The Art of Impossible

by Steven Kotler

  16.Speech printed in book form: David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009).

  17.For a recounting of Wallace’s life, contribution, and suicide, see Tom Bissell, “Great and Terrible Truths,” New York Times, April 24, 2009.

  18.Stewart I. Donaldson, Barbara L. Fredrickson, and Laura E. Kurtz, “Cultivating Positive Emotions to Enhance Human Flourishing,” in Applied Positive Psychology: Improving Everyday Life, Schools, Work, Health, and Society (New York: Routledge Academic, 2011).

  19.Michele M. Tugade and Barbara L. Fredrickson, “Resilient Individuals Use Positive Emotions to Bounce Back from Negative Emotional Experiences,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 86, no. 2 (2004): 320.

  20.Joanne V. Wood, W. Q. Elaine Perunovic, and John W. Lee, “Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others,” Psychological Science 20, no. 7 (2009): 860–66.

  21.M. Zimmermann, “Neurophysiology of Sensory Systems,” Fundamentals of Sensory Physiology (1986): 115.

  22.Joseph LeDoux, The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 159–78.

  23.Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage: How a Positive Brain Fuels Success in Work and Life (New York: Crown Business, 2010).

  24.Mark Beeman and John Kounios, The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain (New York: Windmill Books, 2015), 119.

  25.Glenn R. Fox, Jonas Kaplan, Hanna Damasio, and Antonio Damasio, “Neural Correlates of Gratitude,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 1491.

  26.Roderik Gerritsen and Guido Band, “Breath of Life,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (October 9, 2018): 397.

  27.Amy Lam, “Effects of Five-Minute Mindfulness Meditation on Mental Health Care Professionals,” Journal of Psychology and Clinical Psychiatry (March 26, 2015).

  28.For a really good review of the benefits of mindfulness, see Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (New York: Avery, 2018).

  29.Lorenza S. Colzato, Ayca Ozturk, and Bernhard Hommel, “Meditate to Create: The Impact of Focused-Attention and Open-Monitoring Training on Convergent and Divergent Thinking,” Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012): 116.

  30.Box breathing is a technique developed by former SEAL Mark Divine. See “Box Breathing and Meditation Technique w/ Mark Divine of SealFit,” Barbell Shrugged, uploaded February 25, 2015, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZzhk9jEkkI. Also: Ana Gotter, “Box Breathing,” Healthline Media, June 17, 2020, https://www.healthline.com/health/box-breathing.

  31.Steven Kotler, “They’ve Been Around the Block More Than a Few Times, but Shaun Palmer, Laird Hamilton and Tony Hawk Can Still Rev It Up,” ESPN, July 10, 2012, https://tv5.espn.com/espn/magazine/archives/news/story?page=magazine-19990222-article11.

  32.All Laird Hamilton quotes come from a series of interviews conducted between 1999 and 2020.

  33.Kristin Ulmer, author interviews, 2014–2020.

  34.Michael Gervais, author interview, 2019.

  35.Crystal A. Clark and Alain Dagher, “The Role of Dopamine in Risk Taking: A Specific Look at Parkinson’s Disease and Gambling,” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 8 (2014).

  36.All quotes come from a series of interviews with Josh Waitzkin between 2013 and 2016, but see also Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance (New York: Free Press, 2008). Furthermore, Tim Ferriss has conducted two amazing podcasts with Josh; see Tim Ferriss, “Josh Waitzkin Interview,” Tim Ferriss Show (podcast), July 22, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYaMtGuCgm8.

  37.William James, “The Energies of Men,” Philosophical Review 16, no. 1 (1907): 1.

  38.Harry D. Krop, Cecilia E. Alegre, and Carl D. Williams, “Effect of Induced Stress on Convergent and Divergent Thinking,” Psychological Reports 24, no. 3 (1969): 895–98.

  39.Keith Ablow, author interview, 2015.

  40.Again, this one might be apocryphal, but Quora does a nice job fact-checking it: Reply to “What is the origin of the quote attributed to a Navy SEAL - “Under pressure, you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training”? Where and when was this said?,” Quora, 2016, https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-the-quote-attributed-to-a-Navy-SEAL-Under-pressure-you-dont-rise-to-the-occasion-you-sink-to-the-level-of-your-training-Where-and-when-was-this-said.

  41.Norman B. Schmidt, J. Anthony Richey, Michael J. Zvolensky, and Jon K. Maner, “Exploring Human Freeze Responses to a Threat Stressor,” Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry 39, no. 3 (2008): 292–304.

  42.Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).

  43.“Burn-out an ‘Occupational Phenomenon’: International Classification of Diseases,” World Health Organization, May 28, 2019, https://www.who.int/mental_health/evidence/burn-out/en/; see also Harry Levinson, “When Executives Burn Out,” Harvard Business Review, August 21, 2014, https://hbr.org/1996/07/when-executives-burn-out.

  44.Irshaad O. Ebrahim, Colin M. Shapiro, Adrian J. Williams, and Peter B. Fenwick, “Alcohol and Sleep I: Effects on Normal Sleep,” Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 37, no. 4 (2013).

  45.Esther Thorson and Annie Lang, “The Effects of Television Videographics and Lecture Familiarity on Adult Cardiac Orienting Responses and Memory,” Communication Research 19, no. 3 (1992): 346–69; see also Meghan Neal, “Is Watching TV Actually a Good Way to Rest Your Brain?,” Vice, January 18, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3daqaj/is-watching-tv-actually-a-good-way-to-rest-your-brain.

  46.Björn Rasch and Jan Born, “About Sleep’s Role in Memory,” Physiological Reviews 93, no. 2 (2013): 681–766.

  47.Levinson, “When Executives Burn Out.”

  6: The Habit of Ferocity

  1.All quotes come from author interviews with Peter Diamandis conducted between 1997 and 2020, www.diamandis.com.

  2.Luke J. Norman, Stephan F. Taylor, Yanni Liu, Joaquim Radua, Yann Chye, Stella J. De Wit, Chaim Huyser, et al., “Error Processing and Inhibitory Control in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Meta-Analysis Using Statistical Parametric Maps,” Biological Psychiatry 85, no. 9 (2019): 713–25.

  3.Michael Wharton, author interview, 2019.

  4.William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course (New York: Henry Holt, 1892), 1–17.

  Part II: Learning

  1.Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (New York: HarperPerennial, 2013), 32.

  7: The Ingredients of Impossible

  1.Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 149.

  2.Commission of the European Communities, “Adult Learning: It Is Never Too Late to Learn,” COM, 614 final. Brussels, October 23, 2006; see also Patricia M. Simone and Melinda Scuilli, “Cognitive Benefits of Participation in Lifelong Learning Institutes,” LLI Review 1 (2006): 44–51, https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1144&context=psych.

  8: Growth Mindsets and Truth Filters

  1.Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine, 2006).

  2.Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis, Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 120.

  3.See Kevin Rose’s 2012 interview with Elon Musk, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-s_3b5fRd8.

  4.Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, October 21, 2012.

  9: The ROI on Reading

  1.“To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence: Executive Summary,” Arts Education Policy Review 110, no. 1 (2008): 9–22, https://doi.org/10.3200/aepr.110.1.9-22.

  2.Andrew Perrin, “Who Doesn’t Read Books in America?,” Pew Research Center, September 26, 2019.

  3.Marc Brysbaert, “How Many Words Do We Read per Minute?” (2019), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332380784_How_many_
words_do_we_read_per_minute_A_review_and_meta-analysis_of_reading_rate.

  4.For an overview on the benefits of reading, see Honor Whiteman, “Five Ways Reading Can Improve Health and Well-Being,” Medical News Today, October 12, 2016.

  5.Chris Weller, “9 of the Most Successful People Share Their Reading Habits,” Business Insider, July 20, 2017.

  6.J. B. Bobo, Modern Coin Magic (New York: Dover, 1952).

  10: Five Not-So-Easy Steps for Learning Almost Anything

  1.Hailan Hu, Eleonore Real, Kogo Takamiya, Myoung-Goo Kang, Joseph Ledoux, Richard L. Huganir, and Roberto Malinow, “Emotion Enhances Learning via Norepinephrine Regulation of AMPA-Receptor Trafficking,” Cell 131, no. 1 (2007).

  2.Craig Thorley, “Note Taking and Note Reviewing Enhance Jurors’ Recall of Trial Information,” Applied Cognitive Psychology 30, no. 5 (2016): 655–63.

  3.Steven Kotler, The Angle Quickest for Flight (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001).

  4.Thomas Gifford, Assassini (New York: Bantam, 1991).

  5.Malachi Martin, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Church (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1981).

  6.Karen Armstrong, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York: Vintage, 1999).

  7.Maria Luisa Ambrosini and Mary Willis, The Secret Archives of the Vatican (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969).

  8.Thomas Reese, Inside the Vatican (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  9.Dan Rowinski, “The Slow Hunch: How Innovation Is Created Through Group Intelligence,” ReadWrite, June 9, 2011, https://readwrite.com/2011/06/09/the_slow_hunch_how_innovation_is_created_through_g/; see also Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From (New York: Riverhead, 2011).

  10.Wolfram Schultz, “Predictive Reward Signal of Dopamine Neurons,” Journal of Neurophysiology 80, no. 1 (1998): 1–27.

  11.Diana Martinez, Daria Orlowska, Rajesh Narendran, Mark Slifstein, Fei Liu, Dileep Kumar, Allegra Broft, Ronald Van Heertum, and Herbert D. Kleber, “Dopamine Type 2/3 Receptor Availability in the Striatum and Social Status in Human Volunteers,” Biological Psychiatry 67, no. 3 (2010): 275–78.

  12.Alfredo Meneses, “Neurotransmitters and Memory,” in Identification of Neural Markers Accompanying Memory (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2014), 5–45.

  11: The Skill of Skill

  1.This interview first appeared on a blog I wrote for Forbes; see Steven Kotler, “Tim Ferriss and the Secrets of Accelerated Learning,” Forbes, May 4, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2015/05/04/tim-ferriss-and-the-secrets-of-accelerated-learning/.

  12: Stronger

  1.Christopher Peterson, Willibald Ruch, Ursula Beermann, Nansook Park, and Martin E. P. Seligman, “Strengths of Character, Orientations to Happiness, and Life Satisfaction,” Journal of Positive Psychology 2, no. 3 (2007): 149–56.

  2.Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

  3.Andrew Huberman, Stanford University, and Glenn Fox, USC, author interviews, 2020.

  4.Gallup, “CliftonStrengths,” Gallup.com, June 13, 2020, https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/252137/home.aspx; see also “Be Your Best SELF with STRENGTHS,” Strengths Profile, https://www.strengthsprofile.com/.

  5.Martin E. P. Seligman, Tracy A. Steen, Nansook Park, and Christopher Peterson, “Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions,” American Psychologist 60, no. 5 (2005): 410; see also Fabian Gander, René T. Proyer, Willibald Ruch, and Tobias Wyss, “Strength-Based Positive Interventions: Further Evidence for Their Potential in Enhancing Well-Being and Alleviating Depression,” Journal of Happiness Studies 14, no. 4 (2013): 1241–59.

  13: The 80/20 of Emotional Intelligence

  1.Christopher Peterson, “Other People Matter: Two Examples,” Psychology Today, June 17, 2008, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-good-life/200806/other-people-matter-two-examples.

  2.Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (New York: Bantam, 2005).

  3.For an overview of behaviorism and Skinner’s views, see George Graham, “Behaviorism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, March 19, 2019.

  4.Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  5.Ibid. See also Li He et al., “Examining Brain Structures Associated with Emotional Intelligence and the Mediated Effect on Trait Creativity in Young Adults,” Frontiers in Psychology (June 15, 2018).

  6.Nancy Gibbs, “The EQ Factor,” Time, June 24, 2001.

  7.Goleman, Emotional Intelligence.

  8.William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course (New York: Henry Holt, 1892), 10.

  9.Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life & Business (New York: Random House, 2012), xvi; see also Timothy Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (New York: Harvard University Press, 2002).

  10.Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2010), 43.

  11.Keith Sawyer, “What Mel Brooks Can Teach Us about ‘Group Flow,’” Greater Good Magazine, January 24, 2012.

  12.Claus Lamm and Jasminka Majdandžić, “The Role of Shared Neural Activations, Mirror Neurons, and Morality in Empathy—A Critical Comment,” Neuroscience Research 90 (2015): 15–24; see also Zarinah Agnew et al., “The Human Mirror System: A Motor-Resonance Theory of Mind Reading,” Brain Research Reviews 54, no. 2 (June 2007): 286–93.

  13.Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson, Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (New York: Random House, 2018), 250.

  14.Rich Bellis, “Actually, We Don’t Need More Empathy,” Fast Company, October 20, 2017.

  15.Olga M. Klimecki, Susanne Leiberg, Claus Lamm, and Tania Singer, “Functional Neural Plasticity and Associated Changes in Positive Affect After Compassion Training,” Cerebral Cortex 23, no. 7 (2012): 1552–61.

  14: The Shortest Path to Superman

  1.K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf T. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406.

  2.Anders Ericsson, The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018); see also Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers (New York: Little, Brown, 2013).

  3.David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (New York: Riverhead, 2019), 15–35.

  4.Nick Skillicorn, “The 10,000-Hour Rule Was Wrong, According to the People Who Wrote the Original Study,” Inc., June 9, 2016.

  5.Anders Ericcson, author interview, 2016.

  6.Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman (New York: New Harvest, 2014), 78–82.

  7.Robert Plomin, Nicholas G. Shakeshaft, Andrew McMillan, and Maciej Trzaskowski, “Nature, Nurture, and Expertise,” Intelligence 45 (2014): 46–59.

  8.W. Mischel, Y. Shoda, and M. Rodriguez, “Delay of Gratification in Children,” Science 244, no. 4907 (1989): 933–38.

  9.David Epstein, “Fit Looks Like Grit,” Franklin Covey, December 5, 2019, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v27 vQCGCCLs.

  10.Chloe Gibbs, Jens Ludwig, Douglas L. Miller, and Na’ama Shenhav, “Short-Run Fade-out in Head Start and Implications for Long-Run Effectiveness,” UC Davis Center for Poverty Research, Policy Brief 4, no. 8 (February 2016), https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/policy-brief/short-run-fade-out-head-start-and-implications-long-run-effectiveness.

  11.Epstein, Range.

  12.Chris Berka, “A Window on the Brain,” TEDx San Diego, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBt7LMrIkxg&feature=emb_logo.

  Part III: Creativity

  1.Javier Pérez Andújar, Salvador Dalí: A la conquista de lo irracional (Madrid: Algaba Ediciones, 2003), 245.

  15: The Creative Advantage

  1.Bri Stauffer, “What Are the 4 C
’s of 21st Century Skills?,” Applied Educational Systems, May 7, 2020, https://www.aeseducation.com/blog/four-cs-21st-century-skills; see also Preparing 21st Century Students for a Global Society: An Educator’s Guide to the “Four Cs,” National Education Association report, http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/A-Guide-to-Four-Cs.pdf.

  2.“IBM 2010 Global CEO Study,” IBM, May 18, 2010, https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/31670.wss.

  3.Adobe, State of Create Study: Global Benchmark Study on Attitudes and Beliefs about Creativity at Work, Home and School, April 2012, https://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pdfs/Adobe_State_of_Create_Global_Benchmark_Study.pdf.

  4.Tom Sturges, Every Idea Is a Good Idea (New York: Penguin, 2014), 29.

  5.Gerhard Heinzmann and David Stump, “Henri Poincaré,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, October 10, 2017; see also Dean Keith Simonton, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

  6.Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought (Tunbridge Wells, UK: Solis Press, 2014), 37–55.

  7.A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology. Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927–1928 (New York: Macmillan, 1927).

  8.Alex Osborn, Your Creative Power (Gorham, ME: Myers Education Press, 2007).

  9.Lori Flint, “How Creativity Came to Reside in the Land of the Gifted,” Knowledge Quest 42, no. 5 (May–June 2014): 64–74.

  10.For a great Guilford overview, see: New World Encyclopedia, s.v. “J. P. Guilford,” https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/J._P._Guilford.

  11.Lisa Learman, “Left vs. Right Brained,” Perspectives in Research, May 22, 2019, https://biomedicalodyssey.blogs.hopkinsmedicine.org/2019/05/left-vs-right-brained-why-the-brain-laterality-myth-persists/.