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

by Steven Kotler

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 need to go next (i.e., the direction that produces more flow). “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 discoveries you need risk—you’re just never going to have a breakthrough without it.”

(putting themselves in a high-consequence situation rather than a high-risk environment), an even bigger neurochemical response is facilitated. Risk taking itself releases another big squirt of dopamine, further enhancing performance and increasing pattern recognition. Once the pattern-recognition system lights onto the proper response (i.e., identifies the chunk that will save the athlete’s hide in this particular situation), even more dopamine is released and the cascade continues.

hacking the “high consequence” flow trigger. For starters, risk...

A shy man need only cross the room to say hello to an attractive woman to trigger this rush. In casual conversation, merely telling someone the truth can serve the same purpose. “To reach flow,” explains Harvard psychiatrist Ned Hallowell, “one must be willing to take risks.

And the average person—you and me—must be willing to fail, look foolish, and fall flat on our faces should we wish to enter this state.”

Certainly, risk is needed for flow, but if you don’t want to take physical risks, take mental risks. Take social risks. Emotional risks. Creative risks. Especially creative risks. The application of imagination—one very shorthand definition of creativity—is all about mental chance taking. And the risk is real. Loss of respect, loss of resources, loss of time—the consequences of betting on a bad idea can certainly threaten survival.

if we’re going to hack flow by trading mental risks for physical risks—and especially if we want the same kind of accelerated performance seen today in extreme athletes—then ou...

we need to understand that risk is only the first of our external triggers, and flow hackers have plenty more choices available.

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

And for those of us who want to take advantage of this fact, yet have no interest in action and adventure sports? Simple: 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 contemplate? Use technology to induce awe: surf your city with Google Earth or go see an IMAX movie.

We rely on old habits, we cherish our routines. And why not? Automatic pilot is efficient. Routines save the brain energy and who hasn’t driven to work without remembering the trip? Yet vary the route next time. Brush your teeth with the wrong hand. These against-the-grain tricks increase novelty and unpredictability, demanding focus and pattern recognition, and both are the real goal.

“The brain’s reaction isn’t dependent on real, external information. It’s reacting to a constellation of inputs from the sensory system. If you can light up that same constellation—say replace the novelty found in a natural environment with new routines in your daily life—you’ll get the dopamine and norepinephrine. This is why the flow hack of the twenty-second century is going to be a button on your augmented cognition device that lights up this same constellation.” Olds, by the way, practices what he preaches, driving a different route home from work every day.

Deep embodiment means paying attention to all of these sensory inputs at once. More inputs means more information. Way more information. The brain can’t process this deluge consciously. Too slow. Too inefficient. In many situations, too dangerous. When critical data arrives via fire hose, there’s no time for neurotic debate. “[T]asks that require real-time sensorimotor integration are best handled by the implicit system,”

Deep embodiment, then, is the transient hypofrontality fast track and thus another reason action and adventure athletes have found flow so frequently.

Big rivers accelerate you in every direction at once. This puts the vestibular system into overdrive. This isn’t just your mind paying more attention—suddenly your entire body is paying attention. When this happens, it’s outside our conscious capabilities.

“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

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.”

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.

Yet the here and now isn’t seen much these days. In our always-on, hyperconnected world, there are endless reasons to be elsewhere. Every time we answer an e-mail or return a text or check our Facebook page, we are there and not here.

“[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.”

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 every direction save the one where we’re most effective.

Just as flow states have external triggers, conditions in the outer environment that create more flow, they also have internal triggers, conditions in our inner environment that create more flow. Internal triggers are psychological strategies that drive attention into the now.

“Clear goals that define immediate success” is how this first trigger is typically described.

The point is this: when the brain is charged with a clear goal, focus narrows considerably, the unimportant is disregarded, and the now is all that’s left.

Western society is dominated by Futures—i.e., those well-trained to strive for goals. Thus, when considering “clear goals,” most have a tendency to skip over the adjective (clear) to get to the noun (goals). When told to set clear goals, we immediately visualize ourselves on the Olympic podium, the Academy Award stage, or the Fortune 500 list saying, “I’ve been picturing this moment since I was fifteen,” and think that’s the point. It’s not the point. Those podium moments can pull us out of the present. Even if success is seconds away, it’s still a future event subject to hopes, fears, and all sorts of now-crushing distraction.

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 in-the-moment cognition, and the self stays out of the picture.

create tiny, clear goals. I go through kick cycles.

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.

Immediate feedback, our next internal trigger, is another shortcut into the now. The term refers to a direct, in-the-moment coupling between cause and effect. The smaller the gap between input and output, the more we know how we’re doing and how to do it better. If we can’t course correct in real time, we start looking for clues to better performance—things we did in the past, things we’ve seen other people do, things that can pull us out of the moment. When feedback is immediate, the information we require is always close at hand. Attention doesn’t have to wander; the conscious mind need not get involved.

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. Think daily reviews. Studies have found that in professions with less direct feedback loops—stock analysis, psychiatry, and medicine—even the best get worse over time.

attention is most engaged (i.e., in the now) when there’s a very specific relationship between the difficulty of a task and our ability to perform that task. If the challenge is too great, fear swamps the system. If the challenge is too easy, we stop paying attention. 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.

How hard is that? Answers vary, but the general thinking is about 4 percent. That’s it. That’s the sweet spot. If you want to trigger flow, the challenge should be 4 percent greater than the skills. In technical terms, the sweet spot is the end result of what’s known as the Yerkes-Dobson law—the fact that increased stress leads to increased performance up to a certain intensity, beyond which performance levels off or declines.

It’s also for this reason that uncertainty causes the brain to release dopamine. A lot of dopamine. When anything can happen, survival could be at stake. Dopamine heightens attention and pattern recognition—two things that are absolutely essential to dealing with the unknown. Of course, being dopamine, this is all exceptionally pleasurable. Or, as Stanford neurologist Robert Sapolsky likes to say: “maybe (meaning uncertainty) is addictive like nothing else out there.”

If we want to achieve the kinds of accelerated performance we’re seeing in action and adventure sports, then it’s 4 percent plus 4 percent plus 4 percent, day after day, week after week, months into years into careers. This is the road to real magic. Follow this path long enough, and not only does impossible becomes possible, it becomes what’s next—like eating breakfast, like another a day at the office.

“Ever since you were a little kid, you always have a dream about what you can accomplish. As soon as you get close to that dream, there’s another. There’s always a desire to keep learning, to keep evolving. Here’s the line. Let’s tickle it a bit. And then you figure out that’s not actually the line. The impossible is actually a little farther out, so let’s go over there and tickle it again. You do this for long enough and you just get used to it.”

In 2007, to see if their suspicions were right, Dweck and Bentley recruited forty top drivers, then tested them on mindset before, during, and after every race of the season. The results were significant. They found that drivers with growth mindsets were able to enter flow more quickly and stay there no matter what went wrong during the race. Across the board, they were the winning drivers.

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.

If, like those with the growth mindset, you believe you can develop yourself, then you’re open to accurate information about your current abilities, even if it’s unflattering. What’s more, if you’re oriented toward learning, you need accurate information about your current abilities in order to learn effectively. However, if everything is either good news or bad news—as it is with fixed-mindset people—distortion almost inevitably enters the picture. Some outcomes are magnified, others are explained away, and before you know it, you don’t know yourself at all.”

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 not only does it become easier to find flow once, it becomes easier to find it again and again.” In other words, finding 4 percent not only helps create more flow in the moment, it helps create more flow over the long haul. And when it comes to flow—the haul is far longer than most suppose.

The first is that the state works like a light switch—on or off. You’re either in flow or out. Yet flow is not binary. The state is just one step in a four-part flow cycle. It’s impossible to experience flow without moving through this entire cycle. And this brings us to the second critical misconception: that flow always feels flowy.

The first step in the flow cycle is known as “struggle.” Herbert Benson, the Harvard cardiologist who did much of the foundational research on this cycle, chose that name for a reason. Struggle is a loading phase: we are overloading the brain with information. “For a businessperson,” writes Benson in his book Th...

A profound chemical change takes place during struggle. To amp up focus and alertness, stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine are pumped into the system. Tension rises. Frustration as well. Our problems seem unsolvable, our effort unsustainable, and the whole situation feels as far from flow as one could get. 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 in skill acquisition.

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.

The message is relaxation. The moment this occurs, another chemical change follows: nitric oxide floods the system. This endogenous gaseous signaling molecule causes stress hormones to decline and feel-good neurochemicals like dopamine and endorphins to rise in their place.

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

Afterward, we move into the fourth and final step in the cycle: “recovery.” Flow is an extremely expensive state for the body to produce and maintain. It requires a lot of energy and a lot of neurochemistry and both take a little while to replenish. This is some of what goes on in recovery. More important, memory consolidation is taking place. Information is moving from short-term holding into long-term storage. Here, to borrow the gamer’s phrase, we are “leveling up,” or, as Benson prefers, “returning to a new normal.”