Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

by Steven Kotler

But Bob Kegan, the Harvard psychologist whom we first met in Chapter 2, upended that assumption by doing something psychologists before him hadn’t done too much of: longitudinal research. Kegan tracked a group of adults as they aged. His goal was simple: understand how they changed and grew over time, and determine if, in fact, there were upper limits to who we can become. Kegan spent three decades tracking this group,32 seeing what happened to their psychological maturity and capacity along the way. He discovered that while some adults remained frozen in time, a select few achieved meaningful growth. Right around middle age, for example, Kegan noticed that some people moved beyond generally well-adjusted adulthood, or what he called “Self-Authoring,” into a different stage entirely: “Self-Transforming.” Defined by heightened empathy, an expanded capacity to hold differing and even conflicting perspectives, and a general flexibility in how you think of yourself, self-transforming is the developmental stage we tend to associate with wisdom (and Roger Martin’s Opposable Mind).