Steven Kotler Quotes

Once, unfortunately, in a crisis situation (as the Greek poet Archilochus pointed out so long ago) we don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training. Once again, the issue is fear. The more fear in the equation, the fewer options at our disposal. In times of strife, the brain limits our choices to speed up our reaction times. The extreme example being, fight or flight, where the situation is so dire, that the brain gives us only potential actions. Freezing is the third, yet the same thing happens to a lesser degree under any high stress conditions. And the responses we fall back upon under duress, are the ones we fully automatized: those habitual patterns we've executed over and over again.

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.

Every good athlete can find the flow,” continues Pastrana, “but it’s what you do with it that makes you great. If you consistently use that state to do the impossible, you get confident in your ability to do the impossible. You begin to expect it. That’s why we’re seeing so much progression in action sports today. It’s the natural result of a whole lot of people starting to expect the impossible.

It’s not how good you are; it’s how good you want to be.

Nothing’s too gnarly.

When you’re arrogant and egotistical,” says Dr. Olds, “you’re shutting out complexity, novelty, and unpredictability to preserve a distorted self-image. Any incoming information that could lead to self-doubt is stamped out. It’s a massive data reduction. Humility moves in the other direction, it opens us up and increases incoming information. As a result, there is more opportunity for pattern recognition, more dopamine, and less need for judgmental metacognition.

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.

El valor, el tema del capítulo 5, es lo que la mayoría de la gente piensa cuando se habla de motivación. Es la persistencia, la determinación y la fortaleza, es decir, la capacidad de continuar con el viaje sin importar las dificultades que se presenten.

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with which you should be inoculated? Behold, I teach you the overman: He is this lightning; he is this frenzy. – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

The move from self-authoring to self-transforming for example? Fewer than 5 percent of us ever make that jump.

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

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.

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

This means flow packs a double punch: it doesn’t just increase our decision-making abilities — it increases our creative decision-making abilities. Dramatically.

Flow starts when we say yes to the fight.