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

by Steven Kotler

Lao Tzu, founder of Taoism, warned that a left-hand path is best never begun, and once begun, must absolutely be finished.

On the flow path, we are drawn forward by fire; by powerful hedonic instincts; by our deep need for autonomy, mastery, and purpose deeply fulfilled; by dizzyingly feel-good neurochemistry; by a spectrum of joy beyond common ken; by the undeniable presence of our most authentic selves; by a cognitive imperative to make meaning from experience; by the search engine that is evolution and its need for innovation; and by the simplest of truths: life is long and

A “cirque” is a naturally formed concave amphitheater, carved by glaciers, found atop mountains.

“Action and adventure athletes lead different kinds of lives. There aren’t exactly playbooks. So the best athletes try really hard to learn from each other’s mistakes, especially the fatal ones.

And the key that Rice and others have found is to embrace that suffering, to move through it, and to keep moving. This means learning to use the bad to fuel the good.

For most people, flow hacking is an esoteric pursuit. But these days, in action and adventure sports, it’s become standard operating procedure.

In this world, learning how to access the zone is treated like learning to read or ride a bike—

The athletes we’re about to meet have had an almost opposite experience. They’re the only generation in history to have been raised in a flow-hacking tradition, a high-flow environment, and a culture where using flow to push past impossible is par for the course. They are, to borrow the Silicon Valley term, fast followers. And by examining how fast and how far these followers have come, we can better gauge what just might be possible for ourselves and our children.

today’s practitioners are benefiting from an inrush of techniques and technologies that make accessing flow and using the state to accelerate progression far easier than ever before.

My body knows how to do it better than my brain so I kind of just let it take over.”

“When I’m trying a trick,” he says, “I try to block everything else out. I just try to stay calm and focused on what I’m doing.” This may not sound like much, but many of the athletes interviewed for this book talk about not starting to experiment with the mental game until later in their career, and usually only after being forced in that direction by injury.

Tom Schaar dreamed up the 1080, then used flow to pull that vision out of his subconscious and into a material existence. There is a deep interrelationship here. Our limits are governed by flow’s ability to amplify performance as much as by imagination’s ability to dream up that performance. So asking the question “Where do our limits lie?” is another way of asking, “How far can we stretch our imagination?”

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?

“If you want to understand the Bannister effect,” says high-performance psychologist Michael Gervais, “you have to understand that the brain tells stories.

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.

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.

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.

Yue’s experiment, when neuroscientists found no difference between performing an action and merely imagining oneself performing that action—the same neuronal circuits fire in either case. 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.

much

Schaar’s been practicing visualization since the age of ten and had a working knowledge of flow at twelve.

“When you’re talking about this next generation of athletes,” says high-performance expert Dr. Leslie Sherlin (who we met back in Chapter Two), “their lack of age helps a great deal.

“A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity.

What happens when the source code of ultimate human performance becomes a cornerstone of education? When flow becomes central to culture? When achieving the impossible becomes par for the course? Hard to say for certain. But as Rainer Maria Rilke said, “Live the questions.” And seriously, knowing what we already know about flow, who doesn’t want to live these questions?

If flow underpins optimal performance, then knowing the causes of flow—both where it comes from and why it comes—can help us achieve optimal performance more frequently.

Neural feedback—the use of EEG to train performance—has undergone a similar transformation. Dr. Leslie Sherlin and his colleagues at Neurotopia, to offer one example, have developed an EEG-based system called “BrainSport” that, unlike earlier EEG systems, uses advanced hardware and sophisticated software to filter out extraneous noise.

a.k.a. Flow Dojos. Think Cirque du Soleil meets X Games meets the Science Exploratorium. The goal is to simulate all of the high-risk conditions that extreme performers rely upon to trigger flow—just without the risk.

bodied people that should be commercially available by 2015. “Right now,”

Is this book older

“I’m certain we can’t answer that question,” says Michael Gervais. “At the world-class level, where talent differences are marginal, we estimate that 90 percent of success for elite performers is mental—yet this is the one measurement milestone we haven’t hit. We don’t know how to measure thought. What is it? Where does it begin? Where does it go? Can we track it? Can we track its effects? What’s an accurate picture of its total impact on biology? Until we know these things, psychology remains a fuzzy science.

“Felix is an action sports athlete,” explains Red Bull director of high performance Dr. Andy Walshe, who oversaw the project.

Stratos was Baumgartner’s lifetime dream, yet halfway through the testing phase, he freaked out, quit the project, and flew home to Austria—unable to shake the fear.

Eventually, Dr. Mike Gervais was brought in to help. In a testament to both how good our sports psychology techniques have become and how high a level of mental fortitude our top athletes now possess, it took three days for Baumgartner to get his phobia under control.

I cud have done this in a day

“When Felix walked off the project,” says Walshe, “it was the darkest moment in his life. But a phobia—that’s deeply rooted fear. To face that, to come back, to trust strangers with his life, to put himself back into position to do something no one else had ever conceived of? I’ve seen plenty of astounding feats of human perform...

In fact, Bigelow Aerospace, another private space company, is now developing an inflatable space hotel that’s scheduled for 2017 deployment.

In 2011, I cowrote a book with X Prize founder and Singularity University cofounder Peter Diamandis called Abundance. In it, we explore how exponentially growing technology

Without question, paddling fast enough to catch a possibility wave like abundance means we’ll need the most capable versions of ourselves doing the paddling.

He found a number of factors contribute to longevity, but one stood out far above the rest: the ability to learn faster.

The US military trained snipers in flow twice as fast as normal. McKinsey established that executives in flow are five times more effective than their steady-state peers. This is exactly what 150 years of flow research has revealed; this is what the recent revolution in action and adventure sports clearly demonstrates, flow brings out the very best in us—and for certain, it’s that very best we’ll need to create a world of abundance.