Steven Kotler Quotes

Without question, paddling fast enough to catch a possibility wave like abundance means we’ll need the most capable versions of ourselves doing the paddling. We’ll need to be better, faster, stronger, smarter. We’ll need intrinsic motivation and incredible cooperation. Our imaginations will have to be deeply engaged; our creative selves operating at their full Picasso. In other words, if we’re interested in forging a future of abundance, then we’re going to need flow.

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.

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.

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

Fully alive and deeply committed is a risky business.

as Thomas Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow, “It is not often that Death is told so clearly to fuck off.

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

happiness raises nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37 percent, productivity by 31 percent, and accuracy on tasks by 19 percent,

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

The Greeks called that sudden understanding anamnesis. Literally, “the forgetting of the forgetting.

Those highlight moments forever seared in your memory: that too is group flow in action.

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.

He’s a carnivore, thinks Lion, always remember he’s a carnivore.

Sooner or later, there’s always a Jaws: a mental hurdle we can’t clear, a decision too dangerous to attack head on. In those situations, sideways is forward.