Steven Kotler Quotes

To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities. . . . I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.

There wasn’t anything wrong with these dogs. I wanted to take them all home with me. The whole damn warehouse of misery. Just strap it to my back and get the fuck out of the way.

As journalist Nancy Gibbs once quipped in Time magazine, “IQ gets you hired, but EQ gets you promoted.

As William James pointed out, humans are habit machines.

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.

Tell me what you value and I might believe you,” management guru Peter Drucker once said, “but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you what you really value.

Temple University sports psychologist Michael Sachs, who made an extensive study of these states, summed this up nicely: “Every gold medal or world championship that’s ever been won, most likely, we now know, there’s a flow state behind the victory.

It is not often that Death is told so clearly to fuck off.

Creatives fail and the really good ones fail often.

From a quality-of-life perspective, psychologists have found that the people who have the most flow in their lives are the happiest people on earth.

work for everyone. Put differently, at the Collective, we have a saying: “Personality doesn’t scale. Biology scales.” What we mean is, in the field of peak performance, too often, someone figures out what works for them and then assumes it will work for others. It rarely does. More often, it backfires. The issue is that personality is extremely individual. Traits that play a critical role in peak performance — such as your risk tolerance or where you land on the introversion-to-extroversion scale — are genetically coded, neurobiologically hardwired, and difficult to change. Add in all the possible environmental influences that come from variations in cultural background, financial means, and social status, and the problem compounds. For all these reasons, what works for me is almost guaranteed not to work for you. Personality doesn’t scale. Biology, on the other hand, scales. It is the very thing designed by evolution to work for everyone. And this tells us something important about decoding the impossible: if we can get below the level of personality, beneath the squishy and often subjective psychology of peak performance, and decode the foundational neurobiology, then we unearth mechanism. Basic biological mechanism. Shaped by evolution, present in most mammals and all humans. And this leads us to the next question: What’s the biological formula for the impossible? The answer is flow. Flow is defined as “an optimal state of

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.

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.

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.

Neurons that fire together wire together.