Steven Kotler Quotes

The great civil rights leader Howard Thurman once said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs most is more people who have come alive.

Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness,

As William James pointed out, humans are habit machines.

When Felix walked off the project,” says Walshe, “it was the darkest moment in his life. But a phobia — that’s deeply rooted fear. To face that, to come back, to trust strangers with his life, to put himself back into position to do something no one else had ever conceived of? I’ve seen plenty of astounding feats of human performance, but emotionally, Felix’s journey is the farthest I’ve ever seen an athlete come.

Flow tends to be the psychic signature of world-class performance and paradigm-shifting breakthroughs,

In flow, we are so focused on the task at hand that everything else falls away. Action and awareness merge. Time flies. Self vanishes. Performance goes through the roof.

After all those neurochemicals are drained out, it takes a while for them to replenish so on the back end of flow state...I can barely string sentences together. I become stupid.

Most of us arrive in our fifties feeling that the cage has gotten smaller. What’s actually shrunk is our mindset. We’re in a prison of our own making. Once we discover we can keep on learning later in life, that mindset shifts. The cage vanishes. This changes everything.

Lion glances back at the pigeons. Sees a flicker he didn’t notice before. Remembers that the de-extinction program was a failed effort, realizes he’s looking at a light-vert. An AR projection of an almost. The bad dreams of a society disguised as a good time.

mindset impacts emotion, which alters biology, which increases performance. Thus, it seemed, by tinkering with mindset — using everything from physical to psychological to pharmacological interventions — one could significantly enhance performance.

transient hypofrontality removes our sense of self. With parts of the prefrontal cortex deactivated, there’s no risk assessor, future predictor, or inner critic around to monitor the situation. The normal safety measures kept in place by the conscious mind are no longer. This is another reason why flow states significantly enhance performance: when the “self” disappears, it takes many of our limits along for the ride.

The past three decades have witnessed unprecedented growth in what researchers now term ultimate human performance. This is not the same as optimal human performance, and the difference is in the consequences. Optimal performance is about being your best; ultimate performance is about being your best when any mistake could kill. Both common sense and evolutionary biology tell us that progress under these “ultimate” conditions should be a laggard’s game, but that’s not exactly what the data suggests.

The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.

Once danger becomes its own reward, risk moves from a threat to be avoided to a challenge to be risen toward. An entirely new relationship with fear begins to develop. When risk is a challenge, fear becomes a compass — literally pointing people in the direction they need to go next (i.e., the direction that produces more flow). “If you’re interested in mastery,” says University of Cambridge, England, neuropsychologist Barbara Sahakian, “you have to learn this lesson. To really achieve anything, you have to be able to tolerate and enjoy risk. It has to become a challenge to look forward to. In all fields, to make exceptional discoveries you need risk — you’re just never going to have a breakthrough without it.

Fully alive and deeply committed is a risky business.