The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

by Steven Kotler

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.

Flow is an optimal state of consciousness, a peak state where we both feel our best and perform our best.

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs most is more people who have come alive.”

in the world of action and adventure sports, the easiest way to hunt genius is to look for those athletes consistently betting their asses on the impossible.

Optimal performance is about being your best; ultimate performance is about being your best when any mistake could kill.

high-risk activity can profoundly alter consciousness and significantly enhance mental abilities.

“Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.”

“Great emergencies and crisis show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”

“Every good athlete can find the flow,” continues Pastrana, “but it’s what you do with it that makes you great. If you consistently use that state to do the impossible, you get confident in your ability to do the impossible.

“During a peak experience,” Maslow explained, “the individual experiences an expansion of self, a sense of unity, and meaningfulness in life. The experience lingers in one’s consciousness and gives a sense of purpose, integration, self-determination and empathy.”

when Csikszentmihalyi dove deeper into the data, he discovered that the happiest people on earth, the ones who felt their lives had the most meaning, were those who had the most peak experiences.

“we’re essentially paying to watch people in a flow state. Whether it’s Kobe Bryant, Roger Federer, Jay-Z, or a jazz crooner, they’ve all put in endless hours of work so that when performance time comes, they are fully present and in flow.

The angel was alpha. It was the implicit system saying ‘let’s go for it, we know what to do.’ The devil was beta — it was the explicit system saying ‘hold up a second, let’s just gather more data.’ But the angel won.

Laird Hamilton once explained in an interview with Bon Hawaii: “[T]he true challenge is how you continue doing it, after you’ve ridden the biggest wave, crossed the longest distance. You set up challenges that are more than what you ever did before. And by getting through it, you get the sensation you’ve completed something. And if it’s dangerous, then other things that scare you, the experience will strengthen you for those situations.”

Focus was the key to getting past the fear — and everything else as well.

“I was following the Voice,” he recounts, “and more focused than I’d ever been. I was doing everything I could to cultivate that heightened awareness. I was down there alone, sleeping under rocks, not talking to anyone, meditating — all to help strengthen my intuition. The Voice said climb, so that’s what I did.”

In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi explains further: “One of the most common descriptions of optimal experience is that time no longer seems to pass the way it ordinarily does. The objective, external duration we measure with reference to outside events like night and day, or the orderly progression of clocks, is rendered irrelevant by the rhythms dictated by the activity.… [I]n general, most people report that time seems to pass much faster. But occasionally the reverse occurs.”

“They didn’t move faster, but it looks like they thought faster.”

Norepinephrine tightens focus (data acquisition); dopamine jacks pattern recognition (data processing); anandamide accelerates lateral thinking (widens the database searched by the pattern recognition system). The results, as basketball legend Bill Russell explains in his biography Second Wind, really do feel psychic:

Ever fall in love? That high — the sleeplessness, giddiness, hyperactivity, loss of appetite, etc. — that’s dopamine and norepinephrine at work. These are the neurochemicals that reinforce romantic love.

Risk heightens focus and flow follows focus.

Flow is the rush of possibility: a product of radical neurochemical, neuroelectrical, and neuroanatomical function triggering whole-body transformation.

Devore concludes: “I really think we’re the next stage in human evolution.”

flow is the telephone booth where Clark Kent changes clothes, the place from ...

Prodigies, it seemed, were made, not born. As Bloom later told reporters: “We were looking for exceptional kids, but what we found were exceptional conditions.”

“I’m doing what I love,” explains McConkey. “And if you’re doing what you want to do all the time, then you’re happy. You’re not going to work everyday wishing you were doing something else. I get up and go to work everyday and I’m stoked. That does not suck.”

“Adventure sports form a modern Tao,” he once told reporters, “allowing us to take part in the very forces that sculpted and shaped the world around us.”

“Studies have shown that each time a flow state is disrupted it takes fifteen minutes to get back into flow, if you can get back at all.”

extreme athletes rely on risk to drive focus, the requisite first step toward producing flow.

Once danger becomes its own reward, risk moves from a threat to be avoided to a challenge to be risen toward.

When risk is a challenge, fear becomes a compass — literally pointing people in the direction they need to go next (i.e., the direction that produces more flow).

A shy man need only cross the room to say hello to an attractive woman to trigger this rush.

“To reach flow,” explains Harvard psychiatrist Ned Hallowell, “one must be willing to take risks. The lover must lay bare his soul and risk rejection and humiliation to enter this state. The athlete must be willing to risk physical harm, even loss of life, to enter this state. The artist must be willing to be scorned and despised by critics and the public and still push on. And the average person — you and me — must be willing to fail, look foolish, and fall flat on our faces should we wish to enter this state.”

You can’t control this river, you can’t muscle through it, you have to become part of it, you have to flow with it.”

A “rich environment” is a combination platter of novelty, unpredictability, and complexity — three elements that catch and hold our attention much like risk.

Unpredictability means we don’t know what happens next, thus we pay extra attention to what happens next.

for those of us who want to take advantage of this fact, yet have no interest in action and adventure sports? Simple: Seek out complexity, especially in nature.

If you can’t get into flow, if you can’t melt into the water, become part of the water, then you can’t freedive — there’s just no other way to go deep.”

Cruickshank has trained herself to keep attention right here, right now — which is the only time flow can show up and the only time we’re capable of extraordinary.

when the brain is charged with a clear goal, focus narrows considerably, the unimportant is disregarded, and the now is all that’s left.

If creating more flow is our aim, then the emphasis falls on “clear” and not “goals.” Clarity gives us certainty. We know what to do and we know where to focus our attention while doing it. When goals are clear, metacognition is replaced by in-the-moment cognition, and the self stays out of the picture.

Applying this idea in our daily life means breaking tasks into bite-size chunks and setting goals accordingly.

Think challenging, yet manageable — just enough stimulation to shortcut attention into the now, not enough stress to pull you back out again.

When feedback is immediate, the information we require is always close at hand. Attention doesn’t have to wander; the conscious mind need not get involved.

Surgeons, by contrast, are the only class of physician that improve the longer they’re out of medical school. Why? Mess up on the table and someone dies. That’s immediate feedback.

In the big waves, big rivers, and big-mountains, a half degree of difficulty can mean the difference between home for dinner and never home again. Under these conditions, the desire for improvement keeps athletes from understepping, and the need for survival from overstepping.

when we don’t know what’s going to happen next, we pay more attention to the next. Uncertainty is our rocket ride into the now.

drivers with growth mindsets were able to enter flow more quickly and stay there no matter what went wrong during the race. Across the board, they were the winning drivers.

“It’s not how good you are; it’s how good you want to be.” He has a growth mindset.

Group flow is a social unifier and social leveler, creating what cultural anthropologists call “communitas” — that deep solidarity and togetherness that results from shared transcendent experiences.