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

by Steven Kotler

If you’ve ever lost an afternoon to a great conversation or gotten so involved in a work project that all else is forgotten, then you’ve tasted the experience. 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.

Everything you do, you do better in flow, from baking a chocolate cake to planning a vacation to solving a differential equation to writing a business plan to playing tennis to making love. Flow is the doorway to the ‘more’ most of us seek. Rather than telling ourselves to get used to it, that’s all there is, instead learn how to enter into flow. There you will find, in manageable doses, all the ‘more’ you need.” Flow is an optimal state of consciousness, a peak state where we both feel our best and perform our best.

So potent is this dictate that in 1973 the psychologist Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize for The Denial of Death, arguing that everything we think of as civilization–from the cities we build to the religions we believe in–is nothing beyond an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the awful knowledge of our own mortality.

It was a trail of mechanism: mindset impacts emotion, which alters biology, which increases performance. Thus, it seemed, by tinkering with mindset—using everything from physical to psychological to pharmacological interventions—one could significantly enhance performance.