The Art of Impossible

by Steven Kotler

  Complexity shows up when we force the brain to expand its perceptual capacity, for example, when we stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplate the question of geological time, or when we gaze up at the night sky and realize that a great many of those singular points of light are actually galaxies. This is the experience of awe, where we get so sucked in by the beauty and magnitude of what we’re contemplating that time slows down and the moment stretches on into infinity. It’s partially a dopamine-driven process, which also makes it the front edge of a flow state.

  How to employ these triggers in your own life? Simply increase the amount of novelty, complexity, and unpredictability in your environment.

  This is exactly what Steve Jobs did when he designed the offices at Pixar. Jobs built a large atrium at the building’s center. He then put the mailboxes, cafeteria, meeting rooms, and, most famously, the only bathrooms in the place, right beside that atrium. This forced employees from all over the company to randomly bump into one another, massively increasing novelty, complexity, and unpredictability. This resulted in more flow, heightened creativity, and all those Oscars.

  But once again, you don’t have to go this far.

  A trip into nature will do the trick. Natural environments have high concentrations of novelty, complexity, and unpredictability. This drives feel-good neurochemistry into our system, which also explains why a twenty-minute walk in the woods outperforms most of the antidepressants on the market.

  We can also pull these triggers by reading, or deciding to work in a coffee shop that’s far from home, or both. Whenever I’m trying to learn a new subject, for example, I always take my textbooks on the road. The novelty, complexity, and unpredictability of the new environment drives flow, and flow makes learning that subject much, much easier.

  DEEP EMBODIMENT

  On the threshold between an internal and an external trigger sits deep embodiment.15 Deep embodiment is a type of expanded physical awareness. It means we pay the most attention to the task at hand when multiple senses are engaged in that task.

  If you’re just watching a scene unfold, that’s one level of involvement. But if you’re actually participating in the unfolding, that’s a way more engaging ride. This is one of the main reasons athletes have so much success getting into flow. Sport demands embodiment—it’s built into the environment. But it’s not just athletes who can pull this trigger, and this is the more important point.

  A number of years ago, Csikszentmihalyi and a University of Utah education researcher named Kevin Rathunde went looking for high-flow educational environments. What did they uncover? Montessori education.16

  The Montessori method emphasizes both intrinsic motivation and learning through doing. In fact, for this latter reason, it’s often called “embodied education.” Don’t just read about organic farming—go out and plant a garden. The planting engages multiple sensory systems at once—sight, sound, touch, smell—thus driving attention into the now and driving flow as a result. The boost in learning the state produces is one of the reasons Montessori-educated children tend to outperform other kids on just about every test imaginable.

  But the point here is simple: Get physical. Learn by doing. That’s what it takes to pull this trigger. Multiple senses demand all our focus, and that’s more than enough to drive us into the zone.

  CREATIVE TRIGGERS

  Creativity

  If you look under the hood of creativity, you see two things: pattern recognition, the brain’s ability to link new ideas together, and risk-taking, the courage to bring those new ideas into the world. Both experiences produce dopamine, driving focus and flow.

  This means that for those of us who want more flow in our lives, we have to do three things consistently. First, we need to be constantly loading the pattern recognition system with the raw materials it needs to find connections. This is the reason to read twenty-five to fifty pages a day in a book that’s a bit outside your specialty.

  Second, learn to think differently. Instead of tackling problems from familiar angles, go at them backward and sideways and with style. Go out of your way to stretch your imagination. Massively up the amount of novelty in your life. New environments and new experiences are often the start of the connections that become new ideas.

  The third thing might be the most important: make creativity a value and a virtue. Your life needs to become your art. Or, to be more specific, the art of impossible demands the art of life.

  One reason we saw such an explosion of flow in the action and adventure sports world was this kind of priority shift. Until the freeride “expression session” movement of the 1990s, excellence was typically judged by easily measurable metrics like speed. In skiing and snowboarding, the fastest person to the bottom of the hill won. But in the 1990s, people backed away from these kinds of proving ground contests and instead started valuing creativity. The most creative line was the true measure of excellence. Style mattered. How a particular rider interpreted the terrain was the most important factor. This is how creativity became a central value and a virtue. The result was a high-flow assault on the impossible.

  SOCIAL TRIGGERS

  Earlier, we learned that flow comes in two varieties: individual and group. While most of this book has been devoted to the individual side of this equation, here we want to spend a little time figuring out how to trigger the shared, collective version of the state.

  A little history might be helpful.

  Psychologist Keith Sawyer first identified group flow.17 Sawyer, a lifelong jazz musician, noticed that when the band came together and the music soared, there was a foundational shift in consciousness. It was a hive-mind comingling that produced a whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts effect.

  Sawyer chased this feeling into graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he studied under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. While Csikszentmihalyi had noticed that groups of people seemed to drop into flow together, he had assumed it was the by-product of a bunch of individuals in flow rather than a shared experience. Sawyer thought that something else was going on.

  To figure out what, he took his questions into the field, investigating group flow in improv jazz, comedy, and theater troupes for the better portion of fifteen years. Much of his work was done with Second City Television, the Chicago-based comedy troupe that has long served as a feeder for shows like Saturday Night Live. Sawyer videotaped performances, then developed a painstaking frame-by-frame analysis technique for reviewing the footage. He was hunting those signature moments when the group pulled together and the level of performance shot through the roof. Then Sawyer worked backward from those moments to the preconditions that created them, in the end discovering that there are ten triggers for this shared state.

  In the years since Sawyer did this original work, other researchers have extended and expanded his ideas. Group flow has been further subdivided into “social flow,” or the flow that arises in a social context, “interpersonal flow,” or what two people talking could experience, and “team flow,” where flow results from triggers that are innate in team dynamics.18 There has also been considerable work done on both the nature of this shared flow experience and, at least from a psychological perspective, what might be causing it.

  Yet, there are still major gaps in our education. Technological limitations have stood in the way of deeper research into the neurobiology of group flow or group flow’s triggers. So, while we see some similar mechanisms at work, there are still gaps in the science you could drive a bus through.

  Still, as you’ll find in the following overview, we’ve definitely learned enough to be practical and tactical.

  COMPLETE CONCENTRATION

  In much the same way that individual flow demands complete concentration, group flow requires the same. The research suggests that walling the team off from the world is the best approach. No instant messages or multitasking. No smartphones or social media. Email is best saved for later. The group gets your attention or the group do
esn’t get into flow.

  SHARED, CLEAR GOALS

  For group flow to arise, everybody needs to be heading in the same direction. Shared, clear goals is how this happens. Remember, this doesn’t need to be fancy. What matters is that the group feels like they are moving together toward the same (or complementary) targets.

  Importantly, Sawyer discovered that while high-performing teams need a shared goal, it works against group flow if the goal is too tightly focused. Essentially, you want enough of a target so that the team knows when they’re getting closer to success—and progress can be measured—but one that is open-ended enough for creativity to emerge.

  More recently, other researchers have come up with the concept of “collective ambition” as a variation on this trigger. The main difference here is the size of the goal. Problems we solve today are shared, clear goals. Problems the group came together in the first place to solve—now that’s collective ambition.

  Finally, “aligned personal goals” have become another variation on this theme. It means, if you want group flow, when the teams wins, the individuals who make up that team also have to win. If the team knows the leader will eventually hog the spotlight, then that leader is stealing dopamine from the team—and paying the price in flow.

  SHARED RISK

  When risk is shared, it means that everybody on the team has skin in the game. Sawyer describes this as “the potential for failure” and argues that without the danger of everyone falling, there’s no opportunity for anyone to soar. This also means that you truly have each other’s back, both giving people the space to fail and helping them stand back up again once they do.

  CLOSE LISTENING

  Close listening happens when attention is fully engaged in the here and now. In conversation, this means you’re not thinking about what witty thing to say next or what cutting sarcasm came last. Rather, it’s producing real-time, unplanned responses to the dialogue as it unfolds. Empathy and attention are both engaged, and your portion of the conversation spontaneously emerges from the exchange.

  GOOD COMMUNICATION

  If group flow is to arise, there has to be a constant dialogue among team members. Information is equally shared, as are strategy and steering. In a very real sense, good communication is simply the group version of immediate feedback, one of the most important triggers for individual flow. The real point is that the feedback needs to guide the group’s collective behavior and provide the information required to maximize every member of that group’s unique individual skill set.

  BLENDING EGOS

  Blending egos is a collective version of humility. When egos have been blended, no one’s hogging the spotlight and everyone’s thoroughly involved. This keeps the prefrontal cortex from coming online, allows a collective merger of action and awareness, and creates a shared sense of identity.

  EQUAL PARTICIPATION

  Equal participation demands that everybody have a part to play and everyone play their part. And the role we play is one that demands that we utilize our skills to the utmost. This is another reason that information has to move freely throughout the team. Without this, participation cannot be equal, and this tilt in the balance of power prevents people from dropping into group flow or pulls the group out of the shared state.

  FAMILIARITY

  Familiarity means the group has a shared knowledge base, a common language, and a communication style based on unspoken understandings. It means everybody is always on the same page, and, when novel insights arise, momentum is not lost due to the need for lengthy explanation.

  Familiarity also requires that we have enough experience with each other’s ticks and tendencies that when the unexpected arises, the group’s reaction to that unexpected event is not, in itself, unexpected. The goal is predictable unpredictability. You know what your team members are going to do when the going gets tough, so it makes it easier to keep going together.

  A SENSE OF CONTROL

  A sense of control combines autonomy—being free to do what you want—with competence—being good at what you do. It means that you’re well suited for the role you play on that team.

  On that team, this also means that you get to choose your own challenges and have the skills to meet those challenges. This means that the group does not assign you a goal without your consent or limit (too severely) the way you want to approach that goal.

  Marisa Salanova, a psychologist at Jaume I University in Spain, recently extended this idea, discovering that “collective efficacy beliefs” are a frequent predictor of group flow.19 Collective efficacy beliefs could be thought of as an extension of the sense of control—it’s a team’s confidence in itself. A team has to believe it can get the job done; it needs to have a collective sense of control to maximize flow.

  ALWAYS SAY YES

  Our last trigger, always say yes, is perhaps the most important. It means that interactions should be additive more than argumentative. It’s a trigger based on the first rule of improv comedy. If I open a sketch with, “Hey, there’s a blue elephant in the bathroom,” then “No, there’s not” takes the scene nowhere. But if the reply is affirmative—“Wow, I hope he’s not using up all the toilet paper”—well, now that story is going someplace interesting.

  By saying yes, you’re helping the other person along, lowering their cognitive load, and keeping them engaged in the moment. These affirmations of ideas drive both dopamine and oxytocin into our system, which amps up pattern recognition and social comfort, which, in turn, brings up more ideas and increases our willingness to share them. It’s how we build collective momentum.

  But this doesn’t mean that you have to agree with everyone all the time. In fact, the research shows that this is a recipe for groupthink rather than group flow. Instead, you simply have to find something in there to build upon. In a brainstorming session, this is as simple as: “Well, I disagree with some of what Sarah said, but her idea about using quantum computers to do drug discovery is brilliant, and here’s why.” Keeping the momentum moving is the bottom line, as that’s the exact motion we’re riding into flow.

  FINAL TRIGGER ADVICE

  One of the most well-established facts about flow is that the state is ubiquitous. It shows up anywhere, in anyone, provided certain initial conditions are met. What are these conditions? These twenty-two triggers—it really is that straightforward.

  And there’s a reason for this as well.

  We’re biological organisms, and evolution is conservative by design. When a particular adaptation works, its basic functionality is repeated again and again. Flow most certainly works. As a result, our brains are hardwired for the experience. We are all designed for peak performance. Thus, we are all susceptible to flow’s triggers, as these elements are twenty-two things that evolution deemed exceptionally crucial to survival, meaning they’re the twenty-two things to which our brain automatically pays attention.

  And to really cultivate flow in your life, build these triggers into every facet of your life. Train risk, seek out novelty, tighten feedback loops, keep the pattern recognition system stocked with information so the creativity trigger is always close at hand, play “always say yes” games in your personal relationships, practice ego blending in every conversation you fall into, and on and on.

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  The Flow Cycle

  We used to believe that flow worked like a light switch, either on or off. You’re either in the zone or you’re not. But thanks to research done by Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson, we now know that flow is a four-stage cycle, with each stage underpinned by different and precise changes in brain function.1 You have to move through each stage of the cycle before you can enter the next. You can’t skip steps, and you have to complete an entire cycle to reenter flow—which is exactly why you can’t live in a flow state.

  Yet, while it’s not possible to live in flow, you can definitely maximize the time you spend in the state. Understanding this cycle is a crucial step in that direction. This knowledge pro
vides a map of the territory. If you know where you are now, you know what to do next. So while you can’t live in the zone, you can definitely speed your passage through all stages of the cycle and significantly increase the amount of flow in your life.

  One thing to note: While flow feels great, it’s only one step in a four-step process. And there are a couple of other steps that feel downright unpleasant. In fact, as we’ll see, that unpleasantness is a built-in part of the experience. It’s an unavoidable biological necessity.

  The good news is that every skill we’ve learned in this book does double duty inside this cycle, speeding progress through the tricky, difficult stages, helping us extend and maximize the positive ones.

  Let’s take a closer look.

  STAGE ONE: STRUGGLE

  Optimal performance begins in maximum frustration. While flow is an incredible high, it can start with a deep low. Welcome to struggle—the first stage in the flow cycle.

  Struggle is a loading phase. We’re loading, then overloading, the brain with information. And this is why the prefrontal cortex, which is deactivated in flow, is hyperactive in struggle. We’re learning in this stage. We need the conscious mind to acquire skills and information. Yet, this means that the inner critic, which is silent during flow, can be unfortunately loud during struggle.