Steven Kotler Quotes & Sayings

With this in mind, it is not inconceivable to say that there are people alive today who will live long enough to see their selves stored in silicon and thus, by extension, see themselves live forever. — Steven Kotler

Howard Thurman once said, Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs most is more people who have come alive. — Steven Kotler

He defined the state as being so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost. — Steven Kotler

Risk heightens focus and flow follows focus. This means that the fight-or-flight response primes the body - chemically and psychologically - for the flow state. Athletes report moving through one to get to the other. — Steven Kotler

There's a difference between when this happens in an artist's studio or on the tennis court versus inside the barrel of a fifty-foot wave. When you tap into that much force while pushing the absolute limits of human performance, that's more than just an imaginative breakthrough - that's bending reality to your will. — Steven Kotler

Suddenly normal wasn't good enough. — Steven Kotler

As it turns out, what makes a dog adoptable has very little to do with dogs, a great deal to do with humans. — Steven Kotler

Instead, over the past thirty years, in the world of action and adventure sports, in situations where asses really were on the line, the bounds of the possible have been pushed further and faster than ever before in history. We've seen near-exponential growth in ultimate human performance, which is both hyperbolic paradox and considerable mystery. Somehow, a generation's worth of iconoclastic misfits have rewritten the rules of the feasible, not just raising the bar but often obliterating it altogether. And this brings up one final question: Where-if anywhere-do our actual limits lie? — Steven Kotler

Scientists who study human motivation have lately learned that after basic survival needs have been met, the combination of autonomy (the desire to direct your own life), mastery (the desire to learn, explore, and be creative), and purpose (the desire to matter, to contribute to the world) are our most powerful intrinsic drivers - the three things that motivate us most. All three are deeply woven through the fabric of flow. Thus toying with flow involves tinkering with primal biology: addictive neurochemistry, potent psychology, and hardwired evolutionary behaviors. — Steven Kotler

To get around these things, Maus lived at the back of a closet. The door was — Steven Kotler

Flow tends to be the psychic signature of world-class performance and paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, — Steven Kotler

Mindset impacts emotion, which alters biology, which increases performance. Thus, it seemed, by tinkering with mindset - using everything from physical to psychological to pharmacological interventions - one could significantly enhance performance. — Steven Kotler

Time slows down. Self vanishes. Action and Awareness merge. Welcome to Flow. — Steven Kotler

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. Think challenging, yet manageable - just enough stimulation to shortcut attention into the now, not enough stress to pull you back out again. — Steven Kotler

Flow is more than an optimal state of consciousness - one where we feel our best and perform our best - it also appears to be the only practical answer to the question: What is the meaning of life? Flow is what makes life worth living. — Steven Kotler

Neurons that fire together wire together. — Steven Kotler

Creativity has a brain wave signature as well: alpha waves pulsing out of the brain's right hemisphere. — Steven Kotler

When doing what we most love transforms us into the best possible version of ourselves and that version hints at even greater future possibilities, the urge to explore those possibilities becomes feverish compulsion. Intrinsic motivation goes through the roof. Thus flow becomes an alternative path to mastery, sans the misery. — Steven Kotler

It is not often that Death is told so clearly to fuck off. — Steven Kotler

Fully alive and deeply committed is a risky business. — Steven Kotler

This automatic feedback is another reason extreme athletes have found flow so frequently, but what if we're interested in pulling this trigger without help from the laws of physics? No mystery here. 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. — Steven Kotler

The United States is in a tough spot. — Steven Kotler

Training in high-stress situations increases what psychologists call "situational awareness." Defined as the ability to absorb information accurately, assess it calmly, and respond appropriately, situational awareness is essentially the ability to keep cool when all hell breaks loose. Because attention and pattern recognition are so heightened by flow, training in the state radically increases situational awareness. — Steven Kotler

Sooner or later, there's always a Jaws: a mental hurdle we can't clear, a decision too dangerous to attack head on. In those situations, sideways is forward. — Steven Kotler

When people say that animal rescuers are crazy, what they really mean is that animal rescuers share a number of fundamental beliefs that makes them easy to marginalize. Among those is the belief that Rene Descartes was a jackass. — Steven Kotler

It was even odds that the thing I was the most afraid of didn't actually exist at all. — Steven Kotler

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness. — Steven Kotler

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. — Steven Kotler

This means flow packs a double punch: it doesn't just increase our decision-making abilities - it increases our creative decision-making abilities. Dramatically. — Steven Kotler

There wasn't anything wrong with these dogs. I wanted to take them all home with me. The whole damn warehouse of misery. Just strap it to my back and get the fuck out of the way. — Steven Kotler

Big-box health clubs oversell memberships by 400 percent — Steven Kotler

Theodore Berger, for example, a neural engineer at the University of Southern California, is working on an artificial hippocampus, one of the core neuronal structures implicated in this process. Berger's device records the electrical activity that arises whenever we encode short-term memories - for example, learning to play scales - then translates them into digital signals. — Steven Kotler

The upper echelon of adventure sport athletes are grappling with the fundamental properties of the universe: gravity, velocity and sanity. They're toying with them, cheating death, refusing to accept there might be limits to what they can accomplish. — Steven Kotler

The past three decades have witnessed unprecedented growth in what researchers now term ultimate human performance. This is not the same as optimal human performance, and the difference is in the consequences. Optimal performance is about being your best; ultimate performance is about being your best when any mistake could kill. Both common sense and evolutionary biology tell us that progress under these "ultimate" conditions should be a laggard's game, but that's not exactly what the data suggests. — Steven Kotler

From a quality-of-life perspective, psychologists have found that the people who have the most flow in their lives are the happiest people on earth. — Steven Kotler

Flow is an alternative path toward mastery, but, like any path, not without its pitfalls. There's a serious dark side to flow, — Steven Kotler

With our sense of self out of the the way we are liberated from doubt and insecurity. — Steven Kotler

If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round. Unless we invert this equation, much of our capacity for intrinsic motivation starts to shut down. We lose touch with our passion and become less than what we could be and that feeling never really goes away. — Steven Kotler

It was a silly time to try to make a living out of words, but it was a silly time in general. — Steven Kotler

Most people are so afraid of dying they never live. — Steven Kotler

In Lovelock's view the earth was a 'super-organism,' a cybernetic feedback system that 'seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.' At the suggestion of his neighbor, author and screenwriter William Goldman, he called the system Gaia after the ancient Greek Earth goddess. — Steven Kotler

Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. — Steven Kotler

That day, after barely resurfacing from a seventy-two meter warm up dive into the Blue Hole, Mevoli went into cardiac arrest and died. This time, he wasn't able to bring himself back. When asked to comment on the accident, Natalia Molchanova, regarded by many as the greatest freehold breath diver in the world, said, "the biggest problem with freedivers . . . [is] now they go too deep too fast." Less than two years later, off the coast of Spain, Molchanova took a quick recreational dive of her
own. She deliberately ran though her usual set of breathing exercises, attached a light weight to her belt to help her descend, and swam downward, alone. It was
supposed to be a head-clearing reset. But, Molchanova didn't come back either.
And that's the problem that free diving shares with many other state-shifting techniques: return too soon, and you'll always wonder if you could have gone
deeper. Go too far, and you might not make it back. — Steven Kotler

Correct predictions result in understanding. Incorrect predictions result in confusion and prompt you to pay attention. — Steven Kotler

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. There are no words. Our language becomes that of the river. All the features of the river speak to you and you to them through motion. There is tension, threat, there is joy and release, and overall, a deep, deep sense of flow. You are literally part of the flow of the world. — Steven Kotler

During a peak experience," Maslow explained, "the individual experiences an expansion of self, a sense of unity, and meaningfulness in life. The experience lingers in one's consciousness and gives a sense of purpose, integration, self-determination and empathy. — Steven Kotler

After three decades of research, Zimbardo found that the healthiest, happiest, highest performers blend the best of both worlds. The optimal time perspective combines the energy, joy, and openness of Presents, with the strength, fortitude, and long-term vision of the Futures. — Steven Kotler

That's why people who seek out group flow often join startups or work for themselves. Serial entrepreneurs keep starting new business as much for the flow experience, as for the additional success. — Steven Kotler

Every good athlete can find the flow," continues Pastrana, "but it's what you do with it that makes you great. If you consistently use that state to do the impossible, you get confident in your ability to do the impossible. You begin to expect it. That's why we're seeing so much progression in action sports today. It's the natural result of a whole lot of people starting to expect the impossible. — Steven Kotler

Hallucinogens then do the same job as religion - they provide proof of unity, which is still the only known cure for fear of death. — Steven Kotler

The quality most desirable in a CEO? According to a global survey conducted by IBM of 1,500 top executives in sixty countries: creativity. — Steven Kotler

And the dark night of flow is an issue that society has not made particularly easy to handle. How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors - activities packed with flow triggers - because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like "career" or "children"? How many, now grown up and done with childish things, have put away the surfboard, the skateboard, the whatever? How many have made the mistake of conflating the value of the vehicle that leads us to an experience (the surfboard, etc.) with the value of the experience itself (the flow state)? — Steven Kotler

Our limits are governed by flow's ability to amplify performance as much as by imagination's ability to dream up that performance. — Steven Kotler

creativity triggers flow; then flow enhances creativity. — Steven Kotler

Creatives fail and the really good ones fail often. — Steven Kotler

How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors - activities packed with flow triggers - because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like "career" or "children"? — Steven Kotler