clue how to proceed. I didn’t know any writers. I didn’t know anyone who even wanted to be a writer. There was no discernible path from A to B. No internet, few books, no one to ask. It was my own private impossible. You get one shot at this life, and you’re going to spend one-third of it asleep. So what do you choose to do with the remaining two-thirds? That is the only question that matters.

Dopamine is the brain’s primary reward chemical, with oxytocin a close second.11 Yet serotonin, endorphins, norepinephrine, and anandamide also play a role. The pleasurable feeling created by each of these chemicals drives us to act and, if that action was successful, reinforces the behavior in memory.

The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer eBook

When multiple curiosity streams intersect, you not only amp up engagement—you create the necessary conditions for pattern recognition, or the linking of new ideas together.2 Pattern recognition is what the brain does at a very basic level. It’s essentially the fundamental job of most neurons. As a result, whenever we recognize a pattern, the brain rewards us with a tiny squirt of dopamine. Solid. A helpful and/or enlightening book, in spite of its obvious shortcomings. For instance, it may offer decent advice in some areas while being repetitive or unremarkable in others. The third part (Ch. 15 – 18) is about fostering creativity. Here, Kotler takes the reader on a tour of changing thought about creativity, ranging from the ancient stories of muses to today’s state-of-the-art neuroscience. Like the section on Flow, there is an elaboration of where the neuroscientific understanding of creativity sits at the moment. Having read a range of books discussing such descriptions, this approach is falling out of favor with me. First, whenever I’ve read a book by an actual neuroscientist, I’ve learned that these simple attributions of activities to certain brain regions are either vastly oversimplified, more tentatively agreed upon than suggested, or both of the above. Second, I have realized that learning a name like Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) and an oversimplified explanation of what it does doesn’t really help me. That said, I understand there is interest in these descriptions that drive their inclusion in such books. (I, too, have been interested in reading about it, but less and less so.)Networks, meanwhile, refer to brain structures that are hardwired together by direct connections or structures that tend to activate at the same time.8 For example, the insula and the medial prefrontal cortex are wired together and frequently do work at the same time, making them important hubs in the so-called default mode network. Pushing the limits of impossible is the highest and the most meaningful goal to whichyou can aspire. 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. There are things no one knew were possiblebefore someone accomplished them: capital “I” Impossible feats. Every person also has their ownpersonal “impossibles”:the things that you consider outside the scope of your individual capabilities and possibilities – whether that’s escaping poverty or becoming a professional artist or athlete.The highest and most fulfilling goal you can aspire to in life is to push the boundaries of your personal “impossible.”Some peoplewho persevere in their pursuit of personalimpossibles,long-term, end up pushing the boundaries of what goals humanity deems to be achievable. 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?