Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
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“communal vocational ecstasy”
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When we check our email or Facebook or Twitter, and sometimes
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we find a response and sometimes we don’t, the next time a friend connects, Sapolsky discovered that we enjoy a 400 percent spike in dopamine.
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What looks inevitable in hindsight is often invisible with foresight.
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When John Hagel,22 the cofounder of Deloitte consulting’s Center for the Edge, made a global study of the world’s most innovative, high-performing business teams—meaning the most motivated teams on the planet—he too found that “the individuals and organizations who went the farthest the fastest were always the ones tapping into passion and finding flow.” This ability to unlock motivation has widespread implications. Across the board, from education to health care to business, motivational gaps cost us trillions of dollars a year.
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In 2013 we were invited to participate in the Red Bull Hacking Creativity project,35 a joint effort involving scientists at the MIT Media Lab, a group of TED Fellows,
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and the namesake
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energy drink company. Conceived by Dr. Andy Walshe, Red Bull’s director of high performance (and a member of Flow Genome Project’s advisory board), the project was the largest meta-analysis of creativity research ever conducted, reviewing more than thirty thousand research papers and interviewing hundreds of other subject-matter experts, from break dancers and circus performers to poets and rock stars. “It was an impossible goal,” Walshe explained, “but I ...
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First, creativity is essential for solving complex problems—the kinds we often face in a fast-paced world. Second, we have very little success training people to be more creative. And there’s a pretty simple explanation for this failure: we’re trying to train a skill, but what we really need to be training is a state of mind.
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Conventional logic works really well for solving discrete problems with definite answers. But the “wicked problems” of today36 require more creative responses. These challenges defy singular stable solutions: issues as serious as war or poverty, or as banal as traffic and trends. Throw money, people, or time at any of these and you may fix a symptom, but you create additional problems: financial aid to the developing world, for example, often breeds corruption in addition to its intended relief; adding more lanes to the highway encourages more drivers and more gridlock;
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Roger Martin of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management conducted a lengthy study of exceptional leaders stretching from Procter & Gamble’s then-CEO A. G. Lafley to choreographer Martha Graham and discovered that their ability to find solutions required holding conflicting perspectives and using that friction to synthesize a new idea. “The ability to face constructively the tension37 of opposing ideas,” Martin writes in his book The Opposable Mind, “. . . is the only way to address this kind of complexity.”
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Research done on Tibetan Buddhists38 in the 1990s showed that longtime contemplative practice can produce brainwaves in the gamma range. Gamma waves are unusual. They arise primarily during “binding,”39 when novel ideas come together for the first time and carve new neural pathways. We experience binding as “Ah-Ha insight,” that eureka moment, the telltale signature of sudden inspiration.
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Creativity, learning, and productivity are essential skills and those percentage gains are big numbers. If they were merely the result of a few studies done by a couple of labs, they would be easier to dismiss. But there is now seven decades of research, conducted by hundreds of scientists on thousands of participants, showing that when it comes to complex problem solving, ecstasis could be the “wicked solution” we’ve been looking for.
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In 1172, the English invaded Ireland, planted their flag, and built a great big fence. That barrier, known as the English Pale1—from pale, meaning a stake or picket—defined the world for those invaders. Within their pale, all was safe, true and good, a civilized land ruled by English law and institutions.
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Beyond the pale, on the other hand, lay bad news. That’s where mayhem, murder, and madness resided. Most who ventured beyond it were never heard from again. And the few who did manage to return weren’t always welcomed with open arms.
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As W. B. Yeats put it,14 “The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
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with addictive