Steven Kotler Quotes

Instead, over the past thirty years, in the world of action and adventure sports, in situations where asses really were on the line, the bounds of the possible have been pushed further and faster than ever before in history. We’ve seen near-exponential growth in ultimate human performance, which is both hyperbolic paradox and considerable mystery. Somehow, a generation’s worth of iconoclastic misfits have rewritten the rules of the feasible, not just raising the bar but often obliterating it altogether. And this brings up one final question: Where–if anywhere–do our actual limits lie?

All you can do is your inch. We grab everyone we can carry, put each other onto our backs, and crawl toward the future. Inch by inch — it’s all we can do.

When people say that animal rescuers are crazy, what they really mean is that animal rescuers share a number of fundamental beliefs that makes them easy to marginalize. Among those is the belief that Rene Descartes was a jackass.

That’s because at the Flow Genome Project10 we study the relationship between altered states and peak performance, focused primarily on the experience known as flow. Defined as an “optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best,” flow refers to those “in the zone” moments where focus gets so intense that everything else disappears. Action and awareness start to merge. Our sense of self vanishes.
Our sense of time as well. And all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof.

"So I'm heading for Truth or Consequences."

"Aren't we all," says Lorenzo, "aren't we all."

Our limits are governed by flow’s ability to amplify performance as much as by imagination’s ability to dream up that performance.

the failure of language.” “It’s a creative destruction. Out of that failure comes culture. Out of culture comes desire. Out of desire come products.

And the benefits of selflessness go beyond silencing our inner critic. When free from the confines of our normal identity, we are able to look at life, and the often repetitive stories we tell about it, with fresh eyes. Come Monday morning, we may still clamber back into the monkey suits of our everyday roles — parent, spouse, employee, boss, neighbor — but, by then, we know they’re just costumes with zippers.

the Altered States Economy totals out to roughly $4 trillion a year. That’s a sizable chunk of our income that we annually tithe to the Church of the Ecstatic. We spend more on this than we do on maternity care, humanitarian aid, and K–12 education combined.” It’s larger than the gross national product of Britain, India, or Russia. And to really put this in perspective, it’s twice as many dollars as there are known galaxies in the entire

No one can claim their particular vision of the divine as correct, if there are thousands of other 'visions' with which to compare it. And anyone who does try to claim the spotlight? Even a few decades ago, they could have started a cult. These days, they'll just get trolled online, then ignored.

After three decades of research, Zimbardo found that the healthiest, happiest, highest performers blend the best of both worlds. The optimal time perspective combines the energy, joy, and openness of Presents, with the strength, fortitude, and long-term vision of the Futures.

Flow starts when we say yes to the fight.

These experiences were profound — people were radically different on the other side. Happier, more content, significantly more fulfilled.

This automatic feedback is another reason extreme athletes have found flow so frequently, but what if we’re interested in pulling this trigger without help from the laws of physics? No mystery here. Tighten feedback loops. Put mechanisms in place so attention doesn’t have to wander. Ask for more input. How much input? Well, forget quarterly reviews. Think daily reviews. Studies have found that in professions with less direct feedback loops — stock analysis, psychiatry, and medicine — even the best get worse over time.

A “rich environment” is a combination platter of novelty, unpredictability, and complexity — three elements that catch and hold our attention much like risk. Novelty means both danger and opportunity. To our forbearers, a strange scent in the wind could be prey or predator, but either way it paid to pay attention. Unpredictability means we don’t know what happens next, thus we pay extra attention to what happens next. Complexity, when there’s lots of salient information coming at us at once, does more of the same.