#229 Steven Kotler Episode Notes – Achieving Peak Performance & Taking on the Impossible

Big Idea’s

When uncovering the secrets behind peak performance, Steven says he had two clear lessons. The first is that we are capable of so much more than we know, and the second is that human potential is invisible, especially to ourselves.

“I do believe that the only thing that is more emotionally difficult than the toil of trying to live up to our dreams, is the emotional pain of not”

While finding your passion seems daunting to many, Steven says it’s very simple:

“If you can find four or five or ten things you’re curious about and find a place that three or four or five of them really intersect, that’s a lot of energy. When five or six of your curiosities intersect at one point on one thing, that’s the seed kernel of passion”

Steven’s book, The Art of Impossible, is the first time the secrets behind the peak performers of the world have been uncovered and backed by neuroscience. Steven’s phenomenal explanation of these secrets will make challenge whatever you previously thought was impossible.

“If peak performance is a game, where you’re competing against yourself and the world in a sense, motivation is what gets you into the game, grit and goals keep you there, learning is what allows you to continue to play, creativity is how you steer, and flow is how you turbo-boost the whole thing beyond your reasonable expectations.”

2:36 Since Episode #43

Steven explains how in the past three years since his first appearance on WGYT in Episode #43 he’s felt contentment for the first time in his life. He describes contentment for him as lower cognitive load that is getting between him and good decision making.

“My whole life I just run at challenge at challenge at challenge and that constant anxiety in my brain sort of keeps me a little safe”

5:22 History is Littered With the Impossible

Steven talks about how history is littered with moments in every industry of tackling big challenges, such as the four minute mile, walking on the moon, and creating the smartphone. He went through every domain possible using neuroscience and psychology to decode the ‘never been done before’ feats that people have accomplished .

“The secret to peak performance is getting our biology to work for us rather than against us”

Steven’s book, The Art of Impossible, focuses on the cognitive side and the principles behind them. The way Steven frames it in the book as “capital I” impossible and “lower case i” impossible.

“I’m interested in people who want to exceed their limitations, exceed their expectations, and level up their game like never before and I’m interested in the patterns in the brain that underlie that behavior and allow us to make it possible, and that is what the Art of Impossible is about”

9:53 Lessons from Magic

When Steven was 9 years old, his younger brother performed a simple magic trick for their family. Steven describes this moment was the first time he witnessed ‘magic’ and it taught him that two things had to be true:

His little brother wasn’t magic
If he made the impossible seem possible, there had to be a skillset underneath it

After becoming fascinated with the idea of the skillset behind illusions, Steven worked as a professional magician for almost a decade.

12:55 Inner Drive

Steven reflects back on getting into a creative writing program in college. There was immense classmate competition, but Steven says he felt at competition with the greatest writers of all time.

“It never dawned on me that I was competing against the guy sitting next to me or the woman sitting next to me. Maybe that’s not normal, I just never thought about it. I was like well find me the best in the world and let’s see what they got. I’m going to go up against that even if I get crushed, and that’s how I’ve always approached it”

Steven says that much of his belief system about these ideas got a “helpful or unhelpful” push from his partnership with Peter Diamandis, who he wrote the book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think with.

“He has laws that he thinks about and one of them is, “if at first you don’t succeed, start all over again at the next level up””

Peter’s Laws

17:21 Biggest Problem in Coaching

One of the problems in peak performance training is people try to train other people in what works for them. He explains how genetics and early childhood development play the largest part in our levels of extroversion, introversion, risk tolerance, and risk aversion.

“If you can get underneath the biology, there’s a blueprint for everyone”

We as humans are goal-directed beings and that we filter the world through what scares us and what we want. He believes that the reason crippling depression and anxiety are so common is because our goals are not big enough.

“Passionate purposes are powerful intrinsic motivators. Lack of passion, lack of purpose, these are major causes of depression and anxiety”

22:06 The Passion Recipe

Humans are motivated by extrinsic motivators (food, money, sex, fame, etc) or intrinsic motivators (curiousity, passion, purpose, etc), with curiosity being the most basic intrinsic motivator.

Once you have purpose, you need autonomy, the freedom to pursue your purpose. After autonomy, you need mastery, the skills to be better and pursue your purpose.

“The goals have to be reflective of curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. They all have to be lined up to get the most value”

27:40 Flow is Not a Light Switch

Sean explains how after a state of flow he feels drained, and Steven follows up by saying that flow is not a light switch you turn on and off. He explains that flow is a four day cycle and on the backend there is a recovery period.

“One of the secrets to a hyper lifestyle is actually learning to not ride the ‘up’ too ‘up’, because that ‘up’ is neurochemically expensive.”

For Steven, he recognizes his need for recovery in his creative process when he starts to notice bigger tangents in his thinking and stuff becoming grandiose.

34:11 Game Selection

Steven describes the peak performance recipe from David Epstein as a formula for ‘match quality’ instead of immediate specialization. This match quality recipe encourages hunting for the intersection of multiple curiosities. Steven describes two things that happened over the past years to shift how peak performance was viewed.

The neuroscience massively accelerated
Peak performance went from an invisible art and podcasting made it visible

“What I’m hoping The Art of Impossible actually is, is the first time we’ve looked at the entire big picture put together, and especially backed by neuroscience”

37:15 Steven’s Two Clearest Lessons

After studying the moments in time when the impossible becomes possible for 30 years, Steven has two clear lessons.

We are all capable of so much more than we know
Human potential is invisible, especially to ourselves

“I do believe that the only thing that is more emotionally difficult than the toil of trying to live up to our dreams, is the emotional pain of not”

42:14 Training Weaknesses

Steven says that research has shown that the combination of training a weakness and believing you can overcome the weakness is best done slowly.

“Often when you are training up true deep weaknesses, you’re trying to get over a belief barricade too”

Steven provides an example of how he trained a weakness: he despised contracts and legalities, and in order to train this weakness, he read every contract he ever signed and looked up every word he didn’t know, ultimately taking a year and a half until he felt comfortable with legal language.

“With training weaknesses you have to absolutely forgive failure and you have to realize one of the reasons all this stuff is so hard is learning is invisible.”

Steven says that the first thing you have to do is align your five core intrinsic motivators, then set the three levels of goal setting – big mission statement, high and hard goals, and clear everyday goals- and then tap into the six kinds of grit which you need when the motivation stops working. After you have this down, in Steven’s opinion, is when you start training weaknesses.

“It’s so demotivating to train weaknesses if you haven’t lined up some of the other grit skills first”

The next level after training weaknesses, is the grit to control your fear.

“Fear gives you the most focus for free, if you think about the stuff that scares us, you can’t stop paying attention”

51:34 Being Your Best at Your Worst

Steven explains how his head got ‘kicked sideways’ when talking to Josh Waitzkin, the author of The Art of Learning, when Josh told him that the grit you have to train is being your best at your worst.

As an example, Steven explains how he practices of being his best at his worst to prepare for giving a high consequence speech. After a night of less than ideal sleep, Steven will work a 12-14 hour day, go to the gym and go twice as hard, come home and hike up the mountain behind his house with his dogs and there he delivers his speech.

“If I can give a speech exhausted, while going up a mountain at the end of a 14 hour day, I can give it anywhere”

55:43 Steven’s Message to Readers

Steven says that the book, The Art of Impossible, covers four major categories: motivation, learning, creativity, and flow. These four components are what Steven calls the ‘cognitive peak performance suite.’

1:00:03 What Steven Doesn’t Know

Steven says that while he has written six novels, they are not communicating at the level that he wants them to communicate at. Steven’s next big book is on intuition and how it works neurobiologically.