Steven Kotler

Curiosity into passion; passion into purpose; and purpose into patient profit — that’s the safest way to play this game.

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.

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

In fact, we’re not smart and we have bodies — we’re smart because we have bodies.7 The heart has about 40,000 neurons that play a central role in shaping emotion, perception, and decision making. The stomach and intestines complete this network, containing more than 500 million nerve cells, 100 million neurons, 30 different neurotransmitters, and 90 percent of the body’s supply of serotonin (one of the major neurochemicals responsible for mood and well-being). This “second brain,” as scientists have dubbed it, lends some empirical support to the persistent notion of gut instinct.

When deeply religious subjects view sacred iconography or reflect on their notion of God, brain scans reveal hyperactivity in the caudate nucleus, a part of the pleasure system that correlates with feelings of joy, love, and serenity. But Lindstrom and Calvert found that this same brain region lights up when subjects view images associated with strong brands like Ferrari or Apple.

Flow starts when we say yes to the fight.

When Felix walked off the project,” says Walshe, “it was the darkest moment in his life. But a phobia — that’s deeply rooted fear. To face that, to come back, to trust strangers with his life, to put himself back into position to do something no one else had ever conceived of? I’ve seen plenty of astounding feats of human performance, but emotionally, Felix’s journey is the farthest I’ve ever seen an athlete come.

the concept of wabi sabi30 — or the ability to find beauty in imperfection. If a vase is accidentally broken, for example, they don’t throw the pieces away or try to patch it up to hide the accident. Instead, they take golden glue and painstakingly reassemble the vessel, so its unique flaws make the piece more beautiful.

Once danger becomes its own reward, risk moves from a threat to be avoided to a challenge to be risen toward.

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.

Most of us arrive in our fifties feeling that the cage has gotten smaller. What’s actually shrunk is our mindset. We’re in a prison of our own making. Once we discover we can keep on learning later in life, that mindset shifts. The cage vanishes. This changes everything.

He’s a carnivore, thinks Lion, always remember he’s a carnivore.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities. . . . I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.

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

I rap for the trees...for the trees have no tongues.