Steven Kotler: The Rise of Superman

• The point is this: when the brain is charged with a clear goal, focus narrows considerably, the unimportant is disregarded, and the now is all that’s left.
• In today’s world, rarely do we give ourselves permission to recover; rarely does anyone else. Finish one project and there are always a dozen more deadlines to be met. In fact, in most of our lives, the reward for having a high-flow experience and pulling off something challenging at work is usually more work, more responsibilities, and less time to meet them all. Yet if we want to flow from cycle to cycle, we need to take full advantage of recovery to regroup and recharge. In short, on this path, you have to go slow to go fast.
• Flow is an extremely potent response to external events and requires an extraordinary set of signals. The process includes dopamine, which does more than tune signal-to-noise ratios. Emotionally, we feel dopamine as engagement, excitement
• Immediate feedback, our next internal trigger, is another shortcut into the now. The term refers to a direct, in-the-moment coupling between cause and effect. The smaller the gap between input and output, the more we know how we’re doing and how to do it better.
• Flow appears near the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety, in what scientists call the flow channel—the spot where the task is hard enough to make us stretch but not hard enough to make us snap. How hard is that? Answers vary, but the general thinking is about 4 percent. That’s it. That’s the sweet spot. If you want to trigger flow, the challenge should be 4 percent greater than the skills.
• next neurotransmitter is anandamide, which takes its name from the Sanskrit word for “bliss”—and for good reason. Anandamide is an endogenous cannabinoid, and similarly feels like the psychoactive effect found in marijuana. Known to show up in exercise-induced flow states (and suspected in other kinds), this chemical elevates mood, relieves pain, dilates blood vessels and bronchial tubes (aiding respiration), and amplifies lateral thinking (our ability to link disparate ideas together). More critically, anandamide also inhibits our ability to feel fear, even, possibly, according to research done at Duke, facilitates the extinction of long-term fear memories
• Those who have “fixed mindsets” believe abilities like intelligence and athletic talent are innate and unchangeable—i.e., fixed at birth. Those with “growth mindsets” believe abilities are gained through dedication and hard work, that natural-born talents are merely starting points for a much longer learning process
• The short answer is that a growth mindset is one of the secrets to maximizing the total amount of flow in your life. The longer answer starts with the challenge/skill ratio. If you consistently overestimate or underestimate your abilities, then tuning that ratio is like playing darts handcuffed and blindfolded. To find 4 percent, you need accurate self-knowledge—and this is tricky for fixed mindsetters.
• When interviewed fourteen years later, the kids who could wait were more self-confident, hard-working, and self-reliant. They could handle stress better and could handle tests better. Those who resisted at four ended up scoring 210 points higher on their SATs at sixteen. This may not sound like that much, but, as fellow Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains: “[That] is as large as the average difference recorded between the abilities of economically advantaged and disadvantaged children. It is larger than the difference between the abilities of children from families who parents have graduate degrees and children whose parents did not finish high school. The ability to delay gratification at four is twice as good a predictor of later SAT scores as IQ. Poor impulse control is also a better predictor of juvenile delinquency than IQ
• Yet flow is not binary. The state is just one step in a four-part flow cycle. It’s impossible to experience flow without moving through this entire cycle. And this brings us to the second critical misconception: that flow always feels flowy
• Applying this idea in our daily life means breaking tasks into bite-size chunks and setting goals accordingly. A writer, for example, is better off trying to pen three great paragraphs at a time—the equivalent of moving through Mandy-Rae’s kick cycles—rather than attempting one great chapter. Think challenging, yet manageable—just enough stimulation to shortcut attention into the now, not enough stress to pull you back out again.
• The last external flow trigger, “deep embodiment,” is a kind of full-body awareness
• The first step in the flow cycle is known as “struggle.” Herbert Benson, the Harvard cardiologist who did much of the foundational research on this cycle, chose that name for a reason. Struggle is a loading phase: we are overloading the brain with information.
• A number of these social triggers are already familiar. The first three—serious concentration; shared, clear goals; good communication (i.e., lots of immediate feedback)—are the collective versions of individual preconditions identified by Csikszentmihalyi. Two more—equal participation and an element of risk (mental, physical, whatever)—are self-explanatory given what we already know about flow. The remaining five require a little more information. Familiarity, our next trigger, means the group has a common language, a shared knowledge base, and a communication style based on unspoken understandings. It means everybody is always on the same page, and, when novel insights arise, momentum is not lost due to the need for lengthy explanation. Then there’s blending egos—which is the collective version of the same sort of humility that allowed Doug Ammons to merge with the Stikine. When egos have been blended, no one’s hogging the spotlight and everyone’s thoroughly involved. A sense of control combines autonomy (being free to do what you want) and competence (being good at what you do). It’s about getting to choose your own challenges and having the necessary skills to surmount them. Close listening occurs when we’re fully engaged in the here and now. In conversation, this isn’t about thinking about what witty thing to say next, or what cutting sarcasm came last. Rather, it’s generating real-time, unplanned responses to the dialogue as it unfolds. Always say yes, our final trigger, means interactions should be additive more than argumentative. The goal here is the momentum, togetherness, and innovation that comes from ceaselessly amplifying each other’s ideas and actions. It’s a trigger based on the first rule of improv comedy. If I open a sketch with, “Hey, there’s a blue elephant in the bathroom,” then “No, there’s not,” is the wrong response. With the denial, the scene goes nowhere. But if the reply is affirmative instead—“Yeah, sorry, there was no more space in the cereal cupboard”—well then that story goes someplace interesting.
• Consider the chain of events that takes us from pattern recognition through future prediction. Norepinephrine tightens focus (data acquisition); dopamine jacks pattern recognition (data processing); anandamide accelerates lateral thinking (widens the database searched by the pattern recognition system).
• How we handle these negative feelings is critical. In struggle, we’re using the conscious mind to identify patterns, then repeating those patterns enough times that they become chunks. Until that happens, we are awkward and uncomfortable. To move through struggle takes a leap of faith that the effort will really result in skill acquisition
• The next stage in the cycle is “release.” To move out of struggle and into flow, you must first pass through this second stage. Release means to take your mind off the problem, to, as Benson says, “completely sever prior thought and emotional patterns.” If you’ve been cramming for a test all day, go for a walk
• neurochemicals are “information molecules” used by the brain to transmit messages. Mostly, these messages are either excitatory or inhibitory: Do more of what you’re doing or Do less of what you’re doing.
• By increasing attention, information flow, and pattern recognition in the brain, and heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle firing timing in the body, dopamine serves as a formidable skill-booster as well.
• The sensation Ammons is describing is the “paradox of control,” another of flow’s defining characteristics. The paradox is real power in places we should have none. It’s that sense of controlling the uncontrollable familiar to day traders and emergency-room surgeons, only here taken to its farthest extreme.
• our third flow conspirator, also come with a hell of a high. These natural “endogenous” (meaning naturally internal to the body) opiates relieve pain and produce pleasure much like “exogenous” (externally added to the body) opiates like heroin. Potent too. The most commonly produced endorphin is 100 times more powerful than medical morphine.
• the tail end of a flow state, it also appears (more research needs to be done) that the brain releases serotonin, the neurochemical now associated with SSRIs like Prozac. “It’s a molecule involved in helping people cope with adversity,”
• , we move into the fourth and final step in the cycle: “recovery.” Flow is an extremely expensive state for the body to produce and maintain. It requires a lot of energy and a lot of neurochemistry and both take a little while to replenish. This is some of what goes on in recovery. More important, memory consolidation is taking place
• consider what these abused drugs do. The primary illicit drug of choice is marijuana—that triggers the release of anandamide. Antidepressants are some combination of dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin; tobacco and ADHD drugs affect dopamine and norepinephrine; and prescription drugs of abuse are opioids like Oxycontin—meaning they affect the endorphin system. In other words, Americans are literally killing themselves trying to achieve artificially the same sensations that flow produces naturally
• 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. But how to produce this blended perspective is the more important question.
• As we know these facts, we also know a bit about hacking the “high consequence” flow trigger. For starters, risk is always relative. While some danger must be courted for flow, confrontations with mortality are not required. In fact, even physical risk itself is optional. A shy man need only cross the room to say hello to an attractive woman to trigger this rush. In casual conversation, merely telling someone the truth can serve the same purpose
• He was also depending on two other external triggers—“rich environment” and “deep embodiment”—to keep him in the state. A “rich environment” is a combination platter of novelty, unpredictability, and complexity—three elements that catch and hold our attention much like risk
• If we want to pull the deep embodiment trigger in less extreme environments, then we simply have to learn to pay attention to all these input streams. This isn’t hard. Zen walking meditation teaches an open-senses/all-senses awareness
• the zone, the flow state itself, is the third stage in this cycle. Struggle gives way to release gives way to flow—hallelujah
• Internal triggers are psychological strategies that drive attention into the now. Back in the 1970s, Csikszentmihalyi identified “clear goals,” “immediate feedback,” and “the challenge/skill ratio” as the three most critical. Let’s take a closer look.
• Clear goals that define immediate success” is how this first trigger is typically described. Generally, the thinking’s been that clear goals help identify our task (so we know what to do) and align that task with belief (so we know why we’re doing it). But the most important piece, as University of Illinois cognitive scientist Daniel Simons discovered, is how clear goals impact attention
• Norepinephrine provides another boost. In the body, it speeds up heart rate, muscle tension, and respiration, and triggers glucose release so we have more energy. In the brain, norepinephrine increases arousal, attention, neural efficiency, and emotional control. In flow, it keeps us locked on target, holding distractions at bay. And as a pleasure-inducer, if dopamine’s drug analog is cocaine, norepinephrine’s is speed