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

by Steven Kotler

despite the frequency with which many dismiss these athletes as “adrenaline junkies,” the term is actually one of the greatest misnomers in sport. Of the hundreds of athletes interviewed for this book, very few enjoy this rush. Most share professional kayaker Tao Berman’s sentiment: “I’m the farthest thing from an adrenaline junky. I can’t stand that feeling. If I’m feeling adrenaline, it means I’m feeling too much fear. It means I haven’t done my homework. It means it’s time to get out of my boat to reassess.”

And chemical. The fight-or-flight response—a.k.a. the adrenaline rush—cocktails adrenaline, cortisol (the stress hormone), and norepinephrine. It’s an extreme stress response. The brain switches to reactive survival autopilot. Options are limited to three: fight, flee, or freeze. Flow is the opposite: a creative problem-solving state, options wide open. Yet there are reasons for the confusion. The two highs are linked. Risk heightens focus and flow follows focus. This means that the fight-or-flight response primes the body—chemically and psychologically—for the flow state. Athletes report moving through one to get to the other.

when you’re teetering between flow and fight-or-flight, all it takes is one errant thought to send you in the wrong direction.

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.”

Training in high-stress situations increases what psychologists call “situational awareness.” Defined as the ability to absorb information accurately, assess it calmly, and respond appropriately, situational awareness is essentially the ability to keep cool when all hell breaks loose. Because attention and pattern recognition are so heightened by flow, training in the state radically increases situational awareness.

Without flow, none of this would have been possible. The pattern recognition and information chunking that took place in Switzerland would not have led to instinctive behavior in Chicago. Muscle reaction times would have been slower, intragroup trust weaker. Neither the spotlight attention needed to know when to pull nor the future prediction required to determine which direction to turn would have been in the offing. Panic would have swamped the system and Suicide Corner would have earned its namesake.

In America, over 22 percent of the population has an illicit drug problem; one out of ten take antidepressants; 26 percent of kids are on stimulants, purportedly for ADHD, anecdotally for performance enhancement. And prescription drugs? They’ve just surpassed car accidents as the number one cause of accidental death. Add this up and you’ll find a trillion-dollar public-health crisis.

In other words, Americans are literally killing themselves trying to achieve artificially the same sensations that flow produces naturally.

Flow is the rush of possibility: a product of radical neurochemical, neuroelectrical, and neuroanatomical function triggering whole-body transformation. As Devore concludes: “I really think we’re the next stage in human evolution.”

It’s about long-term mastery, not short-term success, and a question most certainly raised by the ascension of Shane McConkey.

In 1995, Shane McConkey was bussing tables and skiing naked for extra cash. Less than a decade later, he was a legend. But against what odds?

In the past few decades, the bounds of the possible have been pushed farther and faster than ever before in history—yet the folks doing the pushing were never anyone’s ideal candidates for the job.

These athletes haven’t just redefined the limits of human potential; they’ve redefined those limits by doing the opposite of what the experts say they should have done. It’s peculiar, all right. Their stratospheric success suggests that we may have completely misjudged the path toward stratospheric success. In fact, it suggests something far more radical: that if we really want to be our best, we don’t just have to rethink the path toward mastery; we need to reconsider the way we live our lives.

In each case, there was a parent or close relative who rewarded any display of talent, and ignored or punished the opposite.

Provided the right environment and the proper encouragement, it meant that everyone had a shot at perfection. It meant there were no “chosen few.”

research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.”

“This type of practice is focused, programmatic, carried out over extended periods of time, guided by conscious performance monitoring, evaluated by analyses of level of expertise reached, identification of errors, and procedures directed at eliminating those errors,”

Put differently, deliberate well-structure practice is a rigorous, compliance-based approach to mastery. It means you crawl before you walk. It doesn’t mean Laird Hamilton surfing Pipeline at age four, or Danny Way in the deep end of the pool at the Del Mar Skate Ranch by seven. In broader terms, deliberate practice is also how we train genius these days. It’s factory athletics. It’s Kumon math tutoring, Baby Einstein, Suzuki violin, et al. But it’s also the world McConkey walked away from that naked day at Vail. He turned his back on the factory, yet somehow still went on to become Superman.

In 1972, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel performed a fairly straightforward study in delayed gratification: he offered four-year-old children a marshmallow.

The ability to delay gratification at four is twice as good a predictor of later SAT scores as IQ. Poor impulse control is also a better predictor of juvenile delinquency than IQ.”

“From this experience,” he later wrote, “I…learned that the past can be psychologically remodeled to make heaven of hell. Other people learn the opposite lesson, storing and recalling only the worst of times.… The horrors and sheer ugliness of the past they have experienced become a permanent filter through which they view all their current experiences.”

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. And this strategy has an upside. As individuals, Presents are creative, spontaneous, open-minded, high-energy risk takers who play sports, have hobbies, make friends easily, and find lovers often. Their lives are fun-filled and fast-paced. Unfortunately, this comes at a cost. While Presents are often the life of the party, that’s often the end of the line. Because they act without anticipating consequences, don’t often learn from past failures, and are across the boards unable to resist temptation, attractions of the drugs and sex and rock-and-roll variety often derail their lives. A dominant present orientation has been correlated with mental health problems, juvenile delinquency, crime, and addictions. And when it comes to the long path toward mastery, with neither desire to plan nor long-term vision, Presents have a difficult time accumulating anything close to 10,000 hours of practice, deliberate or otherwise.

On the other hand, kids who didn’t eat the marshmallow are future oriented, thus able to resist temptation today for a chance at a greater reward tomorrow. “Futures” have much to recommend them. In dozens and dozens of studies, they outperform Presents in most every category: they get better grades and more education, are healthier and more optimistic, make more money, solve problems more consistently, are more mindful of morality, and can make the best of failure. They are the movers and shakers in this world. Zimbardo writes: 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. Gratification delayed for greater reward is always a better bet for futures, who will trade a bird in the hand for a flock in the future. Unlike their present-hedonistic peers who live in their bodies, the futures live in their minds, envisioning other selves, scenarios, rewards and successes. The success of Western civilization in the past centuries can be traced to the prevalence of the future orientation of many populations.

Obviously, Futures are more likely to achieve the 10,000 hours needed for mastery, but here too are unintentional consequences. 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 exper...

After three decades of research, Zimbardo found that the healthiest, happiest, highest performers blend the best of both worlds. 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—it is its own reward.

Yet the flow high is different from all other highs—meaning it does more than just motivate. For starters, flow doesn’t just happen anywhere. As we’ll explore in depth in Part Two of this book, the state shows up most reliably when we’re using our skills to the utmost. It requires challenge. 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.”

This is a very important point. Flow carries within it delicious possibility. In the state, we are aligned with our core passion and, because of flow’s incredible impact on performance, expressing that passion to our utmost.

Flow is aligned with our passion

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. Intrinsic motivation goes through the roof. Thus flow becomes an alternative path to mastery, sans the misery.

Forget 10,000 hours of delayed gratification. Flow junkies turn instant gratification into their North Star—putting in far more hours of “practice time” by gleefully harnessing their hedonic impulse. In other words, when it comes to time perspectives, flow allows Presents to achieve Futures’ results. On the other side of this coin, flow pulls Futures into the present. Because there is no time in the zone, there’s no way to worry about tomorrow. There’s literally no tomorrow. Flow provides Futures with blissful release from all that endless striving. And since the release is autotelic, Futures who find themselves in flow don’t need to find new ways to slog toward the future. The state is intrinsically motivating so the slogging takes care of itself.

“I’m doing what I love,” explains McConkey. “And if you’re doing what you want to do all the time, then you’re happy. You’re not going to work everyday wishing you were doing something else. I get up and go to work everyday and I’m stoked.

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. Both flow and high-risk situations produce extremely powerful emotional experiences. “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) snipers found that flow cut the time it took to teach novices to shoot like experts by 50 percent. This means that flow doesn’t just provide a joyful, self-directed path toward mastery—it literally shortens the path.

We have traded the now for the later and in collectively making this switch may have missed a vital point: it doesn’t need to be so hard. With passion and play as the gateway to performance and possibility, we no longer have to mistrust ourselves. We can harness our hedonic impulse, using moments of spontaneous joy to shorten our path to mastery. Which, of course, is exactly what Shane McConkey did.

visionary—he just saw things other people didn’t.”

Shane’s perspective shifted. He started reading the mountain differently, seeing lines that others couldn’t. He also started skiing those lines.

“Once Shane decided a line was possible,” says professional skier-skydiver JT Holmes, one of McConkey’s closest friends, “he felt that it had to be done. But he also felt he was one of the best skiers in the world, so if anyone was going to do it, he should be the one. That was the way his mind worked. That was Shane being logical.”

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.”

So how far can we take this? It’s a good question, with the “we” being the most important part. Flow, as Csikszentmihalyi discovered, is ubiquitous. This means that all the superpowers detailed in this first section of the book—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. This is who we are and how we’re wired. Flow is our birthright. But what do we do with that knowledge? As always, that part is up to us.

Ammons is a true polymath. He holds degrees in math, physics, and psychology, is a classical guitarist, black belt in karate, successful businessman, acclaimed author, respected philosopher, and, without question, one of the most revered kayakers in history.

To Ammons, as he explains in his book Whitewater Philosophy,

action and adventure sport athletes have used flow to accelerate performance faster and farther than almost any other group of people in history.

Video-game players get into flow so frequently that Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas have become the most widely accepted theoretical framework for explaining the lure of the joystick. Studies have shown that the amount of flow generated by a video game directly correlates to everything from player engagement to overall product success. In fact, as Dr. Erik Gregory, the executive director of the Media Psychology Research Center, wrote in 2007: “Placing players in flow is the key to video gaming’s universal appeal.”

researchers have found flow the secret ingredient to almost every aspect of online experience. Both website slipperiness (the ease with which we enter and exit an online experience) and website stickiness (how certain sites hold our attention) are influenced by the state. Researchers at Vanderbilt University have found that from the marketing side of this coin, online flow experiences attract customers, mitigate price sensitivity, and positively influence subsequent buying behaviors.

What matters is not the amount of time you’re present, but the amount of time that you’re working at your full potential.

As flow requires focus, one of the first changes suggested by experts was the removal of cubicle farms, those open office plans that permit constant interruption. “These interruptions…move us out of ‘flow’ and increase research-and-design cycle times and costs dramatically,”

“Studies have shown that each time a flow state is disrupted it takes fifteen minutes to get back into flow, if you can get back at all.”

Humans evolved in an era of immediacy, where threats were always of the tiger-in-the-bush variety. Immediate threats require immediate responses, and this fact has shaped our brain more than any other. Consider information processing. Every second, our senses gather way more data than we can actually handle. As a result, much of what the brain does is tease apart the critical from the casual. Since nothing is more critical than survival, the first stop most of this incoming information makes is our danger detector: the amygdala.

In these terms, extreme athletes use risk as a “flow hack” because flow follows focus and consequences catch our attention.

As risk increases, so do norepinephrine and dopamine, the feel-good chemicals the brain uses to amplify focus and enhance performance. Because norepinephrine and dopamine feel really good, playing with this trigger often produces long-lasting effects: risk takers are transformed into risk seekers.