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 Kaufman, author of Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization 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. 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.”

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Finally, there’s an even greater benefit to purpose: outside assistance. Purpose acts as a rallying cry, inspiring others and attracting them to your cause.19 This has an obvious impact on drive. Social support provides even more neurochemistry, which produces an even greater boost in intrinsic motivation. More crucially, other people provide actual help. Financial, physical, intellectual, creative, emotional—they all matter. Simply put, on the road to impossible, we’re going to need all the help we can get. 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. However, biology is very different. It is designed in the same way for all of us. Therefore, the secret to high-performance lies in decoding our fundamental neurobiology. Doing so helps us to really understand the mechanism behind our decisions and actions.

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. 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.

The Art of Impossible: A Peak [Full Book] PDF Download The Art of Impossible: A Peak

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. Here, we want to break that mission statement down into smaller chunks, dividing up the impossible into a long series of difficult but doable goals that, if accomplished, render said impossible much more probable.” Chemical signals are similarly simple, though they can have one of two meanings: do more of what you’re doing, or do less of what you’re been doing. The goal of this book is to use science to decipher these skills. We want to get at the basic biological mechanisms that make each of them run, then use what we learn to make them run better—which is really what I mean by getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. This same mentor liked to point out that history is littered with the impossible. Our past is a graveyard for ideas that have held this title. Human flight is an ancient dream. It took us five thousand years to go from the first winged human cave drawing to the Wright brothers putting their Kitty Hawk launch into the record books—yet we didn’t stop there. Next it was transatlantic flight, then space flight, then the first lunar landing. In each case, impossible became possible because someone figured out the formula. “Sure,” said my mentor, “if you don’t know the formula, it looks like magic. But now you know better.”

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 But what did all of this brokenness add up to in the real world? Time off. What would happen: I’d be hanging out, snap this or that, then be forced onto the couch for a few months. But when I returned, the progress I saw was eye-popping. It was amazing. And it didn’t make any sense. Thus, the solution: identify your biggest weaknesses and get to work. This is why skier Shane McConkey would consistently seek out the worst conditions on the mountain, why Arnold Schwarzenegger always began his weight lifting sessions targeting his weakest muscle group, and why Nobel laureate Richard Feynman decided, late in his life, to learn how to speak to women. Of course, Feynman decides to train this particular weakness by hanging out at strip clubs—but that’s a different story.42” 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 KAUFMAN

The Art of Impossible” is Changing My Life - Medium How “The Art of Impossible” is Changing My Life - Medium

If you’re interested in being your best, your inner monologue needs to support the best you want to be. In fact, when it comes to sustained performance, because doubt and disappointment are constant companions, controlling your thoughts is often the ball game.” Finally, once you have a purpose, you need to layer on the two remaining intrinsic drivers: autonomy and mastery. More specifically, once you have a purpose, the system demands autonomy, which is the freedom to pursue that purpose. Then the system requires mastery, which is the desire to continually improve the skills needed to pursue that purpose. 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.”13The place to begin is with motivation, which is what starts us down the path of peak performance. Yet, motivation, as psychologists use the term, is actually a catch-all for three subsets of skills: drive, grit, and goals. 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. 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.” 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. In practice, we are going to work our way through four main sections, exploring motivation, learning, creativity, and flow in turn. In each section, I’m going to break down what science can tell us about how these skills work in the brain and body, then, through a series of exercises, teach you the best ways to apply this information in your own life.

The Art of Impossible summary - Blinkist The Art of Impossible summary - Blinkist

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. And this brings us to our final question: Why would evolution create a state of consciousness that amplifies all of these particular skills? First, the obvious: that damn ball was gone. Second, the slightly less obvious: my little brother wasn’t magic. 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.This, too, is evolution at work. It’s not that evolution ever lets us stop playing the “get more resources” game, it’s that our strategy evolves. Once baseline needs are met, you can devote yourself to ways to get, well, you guessed it, seriously more resources—for yourself, for your family, for your tribe, for your species. As high-minded as something like “meaning and purpose” might seem as a driver, this is actually evolution’s way of saying: Okay, you’ve got enough resources for yourself and your family. Now it’s time to help your tribe or your species get more. This is also why, in the brain, there’s really not much difference between drivers. Intrinsic drivers, extrinsic drivers, it doesn’t matter. In the end, like so much of life, it all comes down to neurochemistry.