We’re going to approach this in two ways. First, we’re going to talk about order. Then we’re going to examine scheduling.
Let’s start with order.
Because of the nature of intrinsic motivation, you have to start a quest for peak performance where this book started: with curiosity, passion, and purpose. And, if you’re actually following the steps of the passion recipe and not trying to rush the process, you’re going to discover that it can take a while.
You need to keep playing at the intersections of curiosities long enough to figure out if a particular intersection is actually interesting enough to sustain focus for the long haul. Remember, you don’t want to be two years into “pursuing your passion” only to discover it was only a phase. How do you know an intersection is perfect? Well, if nearly every time you explore it you find curiosity increasing and yourself slipping into flow—that’s a good sign you’re exactly where you need to be.
How much time do you spend on a daily basis playing at those intersections? An hour is fantastic, but twenty to thirty minutes is often enough. Learn something interesting about something you’re interested in, let the brain’s pattern recognition system chew on it for a while, then add in more information. Not only does this allow you to align curiosity, passion, and purpose, but it also adds in that next motivator, autonomy. If you’re playing with your curiosities, passions, and purposes, you’re—by definition—doing exactly what you want to be doing. Finally, because you’re learning a little bit more each day, you’re also training yourself to walk the path to mastery.
Next up, layer in goals.
Start with your massively transformative purpose—that mission statement for your life. Then turn that statement into a chunked series of high, hard goals, or all the steps needed to accomplish those MTPs. Now, shrink those high, hard goals into clear goals—your daily attack plan, a set of small and precise targets that sit inside the challenge-skills sweet spot.
These really are items on a checklist: Create the first ten slides of a PowerPoint presentation. Have a conversation with a supplier. Write 500 words of the company newsletter. Simple tasks. Items on the checklist.
Also, remember to figure out how many clear goals you can accomplish in a day, then accomplish that number of goals each and every day. If it goes on your list, you’ve given your word to yourself. Either cross it off the list or—when the challenge turns out to be much harder than expected—chunk it down into a smaller task, accomplish that smaller task, then move the rest onto tomorrow’s checklist.
If you accomplish everything on today’s clear-goals list, this means you’re one step closer to your high, hard goals, which means you’re on mission, which means your intrinsic drivers are doing their job. Cross an item off that list, get a little dopamine; cross another item off, get a little more dopamine. One little win at a time, that’s how this works. Stacking little win atop little win atop little win—especially if a few of those wins produce flow—is how you gain momentum.
And that’s it for order.
Once intrinsic drivers are aligned and goals are stacked, everything else is about scheduling. That is to say, everything else that you need to do you do by adding the activity to your daily checklist.
In total, there are seven daily practices and six weekly practices that are nonnegotiables. If you want to sustain peak performance long enough to accomplish the impossible—whatever that is for you—you’re going to need to weave these items into your schedule.
But this doesn’t have to happen all at once. Start by starting. Add in what you can right now, and as these practices begin to improve your performance, they’ll end up saving you time. Now that you have a little more free time, layer in a few more of these activities.
One thing to note: the two biggest time sucks on this list are the need to start your day with 90 to 120 minutes of uninterrupted concentration devoted to your hardest task and the need, at least once a week, to spend two to six hours doing your highest-flow activity. If you can’t commit that much time in the beginning, commit less. Start with 20 minutes of daily uninterrupted concentration and 40 minutes of weekly high-flow activities. Start with 10 and 20. Then, once these practices pay performance dividends, reinvest the extra time in your schedule.
Here’s the full list:
DAILY
Ninety to 120 minutes of uninterrupted concentration. Spend this time on your most important task—the one that will produce the biggest victory, the one that, once completed, will leave you feeling like you won your day. Also, try to apply one strength in a new way while inside of this 90- to 120-minute block (which allows you to fold strength training into your daily activity). And be sure to push yourself during that activity, so that you’re a little outside your comfort zone and always sitting inside the challenge-skills sweet spot. Over time, this constant pushing on yourself and your skills will result in both an astounding amount of grit and, even better, the habit of ferocity.
Five minutes for distraction management. Place these minutes at the end of your workday to prepare for the next day’s uninterrupted concentration period. Turn off everything that regularly breaks your focus: messages, alerts, email, social media, cell phone ringers, the works.
Five minutes for making a clear-goals list—also usually at the end of a workday to prepare for the next day’s uninterrupted concentration period. Remember, order tasks from the most difficult (and most rewarding) to the least. Also, don’t just put “work tasks” on your clear goals list. Write down everything you want to do in a day, including things like workouts and active recovery periods (that is, “go to the gym” or “take a hot bath” or “practice mindfulness for twenty minutes”) on your list. Finally, always check off all the items on the list. This is the one rule you cannot violate. If it goes on the list, you accomplish it during the day. The only exception being those rare occasions when you missed the challenge-skills sweet spot and the task you’re trying to do is just too hard. Then chunk it down, accomplish what you can today, and bump the rest onto tomorrow’s list.
Five minutes for a daily gratitude practice.
Twenty minutes for release and/or twenty minutes for mindfulness. You can go longer, but this appears to be the minimum time frame needed to start getting results. Remember to preload the release phase with the MacGyver method, so your brain can problem solve while you take a break from the problem-solving.
Twenty-five minutes to load the pattern recognition system (reading outside your core area). Remember, the ROI on reading says books are the best way to go. If you’re trying to master a skill rather than learn new information, these twenty-five minutes can also be spent 80/20’ing that skill. Also, those twenty-five minutes are an estimate. What you’re aiming for is a minimum of about twenty-five pages’ worth of reading.
Seven to eight hours of sleep a night.
WEEKLY
Two to six hours, one or two times a week: highest-flow activity (skiing, dancing, singing, whatever). These are the activities that often get edited out of our lives as responsibilities pile up and schedules get crowded. But the more flow you get, the more flow you get. It’s a focusing skill. So spending extra time in an activity that is all but guaranteed to produce flow will help maximize flow in activities that aren’t quite as flowy. During this activity, try to deploy as many flow triggers as you can. Always push on the challenge-skills sweet spot. Be creative. Take risks. Seek out novelty, complexity, and unpredictability. Also, try to use these sessions to train grit, and to use one or more of your core strengths in a new way.
Sixty minutes, three times a week: regular exercise. Be sure to push yourself during these sessions. The same challenge-skills balance rules apply. If you’re outside your comfort zone, then exercise is a great way to cross-train grit while resetting the nervous system. Also, for reasons that have to do with how exercise impacts brain function, aim for exercises that are cognitively challenging—meaning run outdoors on a trail (so the brain has to do route finding and s
patial mapping and such) rather than indoors on a treadmill.
Twenty to forty minutes, three times a week: active recovery (sauna, massage, long mindfulness session, light yoga, and so on).
Thirty to sixty minutes, one time a week: train a weakness and/or train being your best when at your worst and/or practice taking risks.
Thirty to sixty minutes, one time a week: get feedback on the work you’ve been doing during those 90- to 120-minute periods of uninterrupted concentration.
One hundred and twenty minutes a week: social support. Make time for other people, especially if you’re an introvert. Having loving, supportive people in our lives and being a loving, supportive person ourselves helps keep us calm and happy, but it also helps us be psychologically prepared to attack the challenge-skills sweet spot. Plus, it gives us a place to practice our emotional intelligence skills.
STACKING PRACTICES
Use your three-times-a-week exercise sessions as a place to train grit. This is a great place to work on perseverance, but you can always triple-stack and use this session to train up a weakness and, if you exhaust yourself during the workout and still want to give a little extra, you can also train the grit to be your best when you’re at your worst.
Use a few of your active recovery periods—a.k.a. the sauna and bath—to also practice mindfulness and/or to load the pattern recognition system. When loading the pattern recognition system, try to make books your primary information source, as you can’t match their data density with any other material.
Use the MacGyver method before you enter your release practice. That way, the practice does double duty.
While you’re still working your way through the passion recipe, use the need to play at the intersections of curiosities as a time to load up the pattern recognition system with the information it needs to find connections between ideas.
Always layer flow triggers into every activity. Make novelty, complexity, and unpredictability your good friends. Make sure the items on your clear-goals list sit in that challenge-skills sweet spot. Find a feedback buddy. Practice taking safe risks. Repeat.
When you’re devoting 120 minutes a week to social support, use this period to train up EQ and to practice with group flow’s triggers.
Creativity and the pursuit of mastery should be built into everything you do.
And now that you know the secret, pretty underwhelming, right? And that’s the real rub. None of these interventions are particularly sexy. There is no nifty piece of technology to play with or unusual substance to ingest. They’re just items on a checklist. Worse, progress is often invisible. Peak performance works like compound interest. A little bit today, a little bit tomorrow, do this for weeks and months and years and the result won’t just be a life that exceeds your expectations, it’ll be one that exceeds your imagination.
Most important, I think that all of the information contained in this primer puts a great, yet terrible burden on each of us. Think about it this way: What impossible challenges would you tackle if you knew you could be 500 percent more productive? If you could be 600 percent more creative? If you could cut learning times in half? That’s exactly what the tools and the techniques in this book can provide, which means that’s exactly what’s available to each and every one of us. What you choose to do with that information? Well, that’s entirely up to you.
So go get ’em, tiger!
Afterword
By now, you understand the fundamentals of peak performance. The next step is to harness those fundamentals and bring them together in pursuit of impossibly big goals. How to do this?
Get to work, that’s how.
The blueprint laid out in this book contains everything you need to shatter your limitations, exceed your expectations, and turn wild dreams into real achievements. But if you’re interested in stepping on the gas, then the Flow Research Collective’s flagship peak-performance training, Zero-to-Dangerous, is worth exploring.
Built around more than twenty years of flow research, Zero-to-Dangerous is just so dang good, so downright atomic, seriously, it should be illegal. Since it’s not, since it’s somehow fine for me to offer you the fast track to excellence, the best science-based peak-performance training in the long history of the known universe, let me tell you a little more.
Zero-to-Dangerous is built around three core elements. First, there’s one-on-one coaching with a Flow Research Collective PhD-level psychologist or neuroscientist. Next, there’s a step-by-step program that delivers all the peak-performance tools and techniques you’ll need to accomplish high, hard goals. Finally, you get lifetime access to weekly group coaching calls, facilitated by our team of psychologists and neuroscientists, and attended by the absolutely amazing group of peak performers who make up the collective.
If you’re interested in applying to Zero-to-Dangerous, please go to zerotodangerous.com/impossible. You’ll be signing up to schedule a quick meeting with a member of my team. The call ensures the training is a solid fit.
Finally, a little bonus.
The Flow Research Collective has identified ten roadblocks to peak performance. These are the trouble spots where most of us stumble. We call them the “flow blockers.” To help you discover what’s standing in your way and to help you push past the problem, we’ve created a free diagnostic. Check it out here: flowresearchcollective.com/flowblocker.
—SK out
Acknowledgments
The list of people who helped out with this one is incredibly long. Without the incredible love and support of my amazing wife, Joy Nicholson, and all our dogs, past and present, this book would never have happened. I’m also deeply indebted to my parents, Norma and Harvey Kotler. Without their help, I would never have started this journey in the first place or gotten anywhere close to where I ended up. My great friend and longtime editor Michael Wharton played an enormous role in both getting me to write this book and helping to shape a great deal of the finished product. Rian Doris, as always, has been a force of nature. Paul Bresnick, my longtime agent and friend, thanks again, keep swimming. Peter Diamandis, it’s been a long ride, brother, and I’ve loved every minute. Joshua Lauber, as always. Karen Rinaldi, my publisher-editor at Harper Wave, has, once again, been amazing. Also, the great group of people at Harper Wave who helped shepherd this book into being—you are deeply appreciated. And without Ryan Wickes to chase around mountains, I would never have stayed sane along the way.
My amazing team at the Flow Research Collective deserves enormous thanks, but especially Conor Murphy, who always kept me laughing and really forced me to think deeply along the way, and Scott Barry Kaufman, who lent me his huge heart and huge brain for endless conversations about flow. Heidi Williams also deserves honorable mention for her heroic battle with the endnotes. Additionally, Clare Sarah, Brent Hogarth, Sarah Sarkis, Chris Bertram, Michael Mannino, Otto Kumbar, Will Kliedon, Troy Erstling, Jeremy Jensen, Scott Gies, and Anne Valentino.
A great many of the scientists and/or peak performers whose ideas fill these pages have been longtime friends, fellow adventurers, and core advisers on my research. Big thanks to: Andrew Newberg; Michael Gervais; David Eagleman; Adam Gazzaley; Mark Twight; Paul Zak; Kristin Ulmer; Keoki Flagg; Andrew Huberman; Laird Hamilton; JT Holmes; Jeremy Jones; Glen Plake; Ned Hallowell; Jason Silva; John Kounios; Ray Kurzweil; Salim Ismail; Andy Walshe; Glenn Fox; Andrew Hessel; Mendel Kaleem; Miles Daisher; Gretchen Bleiler; Jimmy Chin; Dirk Collins; Micah Abrams; Danny Way; Leslie Sherlin; Mike Horn; Robert Suarez; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; Gregory Berns; Patricia Wright; Arne Dietrich; Burk Sharpless; Don Moxley; Doug Stoup; Doug Ammons; Nichol Bradford; Chase Jarvis; Christopher Voss; Jeffery Martin; Sir Ken Robinson; Josh Waitzkin; Tim Ferriss; Judson Brewer; Lee Zlotoff; Susan Jackson; Gary Latham; Keith Sawyer; Christopher Jerard and the entire Inkwell crew; Jessica Flack and David Krakauer and everyone at the Santa Fe Institute’s always wild and brilliant peak-performance conferences; all our research partners at Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, USC, Stanford,
UCLA, and Imperial College; and all the incredible brave men and women in the special forces and military community who shared their stories, lessons, and lives with me, especially Rich Diviney, Brian Ferguson, and Joe “It Is The Prophecy” Augustine.
Deep thanks to the late John Barth, Joe Lefler, Dean Potter, and Shane McConkey. Still missing you, gentlemen, still grateful. There are also a handful of brain/flow/peak performance researchers whom I only know a little or haven’t yet met, but whose work has deeply informed this book. Shout-outs are especially due to the late Jaak Panksepp, and to the living: Angela Duckworth, K. Anders Ericsson, Michael Posner, Brian Mackenzie, Falko Rheinberg, Stefan Engeser, Corinna Peifer, Frederik Ullen, Orjan de Manzano, Giovanni Moneta, Johannes Keller, Martin Ulrich, Ritchie Davidson, Daniel Goleman, Allen Braun, and Charles Limb—thank you all.
Notes
Introduction: A Formula for Impossible
1.Jeremy Jones, author interview, 2012.
2.Matt Warshaw, The Encyclopedia of Surfing (San Diego: Harcourt, 2005), 79.
3.Susan Casey, The Wave (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2011), 14.
4.Outside TV did a great little doc about surfing the hundred-foot waves of Nazaré, in Portugal. See “The 100 Foot Waves of Nazare,” Outside TV, June 16, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDzXerJkBwY.
5.Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Vintage, 2013), 735.
6.Steven Kotler, Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact (New York: New Harvest, 2015).
7.Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).
8.Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (New York: Free Press, 2012).
9.Flow Research Collective (website), www.flowresearchcollective.com.
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