Steven Kotler > Quotes

“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, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life

“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, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“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, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“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, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“Since flow is a fluid action state, making better decisions isn’t enough: we also have to act on those decisions. The problem is fear, which stands between us and all actions. Yet our fears are grounded in self, time, and space. With our sense of self out of the way we are liberated from doubt and insecurity. With time gone, there is no yesterday to regret or tomorrow to worry about. And when our sense of space disappears, so do physical consequences. But when all three vanish at once, something far more incredible occurs: our fear of death—that most fundamental of all fears—can no longer exist. Simply put: if you’re infinite and atemporal, you cannot die.”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“When risk is a challenge, fear becomes a compass—literally pointing people in the direction they need to go next”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“As children we are taught not to play with fire, not how to play with fire.”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“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, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“Flow starts when we say yes to the fight.”
― Steven Kotler, The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer

“The great civil rights leader 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, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“The happiest people on earth worked hard for their fulfillment. They didn’t just have the most peak experiences, they had devoted their lives to having these experiences, often, as Csikszentmihalyi explained in his 1996 book Creativity, going to extreme lengths to seek them out: It was clear from talking to them, that what kept them motivated was the quality of the experience they felt when they were involved with the activity. The feeling didn’t come when they were relaxing, when they were taking drugs or alcohol, or when they were consuming the expensive privileges of wealth. Rather, it often involved painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“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, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“When free from the confines of our normal identity, we are able to look at life, and the often repetitive stories we tell about it, with fresh eyes. Come Monday morning, we may still clamber back into the monkey suits of our everyday roles—parent, spouse, employee, boss, neighbor—but, by then, we know they're just costumes with zippers.”
― Steven Kotler, Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

“Motivation is what gets you into this game; learning is what helps you continue to play; creativity is how you steer; and flow is how you turbo-boost the results beyond all rational standards and reasonable expectations.”
― Steven Kotler, The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer

“The reasons there are so many clichés about universes inside of dewdrops is because there are universes inside of dewdrops.”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“Tell me what you value and I might believe you,” management guru Peter Drucker once said, “but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you what you really value.”
― Steven Kotler, Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

“In an environment of turbulent change, as de Geus famously wrote: “The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“This is what the self-help books don’t tell you. Fully alive and deeply committed is a risky business. Once you strip away the platitudes, a life of passion and purpose will always cost, as T. S. Eliot reminds us, “Not less than everything.”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“It was even odds that the thing I was the most afraid of didn't actually exist at all.”
― Steven Kotler, West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief

“What all this means is that learning the impossible is possible augments our ability to see ourselves doing the impossible, which triggers a systemic change in the body and the brain, which closes the gap between fantasy and reality. It also makes us significantly more flow prone.”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“Once danger becomes its own reward, risk moves from a threat to be avoided to a challenge to be risen toward.”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“If you’re interested in mastery,” says University of Cambridge, England, neuropsychologist Barbara Sahakian, “you have to learn this lesson. 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, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“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.”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“Tell me what you value and I might believe you,” management guru Peter Drucker once said, “but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you what you really value.” So”
― Steven Kotler, Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

“Creatives fail and the really good ones fail often.”
― Steven Kotler

“It was clear from talking to them, that what kept them motivated was the quality of the experience they felt when they were involved with the activity. The feeling didn’t come when they were relaxing, when they were taking drugs or alcohol, or when they were consuming the expensive privileges of wealth. Rather, it often involved painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“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, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“Where–if anywhere–do our actual limits lie?”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“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, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life