10.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008), 4–5.
11.For a complete breakdown on flow’s impact on performance, see Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance (New York: New Harvest, 2014).
12.James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (New York: Free Press, 1986).
13.William James, “Energies of Man,” Journal of Philosophical Review (1907), 15.
14.Chuck Barris, Charlie Kaufman, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (Miramax, 2002).
Part I: Motivation
1.William James, The Will to Believe (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2015), 61.
1: Motivation Decoded
1.Celeste Kidd and Benjamin Y. Hayden, “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity,” Neuron 88, no. 3 (2015): 449–60; see also George Loewenstein, “The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation,” Psychological Bulletin 116, no. 1 (1994): 75–98.
2.Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (New York: HarperPerennial, 1992), 38.
3.Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development and Well-Being,” American Psychologist 55, no. 1 (January 2000): 68–78; see also Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead, 2009).
4.D. Kahneman and A. Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 38 (2010): 16489–93.
5.For a thorough breakdown of the neurobiology of chemical and electrical signaling, see Marie T. Banich and Rebecca J. Compton, Cognitive Neuroscience (New York: Cambridge, 2018).
6.Ibid.
7.David R. Euston, Aaron J. Gruber, and Bruce L. McNaughton, “The Role of Medial Prefrontal Cortex in Memory and Decision Making,” Neuron 76, no. 6 (2012): 1057–70.
8.For a thorough discussion of networks see György Buzsáki. Rhythms of the Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
9.Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
10.There’s great work on the evolution of morality out of play behavior. See Steven Kotler, A Small Furry Prayer: Dog Rescue and the Meaning of Life (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), and Marc Bekoff, The Emotional Lives of Animals (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2007), 85–109.
11.For dopamine, see Oscar Arias-Carrión, Maria Stamelou, Eric Murillo-Rodríguez, Manuel Menéndez-González, and Ernst Pöppel, “Dopaminergic Reward System: A Short Integrative Review,” International Archives of Medicine 3, no. 1 (2010), 24; see also Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long, The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity—and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race (Dallas: BenBella, 2019).
12.For oxytocin, see Paul Zak, The Moral Molecule (New York: Penguin, 2012).
13.Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (New York: Owl Books, 2004), 55–98; see also Adrian Fischer and Markus Ullsperger, “An Update on the Role of Serotonin and Its Interplay with Dopamine for Reward,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (October 11, 2017), https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00484/full.
14.Helen Fisher, 55–98.
15.Jaak Panksepp, “Affective Neuroscience of the Emotional BrainMind: Evolutionary Perspectives and Implications for Understanding Depression,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 12, no. 4 (December 2010): 533–45; for oxytocin and play, see Sarah F. Brosnan et al., “Urinary Oxytocin in Capuchin Monkeys: Validation and the Influence of Social Behavior,” American Journal of Primatology 80, no. 10 (2018); for dopamine and play, see Louk J. M. J. Vanderschuren, E. J. Marijke Achterberg, and Viviana Trezza, “The Neurobiology of Social Play and Its Rewarding Value in Rats,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 70 (2016): 86–105.
16.Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman (New York: New Harvest, 2014), 86; author interviews with Shane McConkey, 1996, 1997, 1998; Steve Winter, AI, May 26, 2011. A version of this quote and a great article about McConkey’s importance to action and adventure sports appears in Rob Story, “Skiing Will Never Be the Same: The Life and Death of Shane McConkey,” Skiing, August 2009.
17.Kidd and Hayden, “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity,” 449–60.
18.Adriana Kraig et al., “Social Purpose Increases Direct-to-Borrower Microfinance Investments by Reducing Physiologic Arousal,” Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics 11, no. 2 (2018): 116–26.
2: The Passion Recipe
1.Timothy J. Smoker, Carrie E. Murphy, and Alison K. Rockwell, “Comparing Memory for Handwriting versus Typing,” Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting 53, no. 22 (2009): 1744–47.
2.For more on pattern recognition and dopamine, see Andrei T. Popescu, Michael R. Zhou, and Mu-Ming Poo, “Phasic Dopamine Release in the Medial Prefrontal Cortex Enhances Stimulus Discrimination,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 22 (2016); for more on attention and dopamine, see A. Nieoullon, “Dopamine and the Regulation of Cognition and Attention,” Progress in Neurobiology 67, no. 1 (2002): 53–83; for more on signal-to-noise ratio and dopamine, see Caitlin M. Vander Weele, Cody A. Siciliano, Gillian A. Matthews, Praneeth Namburi, Ehsan M. Izadmehr, Isabella C. Espinel, Edward H. Nieh et al., “Dopamine Enhances Signal-to-Noise Ratio in Cortical-Brainstem Encoding of Aversive Stimuli,” Nature 563, no. 7731 (2018): 397–401.
3.Oscar Arias-Carrión, Maria Stamelou, Eric Murillo-Rodríguez, Manuel Menéndez-González, and Ernst Pöppel, “Dopaminergic Reward System: A Short Integrative Review,” International Archives of Medicine 3, no. 1 (2010): 24, https://doi.org/10.1186/1755-7682-3-24.
4.Eric Nestler, “The Neurobiology of Cocaine Addiction,” Science & Practice Perspectives 3, no. 1 (2005): 4–10, https://doi.org/10.1151/spp05314.
5.M. Victoria Puig, Jonas Rose, Robert Schmidt, and Nadja Freund, “Dopamine Modulation of Learning and Memory in the Prefrontal Cortex: Insights from Studies in Primates, Rodents, and Birds,” Frontiers in Neural Circuits 8 (2014); for a brief overview of memory, learning, and neurotransmitters, see S. Ackerman, “Learning, Recalling, and Thinking,” chap. 8 in Discovering the Brain (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1992), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234153/.
6.Wendy Wood and Dennis Rünger, “Psychology of Habit,” Annual Review of Psychology 67, no. 1 (2016), 289–314.
7.For a great overview on creative incubation, see Keith Sawyer, “Enhancing Creative Incubation,” Psychology Today, April 19, 2013, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/zig-zag/201304/enhancing-creative-incubation; for more research on incubation, see Simone M. Ritter and Ap Dijksterhuis, “Creativity—the Unconscious Foundations of the Incubation Period,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014).
8.For more on pattern recognition, see Arkady Konovalov and Ian Krajbich, “Neurocomputational Dynamics of Sequence Learning,” Neuron 98, no. 6 (2018): 13; and Allan M. Collins and Elizabeth F. Loftus, “A Spreading-Activation Theory of Semantic Processing,” Psychological Review 82, no. 6 (1975): 407–28.
9.Susanne Vogel and Lars Schwabe, “Learning and Memory Under Stress: Implications for the Classroom,” Science of Learning 1, no. 16011 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1038/npjscilearn.2016.11.
10.For a study about readers’ responses to event boundaries in stories, see Cody C. Delistraty, “The Psychological Comforts of Storytelling,” Atlantic, November 2, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/11/the-psychological-comforts-of-storytelling/381964/; Nicole K.Speer, Jeffrey M. Zacks, and Jeremy R. Reynolds, “Human Brain Activity Time-Locked to Narrative Event Boundaries,” Psychological Science 18, no. 5 (2007): 449–55.
11.Early signs of inferring cause and effect in babies and infants: David M. Sobel and Natasha Z. Kirkham, “Blickets and Babies: The Development of Causal Reasoning in Toddlers and Infants,” Developmental Psychology 42, no. 6 (200
6): 1103–15.
12.Sören Krach, Frieder M. Paulus, Maren Bodden, and Tilo Kircher, “The Rewarding Nature of Social Interactions,” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (2010), https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2010.00022; see also R. M. Jones, L. H. Somerville, J. Li, E. J. Ruberry, V. Libby, G. Glover, H. U. Voss, D. J. Ballon, and B. J. Casey, “Behavioral and Neural Properties of Social Reinforcement Learning,” Journal of Neuroscience 31, no. 37 (2011): 13039–45.
13.Krach et al.
14.Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (New York: Plenum Press, 1985).
15.For the amygdala, see Richard Davidson et al., “Purpose in Life Predicts Better Emotional Recovery from Negative Stimuli,” PLoS One 8, no. 11 (2013): e80329; for the insular cortex and medial temporal cortex, see Gary Lewis et al., “Neural Correlates of the ‘Good Life,’” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 9, no. 5 (May 9, 2014): 615–18.
16.Adam Kaplin and Laura Anzaldi, “New Movement in Neuroscience: A Purpose-Driven Life,” Cerebrum (May–June 2015): 7.
17.Davidson et al., “Purpose in Life Predicts Better Emotional Recovery from Negative Stimuli”; for productivity, see Morten Hansen, “Find Success In Your Career By Learning How to Match Your Passion With Your Purpose,” Morten Hansen (website), April 27, 2018, https://www.mortenhansen.com/find-success-in-your-career-by-learning-how-to-match-your-passion-with-your-purpose/.
18.Keisuke Takano and Yoshihiko Tanno, “Self-Rumination, Self-Reflection, and Depression: Self-Rumination Counteracts the Adaptive Effect of Self-Reflection,” Behavior Research and Therapy 47, no. 3 (2009): 260–64.
19.Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis, Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015).
20.The phrase “Massively Transformative Purpose” was coined by Salim Ismail, which he later explored thoroughly in his excellent book Exponential Organizations (New York: Diversion Books, 2014).
21.Tim Ferriss, author interview, 2015.
3: The Full Intrinsic Stack
1.For a brief overview of Ryan and Deci history, see Delia O’Hara, “The Intrinsic Motivation of Richard Ryan and Edward Deci,” American Psychological Association, December 18, 2017, https://www.apa.org/members/content/intrinsic-motivation.
2.Dan N. Stone, Edward L. Deci, and Richard M. Ryan, “Beyond Talk: Creating Autonomous Motivation Through Self-Determination Theory,” Journal of General Management 34, no. 3 (2009): 75–91.
3.Ibid.
4.See Mashable interview with Eric Schmidt: Petrana Radulovic, “How the ‘20% Time’ Rule Led to Google’s Most Innovative Products,” Mashable, May 11, 2018, https://mashable.com/2018/05/11/google-20-percent-rule/.
5.Kaomi Goetz, “How 3M Gave Everyone Days Off and Created an Innovation Dynamo,” Fast Company, July 9, 2018.
6.Ryan Tate, “Google Couldn’t Kill 20 Percent Time Even If They Wanted To,” Wired, August 21, 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/08/20-percent-time-will-never-die/.
7.Kacy Burdette, “Patagonia,” Fortune, February 14, 2019, https://fortune.com/best-companies/2019/patagonia/.
8.Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing (New York: Penguin, 2016).
9.“How Much Sleep Do I Need? Sleep and Sleep Disorders,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, March 2, 2017, https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/about_sleep/how_much_sleep.html.
10.June J. Pilcher and Allen I. Huffcutt, “Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Performance: A Meta-analysis,” Sleep 19, no. 4 (1996): 318–26.
11.Laura Mandolesi et al., “Effects of Physical Exercise on Cognitive Functioning and Wellbeing,” Frontiers of Psychology (April 27, 2018); see also “Stress and Exercise,” American Psychological Association, 2014, https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2013/exercise.
12.For endorphins, see Hannah Steinberg and Elizabeth Sykes, “Introduction to Symposium on Endorphins and Behavioral Processes: Review of Literature on Endorphins and Exercise,” Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior 5, no. 23 (November 1985): 857–62; for anandamide, see Arne Dietrich and William F. McDaniel, “Endocannabinoids and Exercise,” British Journal of Sports Medicine 38, no. 5 (2004): 536–41.
13.David C. McClelland, John W. Atkinson, Russell A. Clark, and Edgar L. Lowell, The Achievement Motive (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953), 195.
14.Gregory Berns, Satisfaction: Sensation Seeking, Novelty, and the Science of Seeking True Fulfillment (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 3–5; see also Gregory Berns, Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Press, 2008), 44–45.
15.Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York: Riverhead, 2009).
16.For a full recounting of Csikszentmihalyi’s life story, see Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman (New York: New Harvest, 2014), 17–22; see also his TED talk: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Flow, the Secret to Happiness,” filmed February 2004, TED Talk, 18:43, https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness?language=en.
17.Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “The Concept of Flow,” in C. R. Snyder and S. J. Lopez, The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 89–105.
18.For a full breakdown of flow’s triggers, see Kotler, The Rise of Superman, 93–153.
19.For a really good discussion on what happens when intrinsic motivation goes awry, see Johann Hari, Lost Connections (New York: Bloomsbury Circus, 2018).
20.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008), 71–76, see also Stefan Engeser, Further Advances in Flow Research (New York: Springer, 2012), 54–57.
21.Hari, Lost Connections, 71–128.
4: Goals
1.Andrea Falcon, “Aristotle on Causality,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, March 7, 2019, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-causality.
2.Edwin A. Locke, “Toward a Theory of Task Motivation and Incentives,” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 3, no. 2 (1968): 157–89.
3.Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, Goal Setting: A Motivational Technique That Works! (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984), 10–19.
4.Gary P. Latham and Gary A. Yukl, “Assigned versus Participative Goal Setting with Educated and Uneducated Woods Workers,” Journal of Applied Psychology 60, no. 3 (1975): 299–302.
5.E. L. Deci and R. M. Ryan, “The ‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Goal Pursuits: Human Needs and the Self-Determination of Behavior,” Psychological Inquiry 11 (2000): 227–68.
6.David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2011), 46–54.
7.George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” Psychological Review 63, no. 2 (1956): 81–97.
8.Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008), 29.
9.Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being,” American Psychologist 55, no. 1 (2000): 68–78.
10.Gary Latham, author interview, 2014.
11.Peter M. Gollwitzer, Paschal Sheeran, Verena Michalski, and Andrea E. Seifert, “When Intentions Go Public,” Psychological Science 20, no. 5 (2009): 612–18.
12.Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, 54–59; see also M. Csikszentmihalyi, Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology (New York: Springer, 2014), 204–7.
5: Grit
1.This may be rumor. Carlyle has quotes all over the place saying this, but there seems to be no original source.
2.Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2018), 8.
3.David Eagleman, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2011), 182–86.
4.Song Wang, Ming Zhou, Taolin Chen, Xun Yang, Guangxiang Chen, Meiyun Wang, and Qiyong Gong, “Grit
and the Brain: Spontaneous Activity of the Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex Mediates the Relationship Between the Trait Grit and Academic Performance,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 12, no. 3 (2016): 452–60.
5.Irma Triasih Kurniawan, Marc Guitart-Masip, and Ray J. Dolan, “Dopamine and Effort-Based Decision Making,” Frontiers in Neuroscience 5 (2011): 8.
6.This finding is the end result of twenty years of interviewing peak performers about grit and persistence. Key contributors to the idea include Michael Gervais, Josh Waitzkin, Tim Ferriss, Angela Duckworth, Scott Barry Kaufman, Rich Diviney, Byron Fergusson, and everyone at the Santa Fe Institute high-performance conferences.
7.Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1869).
8.Duckworth, Grit, 14.
9.Martin E. P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (New York: Random House, 2002), 102–39.
10.Katherine R. Von Culin, Eli Tsukayama, and Angela L. Duckworth, “Unpacking Grit: Motivational Correlates of Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals,” Journal of Positive Psychology 9, no. 4 (2014): 306–12.
11.Despite the hoopla, I still think Baumeister’s book on the subject is a peak-performance must-read: Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (New York: Penguin, 2012).
12.Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine, 2006), 1–14.
13.Jennifer A. Mangels, Brady Butterfield, Justin Lamb, Catherine Good, and Carol S. Dweck, “Why Do Beliefs About Intelligence Influence Learning Success? A Social Cognitive Neuroscience Model,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 1, no. 2 (2006): 75–86.
14.John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire (New York: Dutton, 1981), 401.
15.All Michael Gervais quotes come from a series of author interviews conducted between 2011 and 2020.
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