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

by Steven Kotler

Put differently, deliberate well-structure practice is a rigorous, compliance-based approach to mastery.

The ability to delay gratification at four is twice as good a predictor of later SAT scores as IQ.

Debunked

According to psychologists, by definition, action and adventure athletes are “sensation seekers.” They’re impulsive pleasure junkies. Delayed gratification is not their

How do a bunch of impulsive hedonists raised far from the storied incubators of athletic excellence end up rewriting the rule book on human potential? The short answer, of course, is flow. The long answer is where Philip Zimbardo comes back into our story.

Zimbardo found that the only way he could stop himself from sinking into despair was imagination—he kept imagining better possible futures. And

Zimbardo noticed two competing “time perspectives” at work in Mischel’s experiment. A time perspective is the technical name for the “permanent

filter” Zimbardo described. It’s essentially our attitude toward time. For example, in Mischel’s experiment, the kids who ate the marshmallow immediately were present hedonists. They lived for the now and not the later. It wasn’t that they were unable to delay gratification, it’s that not delaying gratification—the downstream result of being a present hedonist—was their strategy for living.

Presents are creative, spontaneous, open-minded, high-energy risk takers who play sports, have hobbies, make friends easily, and find lovers often. T...

While presents avoid work…futures consider work a source of special pleasure. For them, tomorrow’s anticipated gains and losses fuel today’s decisions and actions.

Futures burn out. They become stressed-out workaholics. Blood pressure goes up, bowels get irritable, heart attacks increase, sex lives disintegrate, marriages fail, children become burdens, friends become memories, and the whole house of cards comes crashing down. So common is this experience that UCLA psychologist Steven Berglas has coined the term supernova burnout to describe the phenomenon. In other words, even when plans work out, Futures place a dangerous bet: too much delayed gratification can rob them of their motivation—which is the very thing that made them Futures in the first place.

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.

Psychologists describe flow as “autotelic,” from the Greek auto (self) and telos (goal). When something is autotelic—i.e., produces the flow high—

While other hedonic pleasures—drugs, sex, gambling—make us feel good on their own, flow only shows up when we’re pushing ourselves to higher and higher levels of performance. “Because flow involves meeting challenges and developing skills,” explains Csikszentmihalyi in Good Business, “it leads to growth. It is an escape forward from current reality, whereas stimulants like drugs lead backward.”

When doing what we most love transforms us into the best possible version of ourselves and that version hints at even greater future possibilities, the urge to explore those possibilities becomes feverish compulsion.

A quick shorthand for learning is the more emotionally powerful an experience, the more chance the details of that experience get moved from short-term storage into long-term memory.

“As a result,” says high-performance sports psychologist Michael Gervais, “athletes in flow in death-facing situations likely gather more relevant data and code it more efficiently. Having these experiences frequently could significantly shorten the learning curve toward expertise.”

In 2011, neuroscientists with the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) found that military snipers trained in flow decreased the time it took to acquire their targets by a factor of 2.3. Similar research run with amateur (i.e., nonmilitary)

In 1998, Shane’s logic led him to Sacrifice. He nailed the line perfectly. Scott Gaffney filmed it—viewable in Something About McConkey—and the hop-and-drop ski technique known as “billy goating” was born. As billy-goating required new skills, it led Shane farther down the flow path, which led to even more skills, which opened up new possibilities, which drove him forward still. “During his big-mountain competition days,” wrote Micah Abrams in one of that era’s preeminent ski magazines, Freeze, “McConkey would routinely point out lines that snaked through rock faces and across gut-churning cliffs to his fellow competitors. More often than not, he was met with blank stares or rolled eyes, to which he would respond empathically: ‘Dude, it’s totally doable!’ Then he would go do it, and then he would win.”

Ski-BASE is definitely not the kind of result that shows up on the compliance-based path to mastery.

the fluid brain-wave control exhibited by Laird Hamilton, the deep relationship to the Voice enjoyed by Dean Potter, the near-telepathic prowess of the Red Bull Air Force, and the accelerated path to mastery trod by Shane McConkey—are available to any and all.

“Perhaps the most beautiful experience in kayaking is flow. There isn’t any other sport that demands such intimacy with nature, moving in harmony with the power and intricacy of the river, and whitewater kayaking is the preeminent flow sport. When you paddle, well, there is the feeling that you are pouring yourself right into and through the river, with no distractions at all, you can weave yourself right into the current. Soloing is the open door for understanding how close to the river you can be.”

The Stikine has been described as one of the world’s forgotten wonders, but it’s unlikely to become a tourist attraction anytime soon. The weather is cold and gray on a good day, downright mean on a bad. The surrounding wilderness covers an area twice the size of France, with a human population numbering in the low thousands. Grizzly bears, meanwhile, are everywhere. Yet the wildlife and wildlands are just sideshow attractions. The canyon is the real show: a vast gorge carved by a ferocious torrent, some sixty miles of colossal Class V+ whitewater: twenty-five “Holy Mother of God” rapids, hundreds of smaller tortures, and a reputation as the Mount Everest of expedition kayaking. In his essay “A Brief History of the Stikine,” Ammons agrees:

Up to now, this book has focused on extreme athletes doing extreme acts and perhaps it’s all a little too extreme. But remember the reason: action and adventure sport athletes have used flow to accelerate performance faster and farther than almost any other group of people in history. Taking a look at how far they’ve come gives us a sense of the possible. It provides a benchmark. Yet this doesn’t mean these athletes have cornered the market on flow. Far from it.

Simple: in all these other domains flow is a luxury; in extreme sports, it is a core requirement. In fact, even though flow is consistently associated with all elite-level athletic success, it’s actually rather elusive in traditional sports. Ken Ravizza, a psychologist at California State University at Fullerton, who examined instances of flow in bat-and-ball and track-and-field sports (and who calls flow by

Maslow’s name, “peak experiences”), explains: “The peak experience in sport is a rare personal moment that remains etched in the athlete’s consciousness. It serves as reminder of the great intrinsic satisfaction that sport participation can provide. Peak experiences during an athlete’s career are relatively rare but their intensity acts as a standard, or qualitative reference point, for subjectively evaluating future performance.”

Flow triggers is the term we’ll be using to describe these circumstances and, over the next four chapters, we’ll be examining four varieties: external triggers, internal triggers, social triggers, and creative triggers.

An almond-shaped sliver of the temporal lobe, the amygdala is responsible for primal emotions like hate, anger, and fear. It’s our early warning system, an organ always on high alert. With most incoming sensory information heading there,

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As such, we’ll be using flow hack and flow hacker to refer to any action that helps propel people into flow, and anyone performing such an action, respectively. In these terms, extreme athletes use risk as a “flow hack” because flow follows focus and consequences catch our attention.

Once danger becomes its own reward, risk moves from a threat to be avoided to a challenge to be risen toward. An entirely new relationship with fear begins to develop.

When risk is a challenge, fear becomes a compass—literally pointing people in the direction they

“If you’re interested in mastery,” says University of Cambridge, England, neuropsychologist Barbara Sahakian, “you have to learn this lesson. To really achieve anything, you have to be able to tolerate and enjoy risk. It has to become a challenge to look forward to. In all fields, to make exceptional disc...

Risk taking itself releases another big squirt of dopamine, further enhancing performance and increasing pattern recognition.

“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.

Action and adventure sports are packed with do-or-die moments. Traditional athletics, in contrast, are cushioned by the artifice of the game.

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. 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.

Seek out complexity, especially in nature. Go stare at the night sky. Walk in the woods. If you can’t find big nature, contemplate the small. The reasons there are so many clichés about universes inside of dewdrops is because there are universes inside of dewdrops. No dew to

But rolling required deep embodiment and that did the trick. Halfway through the roll, I just snapped into the state.”

Ammons was out of options; he let himself get swallowed. “It was the most unbelievable sensation, this thing I knew was impossible, that just couldn’t work, I got to watch myself piece it together. I could feel all of the river’s reactions and could feel myself melding with them. My goal was to do this inconceivable thing, to be a drop of water. Surviving Wasson’s was proof I had done it. From that point on, I knew the impossible was possible.” 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.

Day traders.?

What creates this feeling is a two-part contradiction. Part one: Flow is exceptionally pleasurable, but mostly in retrospect. “It is this absence of…emotion, of almost any kind of conscious awareness of one’s state, that is at the heart of flow,” writes University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman. “Consciousness and emotion are there to correct your trajectory; when what you are doing is seamlessly perfect, you don’t need them.” Part two: You may be unemotional, but you’re not asleep. In the throes of the paradox, you’re fully aware of the ass you’re kicking—just not entirely certain you deserve all the credit.

“When you’re arrogant and egotistical,” says Dr. Olds, “you’re shutting out complexity, novelty, and unpredictability to preserve a distorted self-image. Any incoming information that could lead to self-doubt is stamped out. It’s a massive data reduction. Humility moves in the other direction, it opens us up and increases incoming information. As a result, there is more opportunity for pattern recognition, more dopamine, and less need for judgmental metacognition.”

Wow

Yet, despite the magnitude of his accomplishment, it would be a very long time before anyone heard the tale. Besides his wife and two close friends, Ammons told no one for eighteen years. Since then, other

Krack had uncovered a technique for triggering the mammalian diving reflex, a reflex that optimizes respiration and, like dolphins, whales, and some birds, allows us to operate underwater for extended periods of time. Here’s how it works: When the nerves of the human face come in contact with water, our heartbeat begins to slow (10 to 30 percent in amateurs; up to 50 percent in professionals). A slower heart rate requires less oxygen, leaving more left over for other organs. Next, as pressure from depth increases, blood leaves our extremities—first fingers and toes, next hands and feet, finally arms and legs—and surrounds the heart and brain. Lastly, during deeper dives, organs and circulatory walls allow blood plasma and water to pass through them, preventing the chest cavity from collapsing inward with the massive pressure increase.

The mammalian diving reflex is inhibited by stress, so being comfortable in the water is a considerable advantage when trying to learn the technique. Cruikshank was a natural. Even more important was her ability to equalize at depth.

“Physically,” says Cruickshank, “all that’s required is you hang on and go for a ride. Mentally, it’s like playing chess against yourself. Its will and technique versus panic and pressure. It’s about forcing the mind to stop thinking. It’s about flow. 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.”

Instead, 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.

Instead, as Douglas Rushkoff writes in Present Shock, “[W]e tend to exist in a distracted present, where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored. Our ability to plan—much less follow through on it—is undermined by our need to be able to improvise our way through any number of external impacts that stand to derail us at any moment. Instead of finding a stable foothold in the here and now, we end up reacting to an ever-present assault of simultaneous impulses and commands.”

Not only is the distracted present a miserable place to be, it’s also the worst kind of self-handicapping.

Study after study shows that we’re terrible multitaskers. By trying to improve performance by being everywhere and everywhen, we end up nowhere and never. The sad truth is that our lives are pulling us in ...