The Art of Impossible

by Steven Kotler

  Networks, meanwhile, refer to brain structures that are hardwired together by direct connections or structures that tend to activate at the same time.8 For example, the insula and the medial prefrontal cortex are wired together and frequently do work at the same time, making them important hubs in the so-called default mode network.

  When the brain wants to motivate us, it sends out a neurochemical message via one of seven specific networks.9 These networks are ancient devices, found in all mammals, that correspond to the behavior they’re designed to produce. There is a system for fear, another for anger/rage, and a third for grief or what’s technically known as “separation distress.” The lust system drives us to procreate; the care/nurture system urges us to protect and educate our young. Yet, when we talk about drive—the psychological energy that pushes us forward—we’re really talking about the two final systems: play/social engagement and seeking/desire.

  The play/social engagement system is about all the fun stuff we used to do as kids: running, jumping, chasing, wrestling, and, of course, socializing. Scientists once assumed the point of play was practice. We practice fight today because tomorrow could bring an actual fight for survival. Now, we know that play is mostly designed to teach us about social rules and social interaction. When you’re playing with your little brother and Mom screams, “Don’t pick on someone smaller than you,” she’s exactly on message. The point of play is to teach us lessons like: might doesn’t make right. It’s nature’s way of instructing us in morality.10

  And that instruction occurs automatically. When we play, the brain releases dopamine and oxytocin, two of our most crucial “reward chemicals.” These are pleasure drugs that make us feel good when we accomplish, or try to accomplish, anything that fulfills a basic survival need.

  Dopamine is the brain’s primary reward chemical, with oxytocin a close second.11 Yet serotonin, endorphins, norepinephrine, and anandamide also play a role. The pleasurable feeling created by each of these chemicals drives us to act and, if that action was successful, reinforces the behavior in memory.

  Moreover, neurochemicals are specialized. Dopamine specializes in driving all the various manifestations of desire, from our sexual appetites to our quest for knowledge. We feel its presence as excitement, enthusiasm, and the desire to make meaning from a situation. When your phone dings, and you’re curious to check it out, that’s dopamine at work. The urge to decipher black hole theory, the hunger to climb Mount Everest, the desire to test your limits—that’s dopamine, too.

  Norepinephrine is similar but different. It’s the brain’s version of adrenaline, sometimes called noradrenaline. This neurochemical produces a huge increase in energy and alertness, stimulating both hyperactivity and hypervigilance. When you’re obsessed with an idea, can’t stop working on a project, or can’t stop thinking about the person you just met, norepinephrine is responsible.

  Oxytocin produces trust, love, and friendship.12 It’s the “pro-social” neurochemical that underpins everything from loving, long-term marital bliss to cooperative, well-functioning companies. We feel its presence as joy and love. It promotes trust, underpins fidelity and empathy, and heightens cooperation and communication.

  Serotonin is a calming, peaceful chemical that provides a gentle lift in mood.13 It’s that satiated feeling that comes after a good meal or a great orgasm, and it’s partially responsible for that post-meal/post-coital urge to take a nap. It also appears to play a role in satisfaction and contentment, that feeling of a job well done.

  Endorphins and anandamide, our final two pleasure chemicals, are pain-killing bliss producers. They’re both heavy-duty stress relievers, replacing the weight of the everyday with a euphoric sense of relaxed happiness. It’s that “all is right in the world” sensation that shows up during experiences like runner’s high, or when we catch our second wind.

  Yet the neurochemistry of reward isn’t simply about how individual neurochemicals work, as we’re often motivated by combinations of neurochemicals. Dopamine plus oxytocin is the blend beneath the delight of play. Passion—including everything from the passion of an artist for their craft to the passion of romantic love—is underpinned by the pairing of norepinephrine and dopamine.14

  Flow may be the biggest neurochemical cocktail of all. The state appears to blend all six of the brain’s major pleasure chemicals and may be one of the few times you get all six at once. This potent mix explains why people describe flow as their “favorite experience,” while psychologists refer to it as “the source code of intrinsic motivation.”

  The seeking/desire system is the second system that plays an important role in drive. Sometimes called the “reward system,” this is a general-purpose network that helps animals acquire the resources they need for survival. “In pure form, [the seeking system] provokes intense and enthusiastic exploration and . . . anticipatory excitement [and] learning,” writes Jaak Panksepp, the neuroscientist who discovered these seven systems.15 “When fully aroused, the seeking system fills the mind with interest and motivates organisms to effortlessly search for the things they need”—italics mine.

  I put “effortlessly” in italics for a reason. If we can tune the system correctly, the results show up automatically. Consider passion. When we’re passionate, we don’t have to work hard to stay on task. Because of dopamine and norepinephrine, that happens automatically.

  Every day, I wake up at 4:00 A.M. and start writing. Does this demand grit? Occasionally. But mostly, grit takes care of itself because I have curiosity, passion, and purpose. When I wake up, I’m excited to see where the words will take me. Even on those crappy nights when I wake up in a panic, I retaliate by writing. Writing is where I run when I need to run. My craft is my salvation. And if you talk to anyone who has tackled the impossible, you’ll hear a similar tale.

  Consider the late, great skier and skydiver Shane McConkey.16 As much as any athlete in history, McConkey extended the limits of human possibility, not just accomplishing the impossible but doing so again and again. And if you asked McConkey how he pulled this off, his answer frequently stressed the importance of intrinsic drive: “I’m doing what I love. If you’re doing what you want to do all the time then you’re happy. You’re not going to work every day wishing you were doing something else. I get up and I go to work every day and I’m stoked. That does not suck.”

  The same neurochemical drive that helped Shane McConkey accomplish the impossible is available to all of us. It’s our basic biology at work, the push of our most critical emotional fuels, expertly cocktailed for maximum thrust.

  THE RECIPE FOR DRIVE

  Over the next two chapters, we’re going to learn to stack—that is, cultivate, align, amplify, and deploy—our five most potent intrinsic drivers: curiosity, passion, purpose (chapter 2), autonomy, and mastery (chapter 3). We’re focusing on this stack of five both because they’re our most powerful drivers and because they’re neurobiologically designed to work together.

  Curiosity is where we’ll begin because that’s where the biology is designed to begin.17 This is your basic interest in something, neurochemically underpinned by a little bit of norepinephrine and dopamine. And while curiosity alone is a potent driver, it’s also a foundational ingredient in passion, which is an even bigger driver. Thus, we’ll next learn to turn that flicker of curiosity into the flame of passion by adding a lot more neurochemical fuel—norepinephrine and dopamine—to our intrinsic fire.

  Next comes meaning and purpose, which require connecting our individual passion to a cause much greater than ourselves. Once this happens, we see oxytocin added to the equation and an even bigger increase in core performance traits such as focus, productivity, and resilience, and our intrinsic fire burns that much hotter.18

  Finally, once you have a purpose, you need to layer on the two remaining intrinsic drivers: autonomy and mastery. More specifically, once you have a purpose, the system demands autonomy, which is the freedom to pursue that purpose. Then the system requires ma
stery, which is the desire to continually improve the skills needed to pursue that purpose.

  As you can see, it’s a tightly aligned stack. But built correctly, life will feel exciting, interesting, full of possibility, and thick with meaning. This uptick in energy is one of the reasons why stalking the impossible might be easier than you originally suspected: With intrinsic drivers properly stacked, our biology is working for us rather than against us. In short, the act of stalking the impossible actually helps us to stalk the impossible.

  2

  The Passion Recipe

  Over the course of this chapter, we’re going to start stacking intrinsic drivers, learning to cultivate curiosity, amplify it into passion, and transform the results into purpose. This is not an overnight process. Some steps may take weeks to accomplish; a few could last for months. Take the time to get it right. You don’t want to be two years into pursuing your passion only to discover it was actually a phase. You want to take the time to dial in intrinsic drivers today because, two years from now, if you discover you’ve dialed wrong, consider how frustrated you’ll feel having to start all over again. In peak performance, sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. This is one of those times.

  MAKE A LIST

  The easiest way to start stacking intrinsic drivers is with a list. If you have the option, write this list in a notebook rather than on a computer. There’s a powerful relationship between hand motion and memory, which means, for learning, pen and paper triumph over laptop and keyboard every time.1

  Start by writing down twenty-five things you’re curious about. And by curious, all I mean is that if you had a spare weekend, you’d be interested in reading a couple of books on the topic, attending a few lectures, and maybe having a conversation or two with an expert.

  When it comes to creating this list, be as specific as possible. Don’t just be interested in football or punk rock or food. These categories are too vague to be useful. Instead, be curious about the pass-blocking mechanics required to play left tackle; the evolution of political punk from Crass to Rise Against; or the potential for grasshoppers to become a primary human food source in the next ten years. The specificity gives your brain’s pattern recognition system the raw materials it needs to make connections between ideas. The more detailed the information, the better.

  HUNT FOR INTERSECTIONS

  After your list is complete, look for the places where these twenty-five ideas intersect. Take the above example. Say both grasshoppers as a food source and the mechanics of playing left tackle are on your list. Well, if you’re into pass-blocking mechanics, you’re probably also interested in the nutritional requirements necessary to play left tackle. Insects are exceptionally high in protein—would they make a good football food?

  The point is that curiosity, by itself, is not enough to create true passion. There’s just not enough neurochemistry being produced for the motivation you require. Instead, you want to look for places where three or four items on your curiosity list intersect. If you can spot the overlap between multiple items, well, now you’re cooking. There’s real energy there.

  When multiple curiosity streams intersect, you not only amp up engagement—you create the necessary conditions for pattern recognition, or the linking of new ideas together.2 Pattern recognition is what the brain does at a very basic level. It’s essentially the fundamental job of most neurons. As a result, whenever we recognize a pattern, the brain rewards us with a tiny squirt of dopamine.

  Dopamine, like all neurochemicals, plays a lot of different roles in the brain. We talked about a couple of those a few sections back. Here we want to expand on this idea, focusing on four additional jobs that dopamine does.

  First, dopamine is a powerful focusing drug. When it’s in our system, attention is laser-targeted on the task at hand. We’re excited, engaged, and more likely to drop into flow.

  Second, dopamine tunes signal-to-noise ratios in the brain, which means the neurochemical increases signal, decreases noise, and, as a result, helps us detect more patterns. There’s a feedback loop here. We get dopamine when we first detect a link between two ideas (a pattern), and the dopamine that we get helps us detect even more links (pattern recognition). If you’ve ever done a crossword puzzle or played sudoku, the little rush of pleasure you get when you fill in a correct answer—that’s dopamine. The reason we tend to fill in multiple answers in a row? That’s dopamine tweaking the signal-to-noise ratio and helping us detect even more patterns. This is why creative ideas tend to spiral and why one good idea often leads to the next and the next and the next.

  Third, dopamine is one of those aforementioned reward chemicals, a feel-good drug produced by the brain to drive behavior.3 Dopamine feels really good. Cocaine is widely considered the most addictive drug on earth, yet all that cocaine does is cause the brain to release large quantities of dopamine, then block its reuptake.4 And the pleasure produced by this chemical is key to passion. The more dopamine you get, the more fun and addictive the experience; the more fun and addictive the experience, the more you can’t wait to do it again.

  Finally, dopamine, like all neurochemicals, amplifies memory.5 This, too, is automatic. A quick shorthand for how learning works in the brain: the more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, the more likely that experience will move from short-term holding into long-term storage. Memory enhancement is another key role played by neurochemicals: they tag experiences as “Important, save for later.”

  By stacking motivations, that is, layering curiosity atop curiosity atop curiosity, we’re increasing drive but not effort. This is what happens when our own internal biology does the heavy lifting for us. You’ll work harder, but you won’t notice the work. Also, because dopamine provides a host of additional cognitive benefits—amplified focus, better learning, faster pattern recognition—you’ll also work smarter. These are two more reasons why stalking the impossible might be a little easier than you suspected.

  PLAY IN THE INTERSECTIONS

  Now that you’ve identified the spots where curiosities overlap, play in those intersections for a little while. Devote twenty to thirty minutes a day to listening to podcasts, watching videos, reading articles, books, whatever, on any aspect of that overlap. If you’re interested in supply-chain management in the health care industry and you’re also curious about artificial intelligence, then it’s time to explore the advantages and disadvantages that artificial intelligence brings to supply-chain management in the health care industry.

  Or, to return to our earlier example, if insects as a protein source and the mechanics of playing left tackle are your starting points, then it’s time to play around at their intersection: What are the nutritional requirements for high performance in contact sports? Can insects satisfy those requirements?

  The goal is to feed those curiosities a little bit at a time, and feed them on a daily basis. This slow-growth strategy takes advantage of the brain’s inherent learning software.6 When you advance your knowledge a little bit at a time, you’re giving your adaptive unconscious a chance to process that information. In the study of creativity, this process is known as “incubation.”7 What’s actually happening is pattern recognition. Automatically, the brain begins looking for connections between older bits of info you’ve already learned and the newer bits you’re currently learning. Over time, this means more patterns, more dopamine, more motivation, and, eventually, a bit of expertise.8

  And it’s expertise that arrives with less work.

  When we play with information we’re curious about, we’re not forcing the brain to make new discoveries. There’s no pressure, which is helpful, since too much stress lessens our ability to learn.9 Instead, we’re seeing what connections our brains naturally make, via the incubation phase, then allowing our biology to do the hard work for us. We’re letting our pattern recognition system find connections between curiosities that make us even more curious—which is how you cultivate passion.

  Yet to increase your chances of
making those connections, pay attention to two sets of details: both the history of the subject and the technical language used to describe that subject.

  History is a narrative. Every subject is a voyage of curiosity. Someone had a question, someone answered that question, and this led to another question. And another. And another. Lucky for us, our brains love narrative—which is nothing more than pattern recognition over time.10 If you pay attention to historical details as you play around in a new subject, your brain will naturally stitch these details together into a coherent story via our biological need to link cause with effect.11 It’s automatic. You’ll also get a little dopamine along the way, as you recognize those historical patterns, and this will increase curiosity and amplify motivation even further.

  Once the brain constructs that narrative, it functions like a giant Christmas tree. All the little details you learn along the way are the ornaments. But having this big tree—this overarching structure—makes those ornaments easier to hang. You don’t have to work as hard to remember them. This historical narrative becomes a de facto memory palace, allowing you to take a brand-new piece of information and correctly slot it into its exact right place. If we construct that narrative, we’ll see learning rates increase and time to mastery decrease.

  The technical language that surrounds a subject is the second place to put your attention. Why? Jargon, while annoying, is annoyingly precise. Often, large chunks of the explanation of a subject are contained within the technical language that surrounds that subject. The obvious example is “human” versus “Homo sapiens.” Both terms point in the same direction, but the Latin version not only contains the thing (a human) but also its evolutionary history (genus and species), plus a little color commentary (apparently, someone once thought we were “wise apes”). Thus, understanding a subject’s insider parlance allows you to see the ideas and the connective tissue that holds these ideas together. Homo sapiens not only names the thing but tells you that the thing descended from apes and is smarter than apes, or, at least, thinks it’s smarter than apes.