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

by Steven Kotler

In fact, when it comes to examples of the accelerated progression that results from raising children in high-flow environments, we can look much closer to home: in the classrooms, gardens, and playgrounds of Montessori schools the world over. While exploring the threads of his seminal research on flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his graduate students went on a quest to find the most “flow-prone” learning environments around. Montessori topped the list. The educational philosophy pioneered by Maria Montessori in the early portion of the twentieth century is built around self-directed learning, long periods of intense concentration, and deep physicality (it’s often called “embodied education”) and has been repeatedly shown to produce far greater amounts of flow than more traditional methodologies. The results? While the data is still far from complete, a 2006 study published in the journal Science by University of Virginia psychologist Angeline Lillard found Montessori kids outperformed regular students on everything from academic tests to social skills to creative abilities to executive function. Other studies have extended these findings from the classroom to the boardroom. When professors Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of the globe-spanning business school INSEAD surveyed over 3,000 executives and interviewed 500 people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products, they too found a Montessori connection. As Gregersen to...