The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer

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The place to begin is with motivation, which is what starts us down the path of peak performance. Yet, motivation, as psychologists use the term, is actually a catch-all for three subsets of skills: drive, grit, and goals.

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But how to make sure you stay in the game long enough to achieve your purpose—that’s exactly where we’re going next. Bestselling author and peak performance expert Steven Kotler decodes the secrets of those elite performers-athletes, artists, scientists, CEOs and more-who have changed our definition of the possible, teaching us how we too can stretch far beyond our capabilities, making impossible dreams much more attainable for all of us.In practice, we are going to work our way through four main sections, exploring motivation, learning, creativity, and flow in turn. In each section, I’m going to break down what science can tell us about how these skills work in the brain and body, then, through a series of exercises, teach you the best ways to apply this information in your own life. Yet, there’s no secret secret. After decades spent researching this subject and training people to overcome those odds, I’ve repeatedly learned the same lesson: if you devote your life to accomplishing lowercase i impossibles, you can sometimes end up accomplishing a capital I impossible along the way. Flow’s impact on both our physical and our mental abilities is considerable.11 On the physical side, strength, endurance, and muscle reaction times all significantly increase while our sense of pain, exertion, and exhaustion all significantly decrease.

The Art of Impossible – HarperCollins The Art of Impossible – HarperCollins

Stalking the impossible demands digging deep on a daily basis. Laotzu wasn’t wrong: the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.2 But it’s still a journey of a thousand miles. Uphill, in the dark, both ways. What does it take to accomplish the impossible? What does it take to shatter our limitations, exceed our expectations, and turn our biggest dreams into our most recent achievements? Evolution shaped the brain to enable survival. But evolution itself is driven forward by the availability of resources. Scarcity of resources is always the largest threat to our survival, making it the largest driver of evolution. And there are only two possible responses to this threat. You can fight over dwindling resources, or you can go exploring, get creative, innovative, and cooperative, and make new resources.The Art of Impossible is a must-read! Steven Kotler is one of a handful of people on the planet with a deep understanding of the frontiers of human performance. His ability to bring applied neuroscience and psychology to life through storytelling is world-class. This book is a treasure. Dr. Michael Gervais

The Art of Impossible” is Changing My Life - Medium How “The Art of Impossible” is Changing My Life - Medium

Flow is defined as “an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.”10 It is the state created by evolution to enable peak performance. This is why, in every domain, whenever the impossible becomes possible, flow always plays a starring role. The neurobiology of flow is the mechanism beneath the art of impossible. Of course, describing flow as an “optimal state of consciousness” doesn’t get us very far. More specifically, the term refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption when you get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Action and awareness merge. Your sense of self vanishes. Time passes strangely. And performance—performance just soars. Now for the practical concerns: When it comes to crafting your purpose, dream big. This is going to become the overarching mission statement for your life. Your capital I: Impossible. Next comes meaning and purpose, which require connecting our individual passion to a cause much greater than ourselves. Once this happens, we see oxytocin added to the equation and an even bigger increase in core performance traits such as focus, productivity, and resilience, and our intrinsic fire burns that much hotter.18 Finally, once you have a purpose, you need to layer on the two remaining intrinsic drivers: autonomy and mastery. More specifically, once you have a purpose, the system demands autonomy, which is the freedom to pursue that purpose. Then the system requires mastery, which is the desire to continually improve the skills needed to pursue that purpose.Now that you’ve identified the spots where curiosities overlap, play in those intersections for a little while. Devote twenty to thirty minutes a day to listening to podcasts, watching videos, reading articles, books, whatever, on any aspect of that overlap. If you’re interested in supply-chain management in the health care industry and you’re also curious about artificial intelligence, then it’s time to explore the advantages and disadvantages that artificial intelligence brings to supply-chain management in the health care industry. Next, look for spots where your core passion intersects with one or more of these grand, global challenges—a place where your personal obsession might be a solution to some collective problem. The overlap between passion and purpose, that’s what you’re hunting. If you can zero in on that target, you’ve found a way to use your newfound passion to do some real good in the world. That’s a legitimate massively transformative purpose. This book is a tour de force of high performance. It’s an essential resource for those looking to align their curiosity, passion, and purpose to have not just a little more flow and creativity in their lives but to have a lot more flow and creativity. Want to learn how to take your innovation to seemingly impossible heights? Steven Kotler will teach you how. SCOTT BARRY KAUFMAN