Steven Kotler Quotes

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

This is another reason why flow states significantly enhance performance: when the “self” disappears, it takes many of our limits along for the ride.

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.

Es como el agua en el cubo en una noria. Si se vierte suficiente agua en un cubo, tarde o temprano se derrama en el siguiente cubo, y en el siguiente. Es así de mecánico.

Imagination,” says futurist and philosopher Jason Silva, “allows us to conceive of delightful future possibilities, pick the most amazing one, and pull the present forward to meet it.

Fully alive and deeply committed is a risky business.

In an environment of turbulent change, as de Geus famously wrote: “The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.

The happiest people on earth worked hard for their fulfillment. They didn’t just have the most peak experiences, they had devoted their lives to having these experiences, often, as Csikszentmihalyi explained in his 1996 book Creativity, going to extreme lengths to seek them out: It was clear from talking to them, that what kept them motivated was the quality of the experience they felt when they were involved with the activity. The feeling didn’t come when they were relaxing, when they were taking drugs or alcohol, or when they were consuming the expensive privileges of wealth. Rather, it often involved painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.

Curiosity into passion; passion into purpose; and purpose into patient profit — that’s the safest way to play this game.

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.

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.

The point at which someone goes into REM is a fantastic indicator of depressive tendencies,” said Britton. “We’ve gotten very good at this kind of research. If you took 100 people and did a sleep study, we can look at the data and know, by looking at the time they entered REM, who’s going to become depressed in the next year and who isn’t.” Normal people enter REM at 90 minutes. Depressed people enter at 60 minutes or sooner. It works the same in the other direction. Happy people go into REM around 100 minutes. Britton found that the vast majority of her near-death group entered REM sleep at 110 minutes — a rating that is nearly off-the-charts for overall life-satisfaction and a neurophysiological correlate that supports the anecdotal evidence that these strange states are literally and completely transformative.

the upper echelon of adventure sport athletes are grappling with the fundamental properties of the universe: gravity, velocity and sanity. They’re toying with them, cheating death, refusing to accept there might be limits to what they can accomplish.

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.

Nothing’s too gnarly.