Achieving the Impossible with Steven Kotler & Jim Kwik

Welcome back, Kwik Brain. Your question of today.

We got a lot of people talking about limits in our Facebook group.

This question is, how do you do the impossible? What is truly possible? And on this show, we are very excited to have a returning guest. He's a leading expert on peak performance, award-winning journalist, founder of the Flow Research Collective, author of like a dozen plus books. We've had him on the show before on our stages talking about Rise of Superman, Stealing Fire, His new book, The Art of Impossible. Steven Kotler, thanks for coming on, buddy.

Jim, it's great to be with you again.

Dude, um, this, this book is dense. And, you know, I was just telling you that before we started, um, we started the show. And, you know, our show is only 20 minutes long, and you and I are thinking like, how do we dissect this? What can we talk about? What's the You know, we talked about a small— is it a small I? Is it a big I? You know, are we hardwired to go big? What's the whole formula here? Where do we start?

So the way— The Art of Impossible is 30 years of me literally researching those moments in time when the impossible became possible, right? That was my beat as a journalist, as an author, now as a researcher. And every time I've seen that in every domain you can imagine, I've been trying to use the tools neuroscience and psychology figure out what the hell's going on in people's brains when they're tackling, when they're doing that, which has never been done before. Right? That's sort of the whole goal. And these are capital I impossible. Right? And we see them and we go, oh my God, I don't even get it. But the book is really meant— it's lessons learned from people who have done capital I impossible. But it's meant to be used by anybody, as you mentioned, who's interested in small i impossible. Those things that we think are impossible for us. This could be overcoming deep trauma, rising out of poverty, for sure figuring out as an entrepreneur, how do you get paid to do what you love? That's a huge impossible. If you're in your early teenage years, by the way, how do I get a boyfriend or a girlfriend is often one of the first impossibles that we solve. And what I mean by impossible is, hey, there's not really a clear path between point A and point B. And statistically, if you want to become world-class in whatever you do, or, you know, rise out of poverty, overcome deep trauma, statistically poor odds of success. So those are small i impossibles. And I will absolutely tell you this, 2 things that are important that I've learned in all these lessons. One, say you are interested in really going big, capital I impossible. I want to do that which has never been done. In 30 years of studying this and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people, The only way you get to capital I impossible is one small i impossible after another. What's impossible for you today? Get after that. What's— okay, what's next? What's next? And really, if you talk to everybody, nobody sets out to accomplish capital I impossible. They get good at accomplishing small i impossibles that they almost become automatic. And capital I impossible is just what happens the next day, right? Laird Hamilton once said, people see me on a 50-foot wave, I'm 33 years old, and they think, oh my God, that's impossible. I could never do that. And what they didn't see is me at 3 years old on a 3-foot wave and 4 years old on a 4-foot wave and 5 years old on a 5-foot wave. And they didn't see me last week on a 49.5-foot wave. So they see a 50-foot wave and they think, oh my God, that's impossible. And I think, dude, you're 6 inches more than last week. You're not even like— what are you doing? You're not even pushing yourself. So small I impossible after small I impossible. The next thing that I want on this subcategory under that is Peak performance, all this stuff is nothing more than getting our biology to work for us rather than against us. I have met extraordinary people who have done extraordinary things. None of them started out extraordinary. They start out like everybody else, but they have figured out how to get their biology to work for them rather than against them. And once you do that, the turbo boost is enormous.

What would be an example? So people have to get their internal world to be able to meet the demands of the, of the external The challenges that they have. What would be an example of this?

Yeah. A simple example is this. We all know we have intrinsic motivation, internal motivators, right? We've heard of them. We know curiosity, passion, purpose. What most people don't realize is one, these are actually all part of a single system and they're all designed to work in a specific order in a specific way. Curiosity is our foundational motivation. Why does it matter? get focused for free. When you're curious about something, you don't have to burn a ton of energy to pay attention. Curiosity is literally designed to be cultivated into passion. Passion is designed to be attached to a purpose greater than ourselves. And there are biological reasons under all this, but that's once you have your purpose, then you need the autonomy, the freedom to pursue that purpose. Once you have the freedom to pursue your purpose, then The system needs mastery, the skills to pursue that purpose well. Once you've gotten that path in, there are 3 tiers of goal setting that our biology demands. We're sort of goal-directed machines. And if you give the human body the right goals, it will do a lot of the work for you along the way. But you have to do it in a specific way. Once you've got your goals locked in, you need levels of grit. And there's 6 different kinds of levels of grit. And once you, like, when you get, as you start to line this stuff up, as it starts to be designed to work, you start getting way more flow. Flow is optimal performance, right? It's a state of consciousness where we feel our best, we perform our best. It's an enormous boost in motivation, productivity, creativity, learning, focus, grit. All the things that we're trying to work on get amplified in flow. So when you start lining up your intrinsic motivators and setting goals in the proper order and the way the system has been designed to work, you start really getting a lot of flow and everything gets turbo boosted. And finally, I'm not saying, none of these things I'm saying, it's not like your listeners, right? Like Kwik Brain, they know, oh, intrinsic motivation. Okay. Yeah.

Goals.

I mean, these are things we've all heard about pieces of the puzzle. There are great books written on pieces of the puzzle. I've written a couple of those books, including books on flow. What we know, what neuroscience has done in the past 5 to 10 years is advanced to the point that we're like, oh crap, it's a whole system. It's a sequence. It's designed to all work together in a certain order. And if you can get everything right, then you really accelerate it. And that really is what most peak performers have figured out. We'll do a lot of this intuitively. Now we know enough to shortcut the process for everyone.

Yeah, I think our listeners are very used to— they were exposed to flow with you on our stages and our podcast. I interviewed you for our chapter on flow in Limitless. And so it's nice to see that there's a syntax to success. And then the output is what? Performance, creativity, it's these world-class people that you work with?

The way I mean, so all peak performance works like compound interest, right? Little bit, little bit, little bit today, a little bit tomorrow, and it starts to blow up. But you gotta, let's give simple examples. So high, hard goals on the goal setting frontier, we know you need a mission level, what Peter and I, Peter Diamandis and I, call massively transformative purpose. You need mission-level goals for your life and high-hard goals. Mission level is I want to be a great, the greatest writer in the history of the universe. High-hard goals is I want to get a degree in journalism. I want to write a book on learning, right? They're 1 to 5 year implements and they're meant to be set in a specific way. And then there are clear goals, today's like to-do list, and everything has to point in the same direction. You're today's to-do list goes toward. High, hard goals, if you properly set them, will give you an 11% to 25% boost in motivation automatically. It's just the way the system works. So we get them right. There's a lot of those things along the way, right? So you're going to get all these micro boosts in motivation. I talk about what happens when you get all the motivation triad of goals, grit, and intrinsic motivation sort of stacked together. You develop what I call the habit of ferocity. This is the ability to automatically sort of rise to and lean into any challenge. And the example, the way to think about this is when you see it, and you've seen this in people, like amazing, you're probably a little bit like this, but world-class attackers basically, when challenges rise up, they don't dither, they don't think about, they lean in instinctively. It happens automatically. The big deal here, most people, we get about 5 or 6 business challenges a day in any given business day. Most people will spend 5 to 10 minutes a challenge sort of dithering. What's the best way in? Should I do this? And they're going to do it anyways, but they lose— doesn't— 5 minutes challenge, it's 5 challenges a day, it's 25 minutes a day, but it's 3.5 hours a week and it's 3.5 weeks a year. So by having these things stacked up properly, for example, this is just one example because motivation is just where this stuff starts. But you know, this one example is saving you your 3.5 weeks year ahead of the competition just by doing this properly. So that's sort of what happens when you start getting everything really to work together in that way, I think. And then of course, flow, you know, if you're going by McKinsey's numbers on productivity, it's a 500% boost in productivity. The DOD found learning accelerates 240+% in flow. Our research and a lot of other research, creativity goes up 400% to 700%. grit, resilience, quality of life, meaning, satisfaction, all these things massively amplified in flow. So you're getting all these little bits along the way, and then you're getting way more reliable flow. And flow is this massive turbo boost, which is why when you see sort of like real— Elon Musk or Peter Diamandis— and you're like, how the hell do they get so much done so fast? It's because everything is designed to turbo boost itself, and you're just getting positive feedback loop. Positive feedback loop and you get a lot farther faster.

So can you make living up to your potential and achieving the impossible, can you, can you make that a habit?

Yeah, it's the crazy thing about Art of Impossible is when you go through the whole book, you said it's dense. Hopefully it's fun. I tried to make the book really, really fun, but, uh, and with good stories along the way, but you— there's a ton of stuff in there and it's like, you know, But when you get to the end, there are onboarding processes. For example, we talked about curiosity into passion. That's an on— you have to do that in a specific way. That can take a little while to get it right and get it going. But what it actually comes down to is about 6 things you have to do every day, 7 things you have to do every week. And some of the 6 things are really like 5 minutes. There's a couple of them that are 5 minutes. A couple of them, other things you're already going to be doing get folded inside of. So it is It's oddly not that huge of a commitment. You have to understand what you're doing and how the system works and all that stuff. But, um, it's, it's, you know, it, it's what's really— the difficult part is the consistency. The difficult part is I can— is doing this every day. And that— but if you can stick to that, yeah, the turbo boost is extraordinary.

So what would some of those— what would be just a few of those things you do daily?

Let me give you— let me give you a simple example. the flow section, the way the book goes. And this is how to— so motivation, when psychologists say motivation, it's a triad of skills, right? It's internal motivation, grit, and goals. So it's a thing. But the full peak performance picture, like all of our biology is a limited toolkit. You need the motivation to get into the game, the learning that allows you to continue to play, right? And then creativity that allows you to steer, especially if you're going towards high, hard goals or impossible goals where it's hard to figure out where am I going? You need that amplified creativity, creative solve problem. That's the sequence. And to really maximize all those skills in your life, it is, it's honestly 6 things to do a day, 7 additional things to do a week. Quality of life goes up hugely. You end up with time back. Like, it's amazing how— It's when people who, who have been working with this for a really long time, what they come back to me with is that the surprise is that there's no secret secret, that this is actually the formula, right? One of the big problems people have with peak performance, and you know this, is people want something sexy. They want a new technology or they want a new substance, right? And the truth of the matter is the real tools, the psychological tools, clear goals, high, hard goals, right? Those are not sexy, right? They're not really going to— they're not how you're going to pick up strangers in bars really. Like it doesn't— they're just that, but they're deadly effective. And just to give you an idea, the flow section right at the end of the book, the stuff in there is the same stuff we use in Zero to Dangerous, which is the Flow Research Collective's kind of flagship training. We see and we measure flow pre and post with the best psychometric instruments around. we see on average a 70% boost in flow on the backside of our training. This book has all that same information. That's a massive boost in flow. If flow— I mean, the McKinsey 500% boost in productivity, it's a subjective number. They went around the world and asked top executives how much more productive you are in flow, but they asked a lot of them, right? And 500%, I mean, you go to work on Monday, you spend Monday in a flow state, you take Tuesday through Friday off, you just got as much done as everybody else that week. 2 days a week in flow, you're 1,000% more productive than the competition. These are huge boosts and they're huge boosts over time and they keep adding up. The biggest lesson, Jim, in 30 years of doing this work is that we are all capable of so much more than we know. That's what I've seen over and over and over again. But I've also seen that most people don't know this because human potential is invisible. Literally, as, and especially to ourselves. Studies show that we don't know what we're going to like or be good at until we've tried an activity and begun to master it. Right? So you literally can't even prejudge if I'm going to be good at this or like this until you start to know your way around a subject. We know that. And we know that human potential only emerges when you use your skills to the utmost again and again and again. That's how you find out what you're actually capable of. But all of that is a habit. And you have to get in the habit of pushing yourself to that edge again and again and again. Then you start to go, oh wow, this is a different ballgame. That's why you go small i after small i after small i. Because the real thing that emerges, and you know this as you go after small i's, is a much bigger adjacent possible. Every time you go after one of those small i's and tick it off your list, and you're like, the next question is always, oh wow, I just did that. Okay. What else can I do? And it's a bigger playpen. And you get to play in a slightly bigger world. And that's how you do this. And that's also, as you know, the most fun we can have on this planet. Yeah. So it's, it's an amazingly rewarding path that is available to all of us.

So let's say somebody wants to, uh, well, for them, their small i is, is learning a language, or like maybe it's Spanish, or maybe it's snowboarding. Is it a different strategy you would take a subject or a client through To learn Spanish than to be competent at snowboarding or skiing?

So when I— yes, but yes, but yes, but no. Mostly because learning a language is a sort of— there's different strategies for learning knowledge versus learning skills, right? And that's how I break it down in the book. And really, Like with skills like a language, I take Tim Ferriss's approach to 80/20 the problem. I think that's the fastest, quickest, like for skill acquisition, unless it's going to core skill to your core passion and purpose, right? Like I, one of the examples I give, I 80/20 legalese so I could understand all the contracts and talk to all the lawyers I have to deal with, right? I'm not going to 80/20 the craft of writing. that's a thing where I need to know how to do everything. So slightly different those ways, but with skills, um, that's how I really approach those things. But more importantly is also learning how you learn, taking advantage. Most people don't take advantage of innate curiosity, and that's the best driver for learning because innate curiosity means there's norepinephrine and dopamine in our system, which is what primes the body for learning. So there are, right, it's not about learning harder, as you know, it's about learning smarter.

Right. And so the biochemistry of learning, I mean, that, that could be a whole separate episode, but you're saying that basically we are wired, our neurobiology is wired to go big, to be able to perform like this.

We, it's so not only do I, the, what's very, very clear I mean, first of all, flow is the state of optimal performance. And one of the known— most well-known things about flow is it's universal. It's found in every human being. It's found in most mammals for that matter, maybe possibly all mammals. So yeah, I mean, flow requires a bunch of different neurochemistry. Don't like— remember, trees process information with the same neurochemicals that human brains do. So a lot of these systems have been really conserved through evolution and they're present kind of all over the place. Um, but yeah, most mammals seem to be able to get into flow. Dogs for sure, horses for sure, social mammals for sure. Um, anyways, doesn't— besides the point, we're all hardwired for that. The other thing is all the other systems that we're taking advantage of. All human beings, all mammals again, have 7 basic emotional systems. There are social emotions built on top of that, but there are 7 systems. And the seeking system which is most of what we're playing with in peak performance, it's pretty well explored. We understand how it works and we understand how to get it to work for us. So all this stuff is really baked in. It's baked into all humans. And here's what's crazy. Not only do I think we're hardwired to go big, but the proof that we're hardwired to go big is that not going big is actually bad for us. Right? The system is designed to work in a certain way. There are 8 major causes of depression. 2 of them get all the attention. This is genetics or trauma. And yet it turns out genetics alone cannot cause depression. It's very, very rare. It's like 50% of the picture, but there's always other causes. And trauma, the other cause that people pay a lot of attention to, as I'm sure you know, most of the time trauma leads to post-traumatic growth. not post-traumatic stress disorder. Right. So as a general rule, while trauma is still traumatizing, most people end up overcoming and moving in a positive direction. Doesn't actually lead towards anxiety and depression. The other 6 causes are, for example, lack of meaningful work is one of the 6 major causes of depression and anxiety. Now, 1 out of 10 adults is going to be depressed over the next year. So it's a plague, right? Somebody kills themselves once every 12 seconds today, which is insane. Right. And lack of meaningful work is one of the 6 major reasons why. What does that actually mean under the hood? It means work that does not— that I'm not curious about, that does not align with my passion, that does not align with my purpose, that there's no freedom to pursue it the way I want to pursue it. I don't have the chance to master any skills, so I'm not actually getting better at shit while I'm pursuing this work and it's not producing flow. That's what we mean by lack of meaningful work. And you can take it one level down to these specific neurochemicals. Right. But the point is that we are wired to work in a certain way. And Abraham Maslow put it this way. He said, whatever humans can be, they must be. And that like more and more seems to be true. And, you know, we've gotten, we've gotten a little away from that lately in terms of how we're living our lives, I think. And, um, But if we can re-tilt it and get it right, it doesn't seem like there are many limits.

Yeah.

Looking at your Limitless book behind you.

And Limitless is where it's not about, you know, it's, it's, it's not about being perfect. It's about advancing and advancing beyond what you believe is possible.

Totally. Yeah. And that's, I mean, my point is that over and over and over again, right, we have no idea what we're capable And, you know, the examples I like to give is like the early action sport athletes that I was studying, the first group of people I wrote about in Rise. These people, literally the '90s in action adventure sport era, it's considered the great era of impossible. More things that nobody thought were ever going to be done in history were done. It happened. It was routine. And I knew these people, the men and women doing this. And as a general rule, they came from broken homes and horrific childhoods. They had very little education. They had very little money. There was a ton of drugs. and alcohol in the community. Like, if you were to bet against any particular group of people, right, this does not sound like a formula for we're going to reinvent the limits of our species. And that's exactly what happened. And it happened because they tapped into all this stuff that's in Art of Impossible. They overcame every single limitation that society says leads to jail or early death. And they reinvented what was possible for our species. And that's what you see over and over again in the literature on peak performance. That's right. Like, so if that's what's possible for everybody, you know, and I've seen it again and again and again. So hopefully that's the message in the book.

It is. Highly recommend it. Go to theartofimpossible.com. Highly recommend it. And I would recommend everyone takes a screenshot of this episode and tag Steven on social media.

Please.

And tag myself. And here's the thing, when we, when we hear something, we get to learn it once, but when we share it and we teach it, we get to, get to learn it again. And so share it with your fans, your followers, your family, your friends by posting it online. I will put all the links in our show notes as we always do at jimkwik.com/notes, as well as to Stephen's other books, as well as the art of Impossible and his social media also as well. Stephen, thank you so much for being back on our show.

Jim, thanks for having me. It's always great to see you.

Hi, Kwik Brain.

It's your brain coach. I want to thank you so much for watching this video. 3 things to do. Number 1, make sure you share this because when you teach something, you get to learn it twice. Update your learning so you can update other people's learning as well. Number 2, make sure Make sure you subscribe to this channel so you don't miss a thing, because if you miss a video, you miss a lot. And finally, make sure you hit that bell so you're notified and you find out when we put out the latest and the greatest. One extra thing, if you want really close attention, then text me. Here is my phone number: 310-299-9362. Did you remember that number? 310-299-9362. Shoot me a text and we'll stay in touch. Ask me your burning question. And I wish your days be full of lots of life, lots of love, lots of laughter, and always lots of learning. I'll see you in our next video.

Bye.