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

by Steven Kotler

Back in the 1970s, Csikszentmihalyi identified “clear goals,” “immediate feedback,” and “the challenge/skill ratio” as the three most critical.

Even if success is seconds away, it’s still a future event subject to hopes, fears, and all sorts of now-crushing distraction. Think of the long list of infamous sporting chokes: the dropped pass in the final seconds of the Super Bowl; the missed putt at the end of the Augusta Masters. In those moments, the gravity of the

goal pulled the participants out of the now; when, ironically, the now was all they needed to win.

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...

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

No mystery here. Tighten feedback loops. Put mechanisms in place so attention doesn’t have to wander. Ask for more input. How much input? Well, forget quarterly reviews.

Flow appears near the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety, in what scientists call the flow

channel—the spot where the task is hard enough to make us stretch but not hard enough to make us snap.

Yerkes-Dobson law—the fact that increased stress leads to increased performance up to a certain intensity, beyond which performance levels off or declines. In real-world terms, it’s not much at all.

Or, as Stanford neurologist Robert Sapolsky likes to say: “maybe (meaning uncertainty) is addictive like nothing else out there.”

And for you and me, this is all very good news. A feel-good sweet spot for flow that only requires a 4 percent increase in effort? Seriously, who can’t push 4 percent further than the last time around?

Mindset refers to our feelings toward basic qualities like intelligence and athletic talent. After more than thirty years of research, Dweck found

The short answer is that a growth mindset is one of the secrets to maximizing the total amount of flow in your life. The longer answer starts with the challenge/skill ratio. If you consistently overestimate or underestimate your abilities, then tuning that ratio is like playing darts handcuffed and blindfolded. To find 4

percent, you need accurate self-knowledge—and this is tricky for fixed mindsetters.

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The absence of self-knowledge makes it harder to tune the challenge/skill ratio. Equally vexing, if the resulting feedback is unflattering, fixed mindsetters tend to distort the bad news—making it even tougher to remain dialed in.

You have to know yourself, and your limits, know exactly what you’re afraid of and exactly how hard to push past it. That’s serious work. But get it right and

The first step in the flow cycle is known as “struggle.” Herbert Benson, the Harvard cardiologist who

How we handle these negative feelings is critical. In struggle, we’re using the conscious mind to identify patterns, then repeating those patterns enough times that they become chunks. Until that happens, we are awkward and uncomfortable. To move through struggle takes a leap of faith that the effort will really result

The next stage in the cycle is “release.” To move out of struggle and into flow, you must first pass through this second stage. Release means to take your mind off the problem, to, as Benson says, “completely sever prior thought and emotional patterns.” If you’ve been cramming for a test all day, go for a walk. If you’ve been trying to master double black-diamond ski slopes, take a few runs down the blues. If the innovation team has been pulling all-nighters for a week, send them out for dinner and a movie. The method is unimportant. The message is relaxation.

And the zone, the flow state itself, is the third stage in this cycle. Struggle gives way to release gives way to flow—hallelujah.

to borrow the gamer’s phrase, we are “leveling up,” or, as Benson prefers, “returning to a new normal.”

“If you don’t believe developmental learning is possible,” says Jamie Wheal, high-performance expert and executive director of the Flow Genome Project, “then it’s hard to see flow as the result of something you did differently. Or could do again, or do better with more practice. After experiencing flow, the person with a fixed mindset wants to take unilateral credit for the amazing performance that

This is the critical detail. Walsh’s philosophy is: “It’s not how good you are; it’s how good you want to be.” He has a growth mindset. He

More incredible, there hasn’t been a big-wave tow day at Jaws since. Paddling is now the way surfers catch big waves. Walsh shifted the paradigm.

“Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder,” wrote Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In, and she’s not wrong. Statistics vary, but today, the average person changes jobs seven times between ages eighteen and forty. Most important, there’s momentum on the flow path. Lateralization allows you to hold on to that thrust no matter the circumstances.

And that’s also what athletes mean by the term progression. Walsh had been surfing at Jaws since he was a kid. There had been days, weeks, months, and years of 4 percent plus 4 percent plus 4 percent, of pushing himself into ten-foot, twenty-foot, thirty-foot surf, of continuously testing limits, of lateralizing, of nearly dying, of driving past injury and fear, of honing skills, getting stronger, getting smarter—a self-taught, near graduate-level education in hydrodynamics, meteorology, body mechanics, and flow.

Hedonism has a bad name and telling people you’re addicted to an altered state where self vanishes and time slows down rarely elicits the best of reactions.

Why has there been near-exponential growth in ultimate human performance these past few decades? Because action and adventure sports athletes discovered that one of the easiest ways to find flow is to band together to chase the state.

As a result, when other people are present, we pay more attention to the present. Companionship drives focus into the now—it’s arguably the simplest flow hack in the world.

1990, Sawyer began a University of Chicago doctoral program in psychology under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. His fascination with group dynamics soon led him to the literature of high performance, where he discovered a problem: “All the studies that had been run on high performance were about solo performers. There was this huge gap in what led to high performance in groups. Almost no one had done work on the topic.”

“Surgeons say that during a difficult operation they have the sensation that the entire operating team is a single organism, moved by the same purpose; they describe it as a ‘ballet’ in which the individual is subordinated to the group performance, and all involved share in the feeling of harmony and power.”

In Group Genius, he explains it this way: “My years of playing piano in jazz ensembles convinced me that what happened in any one person’s mind could never explain what made one night’s performance shine and another a dud.

Csikszentmihalyi discovered the most commonly reported instances of flow are those of group flow showing up when people are having a conversation—especially, for reasons we’ll get to, if those conversations happen at work.

communication, creativity, productivity, and overall performance all go through the roof. “In a study of more than 300 professionals at a strategy consulting firm, a government agency, and a petrochemical company,” writes Sawyer, “…the people who participated in group flow were the highest performers.”

Close listening occurs when we’re fully engaged in the here and now. In conversation, this isn’t about thinking about what witty thing to say next, or what cutting sarcasm came last. Rather, it’s generating real-time, unplanned responses to the dialogue as it unfolds.

The greatest athletes aren’t interested in the greatest risks. I mean, sometimes they’re taken, sometimes not, but those physical risks are a by-product of a much deeper desire to take creative risks. Don’t be fooled by the danger. In action and adventure sports, creativity is always the point.”

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.

“the process of developing original ideas that have value”

Neuroelectrically, flow’s baseline brain-wave pattern of low alpha/high theta also boosts creativity.

The neurochemicals that underpin the state are among the most addictive drugs on earth. Equally powerful is the psychological draw. Scientists who study human motivation have lately learned that after basic survival needs have been met, the combination of autonomy (the desire to direct your own life), mastery (the desire to learn, explore, and be creative), and purpose (the desire to matter, to contribute to the world) are our most powerful intrinsic drivers—the three things that motivate us most.

Nor is he alone. “The joy I get from skiing, that’s worth dying for,” said C. R. Johnson—not long before he died skiing. Canadian freestyle skier and four-time X Games champ Sarah Burke is now sorely missed. So are Arne Backstrom, Caleb Moore, Jeremy Lusk, Ryan Hawks, Aaron Robinson, Kip Garre, Antoine Montant, and many more. ESPN called 2011 the “grimmest year in [action] sports’ collective history,” and then explained why: “[T]he action-sports community averaged one pro athlete death every three weeks.” The year 2013—while not yet in the books—is starting to look grimmer than 2011.

“No question about it,” says Flow Genome Project executive director Jamie Wheal, “there’s a dark night of the flow. In Christian mystical traditions, once you’ve experienced the grace of God, the ‘dark night of the soul’ describes the incredible pain of its absence. The same is true for flow. An enormous gap sits between the ecstasy of the zone and the all-too-familiar daily toil waiting for us on the other end. If you’ve glimpsed this state, but can’t get back there—that lack can become unbearable.”

hope you talk a little about how utterly fucked we can become when we get too old or broken or smart to keep it up.

What’s painfully ironic here is that flow is a radical and alternative path to mastery only because we have decided that play—an activity fundamental

“When they confront the difficulty of the day to day, they’d rather reach for a pill or a new lover or another meditation retreat than get down to hard work.

Along similar lines, no one knows if flow can be used to train super soldiers, but the US Defense Department

Most of the high-performance scientists in this book work with both athletes and the military. Red Bull, for example, has teamed up with the Navy SEALs. DARPA funds flow research (the aforementioned sniper study). Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on one’s trust in government and feelings for nation-states, but it doesn’t take much to imagine how this experiment could go wrong.

Squaw Valley psychiatrist Dr. Robb Gaffney (Scott’s brother, who McConkey once called the best “nonpro” skier in the world) recently told NBC

The second issue here is whether flow can be controlled. Doubtful. In technological terms, a “disruptive technology” is any innovation that creates a new market and new values and eventually displaces an old market and older values. Cars replacing horse-drawn carriages is the classic example. Flow is also a very disruptive technology. Unlike the automobile, it’s not

disruptive “external” technology, but a disruptive “internal” technology, operating in the psychological rather than the physical world.