Intrinsic motivators, goals, and grit –⁠ these three things will motivate you to achieve the impossible. But motivation alone is far from the end of the story. Pushing the limits of impossible is the highest and the most meaningful goal to whichyou can aspire. 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. Book Genre: Business, Health, Leadership, Nonfiction, Personal Development, Productivity, Psychology, Science, Self Help

The Art of Impossible Quotes by Steven Kotler - Goodreads The Art of Impossible Quotes by Steven Kotler - Goodreads

Grit, the subject of chapter 5, is what most people think of when they think of motivation. It’s persistence, determination, and fortitude—the ability to continue with the journey no matter the difficulty involved. And that instruction occurs automatically. When we play, the brain releases dopamine and oxytocin, two of our most crucial “reward chemicals.” These are pleasure drugs that make us feel good when we accomplish, or try to accomplish, anything that fulfills a basic survival need. For beginners – You’ll find this to be a good primer if you’re a learner with little or no prior experience/knowledge. 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 Feats that were, three months earlier, considered absolutely impossible—never been done, never gonna be done—were not just being done, they were being iterated upon. “It was brain-scrambling,” explains snowboarding legend Jeremy Jones.1 “Things that were impossible in the morning were possible by the evening. Literally. Rules that were adhered to vehemently, rules that had been in place since the beginning of [action] sports, rules like don’t do this because you’ll die, were changing on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.”

Customer reviews

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. At getAbstract, we summarize books* that help people understand the world and make it better. Whatever we select for our library has to excel in one or the other of these two core criteria:

The Art of Building the Impossible | The New Yorker The Art of Building the Impossible | The New Yorker

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. Good. A helpful and/or enlightening book that combines two or more noteworthy strengths, e.g. contains uncommonly novel ideas and presents them in an engaging manner. getAbstract offers a free trial to qualifying organizations that want to empower their workforce with curated expert knowledge.Applicable – You’ll get advice that can be directly applied in the workplace or in everyday situations. Drive, the subject of the next two chapters, refers to powerful emotional motivators such as curiosity, passion, and purpose. These are feelings that drive behavior automatically.1 This is the big deal. When most people think about motivation, they’re actually thinking about persistence—meaning the stuff we need to keep going once our drive has left us. Consider the simplest drive: curiosity. When we’re curious about a subject, doing the hard work to learn more about that subject doesn’t feel like hard work. It requires effort, for certain, but it feels like play. And when work becomes play, that’s one way to know for sure: Now, you’re playing the infinite game. Flow is defined as “an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.”10 It is the state created by evolution to enable peak performance. This is why, in every domain, whenever the impossible becomes possible, flow always plays a starring role. The neurobiology of flow is the mechanism beneath the art of impossible.

The Art Of Impossible - Steven Kotler

For three years, the author struggled with Lyme disease, an illness that can cause flu-like symptoms and severe brain fog. The disease reduced him to a shadow of his former self, leaving him barely able to walk, and with reduced concentration and failing vision.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.