Kegan spent three decades tracking this group,32 seeing what happened to their psychological maturity and capacity along the way. He discovered that … - Steven Kotler

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Kegan spent three decades tracking this group,32 seeing what happened to their psychological maturity and capacity along the way. He discovered that while some adults remained frozen in time, a select few achieved meaningful growth. Right around middle age, for example, Kegan noticed that some people moved beyond generally well-adjusted adulthood, or what he called “Self-Authoring,” into a different stage entirely: “Self-Transforming.” Defined by heightened empathy, an expanded capacity to hold differing and even conflicting perspectives, and a general flexibility in how you think of yourself, self-transforming is the developmental stage we tend to associate with wisdom (and Roger Martin’s Opposable Mind). But not everyone gets to be wise. While it usually takes three to five years for adults to move through a given stage of development, Kegan found that the further you go up that pyramid, the fewer people make it to the next stage. The move from self-authoring to self-transforming for example? Fewer than 5 percent of us ever make that jump.

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About Steven Kotler

Steven Kotler is an American author, journalist and entrepreneur. He is best known for his nonfiction books, including Abundance, A Small Furry Prayer, West of Jesus, Bold, The Rise of Superman and Stealing Fire.

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Additional quotes by Steven Kotler

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

And the dark night of flow is an issue that society has not made particularly easy to handle. How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors — activities packed with flow triggers — because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like “career” or “children”? How many, now grown up and done with childish things, have put away the surfboard, the skateboard, the whatever? How many have made the mistake of conflating the value of the vehicle that leads us to an experience (the surfboard, etc.) with the value of the experience itself (the flow state)?

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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.

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