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

by Steven Kotler

a recent Gallup survey found that 71 percent of American workers were “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their jobs. Think about this for a moment: two out of three of us hate what we do with the majority of our time.

Greylock partner venture capitalist James Slavet, in a recent article for Forbes.com,

“Imagination,” says futurist and philosopher Jason Silva, “allows us to conceive of delightful future possibilities, pick the most amazing one, and pull the present forward to meet it.

Clear goals: Expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities. Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high. Concentration: A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness: The merging of action and awareness. Distorted sense of time: One’s subjective experience of time is altered. Direct and immediate feedback: Successes and failures are apparent, so behavior can be adjusted as

needed. Balance between ability level and challenge: The activity is neither too easy nor too difficult. A sense of personal control over the situation. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so action is effortlessness. A lack of awareness of bodily needs. Absorption: narrowing of awareness down to the activity itself.

Still, out of this total, three of the components—clear goals, immediate feedback, and the challenge/skill ratio (all of which we’ll explore in greater detail later)—are considered “conditions for flow.” They do not actually describe the state itself.

These five chemicals are flow’s mighty cocktail. Alone, each packs a punch, together a wallop. 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).

Once JT’s pattern recognition system recognizes that his wing’s are powered up, he can relax and—according to experiments run by Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson—that’s flow’s real trigger. This so-called relaxation response floods the body with high quantities of nitric oxide (NO)—an endogenous gaseous signaling molecule. “[T]he NO,” writes Benson, “counteracts the norepinephrine and other stress secretions. Simultaneously, as the NO puffs billow forth in the brain and body, the brain releases calming neurotransmitters…such as dopamine and endorphins. As a result of these secretions, the blood vessels dilate or open up, the heart rate decreases, the stress response fades, and inner tranquility takes over.

A “rich environment” is a combination platter of novelty, unpredictability, and complexity—three elements that catch and hold our attention much like risk. Novelty means both danger and opportunity. To our forbearers, a strange scent in the wind could be prey or predator, but either way it paid to pay attention. Unpredictability means we don’t know what happens next, thus we pay extra attention to what happens next. Complexity, when there’s lots of salient information coming at us at once, does more of the same.

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.

Obviously, the reason has plenty to do with flow, but the relationship between flow and creativity is complicated and not completely understood. Moreover, every time someone makes a list of skills needed in the twenty-first century, creativity tops it. The quality most desirable in a CEO? According to a global survey conducted by IBM of 1,500 top executives in sixty countries: creativity. What about the skills our children need to thrive in the future? According to the Partnership for 21st Century Skills—a collection of 250 researchers at sixty institutions—creativity is again the answer. So if ever there was a critical yet overused term in need of clarification, this is it.

Let’s start with a standard working definition of creativity. There are plenty to choose from but “the process of developing original ideas that have value” is arguably the most common, so we’ll go with that. The first thing to know about coming up with original, valuable ideas is how deeply this process scares us. Every time we have a creative insight and share it with the world, we come up against some very primal terrors: fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of social ridicule, fear of loss of resources (time, money, access, etc.). There’s significant risk involved in every step of this process.

Drilling down deeper, beyond the risk taking involved in idea generation, there’s a second mechanism at work: pattern recognition. When Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said, “Creativity is just connecting things,” he wasn’t wrong. When coming up with a new idea, we always have to find patterns—i.e., Jobs’s connection between things—that...

ideas always requires risk taking and pattern recognition—and ...

Dopamine is the pleasure chemical released whenever we take a risk or identify a pattern. We feel this inrush as excitement, engagement, and curiosity. But dopamine does more than just stimulate our emotions and increase our motivation—it also tightens focus, drives us into the now, and, thus, speeds entrance into flow. What all of this means is that the creative act (one ...

“When you’re concentrating on something that matters,” explains Harvard psychologist Ned Hallowell, “when you can’t proceed on automatic pilot, that’s when flow shows up. That’s creativity to a T. Once you’ve thrown out the rule book and begun making creative decisions, the risk involved tighte...

Even better, the flow state itself acts like a force multipl...

In flow, beyond this neurochemical reaction, there are also neuroanatomical and neuroelectrical changes taking place. Neuroanatomically, with large swatches of the prefrontal cortex deactivated, our inner critic is shut off and our inner monologue rendered silent. As a result, we’re more receptive to novel experiences (the building blocks of new ideas) and much less inhibited (thus more likely to present those new ideas to the world). This is why, for example, in studies run by University of Pennsylvania psychologis...

solve, the hypofrontal subjects came up with more novel insights in far shorter time fra...

Neuroelectrically, flow’s baseline brain-wave pattern of low alpha/high theta also boosts creativity. Alpha means we’re calm, confident, and content (thus more willing to take risks) and that the lines of communication between the subconscious mind and the conscious mind are wide open (thus more chances for pattern recognition and novel insight). Theta, meanwhile, is a relaxed state where the brain can move from notion to notion without much internal resist...

If we put this all together, what we find is a powerful reciprocity: creativity triggers flow; th...

No one

really knows exactly when the four-minute mile first seemed possible. Certainly, in 1923, when Finnish runner Paavo Numi clocked a 4:10.4, it wasn’t beyond the pale. Yet eight years passed before anyone sliced a second from Numi’s time, and it took ten more for the next three to fall. By 1942, runners had cut it down to 4:04.6; then 4:02.6 by 1943. Two years later, Swedish miler Gunder Hagg clocked 4:01.4 and impossible seemed within reach. A good tailwind, a better track surface, slicing one tick off the time—it was bound to happen. But nothing happened. Not in 1946. Or 1947. Or 1948. The issue, turns out, wasn’t merely physical. It was mental. “Most people considered running four laps of the track in four minutes to be beyond the limits of human speed,” explains Neal Bascomb in The Perfect Mile. “It was foolhardy and possibly dangerous to attempt. Some thought that rather than a lifetime of glory, honor and fortune, a hearse would be waiting for the first person to accomplish that feat.” It was Englishman Roger Bannister who—nine years after Hagg’s near miss—finally broke this mental barrier and accomplished the feat, running 3:59.4 on May 6, 1954. And when we retell this tale, this is typically the point where the story stops, yet two months after Bannister did the impossible and lived, Australian John Landy did it again and then some—cutting 1.4 seconds off Bannister’s time with 3:58 flat. Within five years two other runners had bested that mark; within ten the first s...

Think about this for a moment. Thirty years of collective running effort were required to do the impossible, yet it took less than a month for someone to better the feat? And less than a decade for...

All that changed was thought, assumption, the mental frame built around the challenge. Every athlete interviewed for this book agrees: after something has been done once, it becomes considerably easier to repeat. Yet why is this so? What is it, exactly, about learning that the impossible is possible that makes it suddenly possible?

our first reaction is: ‘Not real, no way, not possible.’ But we have a strong need to make meaning out of experience and this new reality forces us to change our story. We move to, ‘That’s crazy, far out, unreal.’ Pretty soon, we accept this new reality and shift our paradigm further and this engages imagination. We start imagining the impossible as possible.

What does impossible feel like, sound like, look like. And then we start to be able to see ourselves doing the impossible—that’s the secret. There is an extremely tight link between our visual system and our physiology: once we can actually see ourselves doing the impossible, our chances of pulling it off increase significantly.

It was Harvard physiologist Edmund Jacobson who first discovered this link. Back in the 1930s, Jacobson found that imagining oneself lifting an object triggered corresponding electrical activity in the muscles involved in the lift. Between then and now dozens and dozens of studies have born this out, repeatedly finding strong correlations between mental rehearsal—i.e., visualization—and better performance. Everything from g...

We also know that the benefits extend beyond the psychological (increased confidence and motivation) and into the physiological. In 2004, for example, Cleveland Clinic physiologist Guang Yue wanted to know if merely thinking about lifting weights was enough to increase strength. Study subjects were divided into four groups. One group tried to strengthen their finger muscles with physical exercise; one tried to strengthen their finger muscles by only visualizing the exercise; another tried to increase arm strength through visualization; while the last group did nothing at all. The trial lasted twelve weeks. Whe...

mental groups where things got curious. Folks who did no physical training but merely imagined their fingers going through precise exercise motions saw a 35 percent increase in strength, while the ones who visualized arm exercises saw a 13.5 percent increase in strength. How tightly are imagination and physiology coupled? Strength is among the most baselin...

This means that visualization impacts a slew of cognitive processes—motor control, memory, attention, perception, planning—essentially accelerating chunking by shortening the time it takes us to learn new patterns. Since the first stage of the flow cycle—the struggle stage—involves exactly this learning process, visualization is an essential flow hack: it shortens struggle.

What all this means is that learning the impossible is possible augments our ability to see ourselves doing the

impossible, which triggers a systemic change in the body and the brain, which closes the gap between fantasy and reality. It also makes us significantly more flow prone. So when we do actually execute on our vision—i.e., attempt the impossible—we’re far more likely to find ourselves in the zone during that attempt and far more likely to perform properly as a result.

Children, as Sherlin pointed out, are developmentally hypofrontal—meaning portions of their neocortex are not fully formed (the brain keeps developing until age twenty-five) and this makes them even more flow prone. “More than that,” he continues, “EEG studies of adolescents show their normal brain-wave pattern is much closer to the alpha wave/theta wave borderline that is baseline flow. No direct research has been done, but it looks like they’re hovering on the edge of the state much of the time.

To divine this secret, de Geus put twenty-seven corporations larger and longer lived than Shell under the microscope. He found a number of factors contribute to longevity, but one stood out far above the rest: the ability to learn faster. That was it—the secret to centuries of thriving. In an environment of turbulent change, as de Geus famously wrote: “The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.