A talk by Steven Kotler exploring how individuals and small teams achieve seemingly impossible feats across domains (action sports, technology, entrepreneurship) by entering the psychological state known as flow. Kotler summarizes flow’s defining features, its measurable nature (per Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), and evidence that flow dramatically boosts performance and productivity.
Chapters
What does it take to do the impossible? I came to this question of impossibility through an unusual door. I walked in through the door of journalism. And in the early 1990s, when I became a journalist, action adventure sports were a really hot topic. The X Games were starting out the Gravity Games. And back then, if you could write and ski or write and surf or write and rock climb, there was work. I couldn't do any of those things very well, but I really needed the work. So I lied to my editors and I was lucky enough to spend the better portion of 10 years chasing extreme athletes around mountains and across oceans. And I will tell you that if you are not an extreme athlete and you spend all your time chasing extreme athletes around mountains, across oceans, you tend to break things. I broke a lot of things. And then I have to take four months, five months off. And when I came back, the progress I saw was astounding. It was amazing. It was leaps and bounds kind of progress. Stuff that had been absolutely impossible just four months ago was not just being done, it was being iterated upon. Now, this caught my attention for a number of reasons. The first is that back in the early 1990s, action adventure sports was a punk rock pastime practiced by rowdy, irreverent people without a lot of natural advantages. So most of the people I spent my time with, they had very, very little education. They had almost no. And the vast majority of people I knew came from horrifically difficult childhoods. Destroyed homes. Not just broken homes. Destroyed homes. And yet here they were on a regular basis, reinventing what was possible for our species. Right. Extending the limits of kinesthetic possibility. So surfing is a very old sport. Dates back to 400 AD. And from 400 AD until 1996, progress was really slow, incremental at best. 25ft was the biggest wave anybody had ever surfed. And above that, everybody believed it was impossible. There were physics papers written about how it's impossible to paddle into a wave over 25ft and possible to surf a wave over 25ft. As you can see from this photo Today, less than two decades later, surfers are routinely pulling into waves over 100ft tall. This caught my attention what the heck was going on? But I also knew, because I had broken 82 bones at that point, that if I didn't take my question out of action sports and into other places, I. I was probably going to kill myself. So that's what I did. And I really took this question pretty much into every domain imaginable. I focused on those Maverick innovators who turned science fiction ideas into science fact technology, who did the impossible of literally dreaming up the future in bold. I looked at upstart entrepreneurs, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk. People who had built world changing and possible businesses in near record time in abundance. The book that Vishen mentioned, we looked at small teams and individuals who are going after grand global challenges. Things like poverty or healthcare, or energy scarcity or water scarcity. These are things that just a few decades back had been the sole province of large corporations and big governments. And yet here were individuals tackling these impossible challenges. So what I discovered in all these domains is that it doesn't actually matter where you look. You could be talking about the action, adventure, sport, athletes, you can be talking about business tycoons, about technologists or artists, it doesn't matter. Every domain you find, ultimate human performance has the exact same signature. It is a state of consciousness known to researchers as flow. Now, you may know flow by other names, right? You may call it runner's high or being in the zone. If you happen to play basketball, you might call it being unconscious. If you're a beatnik jazz musician, you're being in the pocket. If you do stand up comedy, you're in the forever box. Flow is a technical term. As I mentioned earlier, it is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness, one where we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, it refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. We get so focused on the task at hand, everything else just disappears. Action and awareness will start to merge. Your sense of self will vanish, time will dilate. Which is a fancy way of saying it passes strangely. So sometimes, occasionally it'll slow down and you get that freeze frame effect from anybody who's been in a car crash. And more frequently, it speeds up and five hours go by in like five minutes. And throughout, all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. Now, flow science is actually quite old. It dates back to the late 1880s, which was the very first time somebody figured out that an altered state of consciousness, which is what flow is, had a radical impact. Performance science of flow took a huge step forward in the 60s, 70s, 80s, thanks to this man. This is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He is often called the godfather of flow psychology. And he conducted one of the largest global studies on optimal performance anybody's ever done. And he learned three things about flow that are really fundamental. The first thing he discovered is that flow is definable. It has seven core characteristics, uninterrupted concentration in the present moment, vanishing of self, time dilation, and so forth. And because it is definable, it is measurable. So we have extremely well validated psychometric instruments to measure flow at this point. Csikszentmiyai also discovered that flow is universal, shows up in everyone, everywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met. He also discovered why flow is flowy and why it's called flow. So in his giant study, ran around the world talking to people saying, hey, tell me about the time in your life when you feel your best, you perform your best. And the vast majority, tens of thousands of people said, you know, when I'm at my best, I'm in this state. And every idea, every action, every decision flows seamlessly, perfectly, effortlessly from the last. So flow is actually a phenomenological description. It's how the state makes us feel. Interestingly, for the state to make us feel flowy, right underneath that, you actually get a really good shorthand definition of what flow is. For every action, every decision to lead seamlessly, perfectly, effortlessly to the last flow has to be as close to near perfect, high speed, creative decision making as we can get. So that's a quick shorthand way of thinking about what flow actually is. Final thing that Csikszentmihalyi discovered is that flow is fundamental. Flow is fundamental to well being and overall life satisfaction. In fact, in his study, he found that the people who score off the charts highest in the world for overall life satisfaction and well being are the people with the most flow in their lives. The next question researchers turned their attention to was, all right, so this is optimal performance. Great. How optimal? What we now know in athletics, for example, is pretty much every gold medal or world championship that's ever been won, there's a flow state at its heart. We know that flow in the arts, in technology, in science accounts for significant progress. Major paradigm shifts, usually a flow state at the heart. So McKinsey, the global consultancy, did a 10 year study and they found that top executives in flow are five times more productive than out of flow. Five times more productive is 500% more productive. Means you could go to work on Monday, take Tuesday through Friday off and get as much done as your steady state peers. Interestingly, two days a week in flow, you are 1000% more productive than the competition. So think about this for a second. We work with a lot of top organizations, lot of top businesses that are now starting to incorporate flow into their fundamental DNA. Anybody who's not doing this at this point. If employees inflow are 1000% more productive versus company over here that doesn't have employees inflow, you can see the problem.
