Full text of best-selling author Steven Kotler’s talk: How to open up the next level of human performance at TEDxABQ conference.
Listen to the MP3 audio here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Steven Kotler – Author
I study ultimate human performance, or what it takes to be your best when it matters most, what it takes to do the impossible.
And when I found, when I say something like ultimate human performance out loud and in public, most people tend to think of anybody but themselves, we picture astronauts or Navy SEALs or genius innovators.
So I want to be clear: when I say what does it take to be your best when it matters most, I mean what does it take for you to be your best when it matters most? What does it take for you to do the impossible?
And I came to this topic from an unusual direction: journalism. In the early 1990s, I became a journalist and at the time action sports were beginning to grab the public’s imagination.
So back then if you could write and you can surf or you could write and you could ski, or you could write, you could rock climb, there was work.
I couldn’t do any of those things very well, but I needed the work. So I lied to my editors and I was lucky enough to spend the better portion of five years chasing athletes around mountains.
I will tell you if you’re not a professional athlete and you spend a lot of time chasing athletes around mountains and across oceans, you break bones. I broke a lot of bones. This meant I had a lot of time off; I had a lot of downtime. I’d be hanging out, I would snap this or that.
And I did take four or five months off.
And when I came back the progress I saw amazed me, absolutely astounded me; it was leaps and bounds kind of progress.
Now sports performance as a general rule, it’s slow, its steady, it’s governed by the laws of evolution. As a general rule in athletics, we break records every five to ten years, not every couple of months. But that was exactly what was going on in action and adventure sports.
And I want to give you a couple of examples. In 1990, in snowboarding, the biggest gap jump anybody ever cleared was 40 feet. 40 feet is big; it’s two buses stacked end to end. Today as you can see we’re clearing gap jumps that are over 250 feet tall. That’s a skyscraper.
This is my favorite example. This is my friend Alex Honnold. Alex is free soloing Half Dome in Yosemite. Free soloing means he’s climbing without ropes and without protection, so he falls, he dies.
Now most people when they climb Half Dome, it’s an enormous climb; it usually takes a day and a half, two days. They bring portal edges so they can sleep on the side of the wall. Alex didn’t need a portal edge, because in 2002 or 2012, he free soloed Half Dome in 1 hour and 22 minutes. That’s the rough equivalent of running a four-minute mile in about 38 seconds.
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And Alex is only one example between 1990 and today. Action-adventure sport athletes have achieved more impossible feats than pretty much any group in history. And this raises a pretty basic question: what the heck is going on?
And the answer is a state of consciousness known as flow, that these athletes have learned to harness, probably better than almost any group in history. You may know flow by other names. You may talk about it as runner’s high, being unconscious, being in the zone.
Flow is a technical term, and it’s defined as an optimal state of consciousness. When we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, it refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption. We get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Action and awareness start to merge. Your sense of self vanishes. Time passes strangely. Sometimes you’ll slow down, you’ll get a freeze-frame effect. More frequently it speeds up and five hours pass by in like five minutes. And throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof.
But 15 years ago, our brain imaging technology got good enough that for the very first time could peer under the hood in figuring out where this ultimate performance was coming from.
And what we discovered turned a lot of our deep old ideas about high performance on its head. The old idea was that at any norm… normal time we’re only using a small sliver of our brain. So ultimate performance must be the full brain on overdrive.
Turns out we actually had it exactly backwards. In flow, we’re not using more of the brain, we’re using a lot less. Instead of brain becoming hyperactive, it’s becoming hypoactive… H-y-p-o… it’s the opposite of hyper, means to slow down or deactivate.
And the main portion of the brain that’s deactivating is your prefrontal cortex. Now this is the part of your brain that governs all of your higher cognitive functions, complex decision-making, long-term planning, your sense of morality, your sense of will.
Why does time pass so strangely when we’re in the zone? Because time is calculated all over the prefrontal cortex. You know, as parts of it wink out, we can no longer separate past from present from future and we’re instead plunged into a state researchers talk of as the deep now.
Something similar happens to your sense of self. Self is also calculated all over the prefrontal cortex, and as parts of it wink out, we can no longer perform this calculation.
Now when your sense of self goes quiet, it turns off your inner critic, that nagging always on defeatist voice in your head, your inner Woody Allen, in flow, Woody goes quiet.
Now we experience this as liberation, as freedom. We’re actually getting out of our own way. Risk-taking goes up; creativity goes up.
Now besides these changes in neural anatomical function, we also get a big dump of neuro-chemistry in flow. Five of the most potent neuro-chemicals the brain can produce show up in the state and flow appears to be the only time we get access to all five at once.
And if we want to understand how these action-adventure sport athletes did the impossible, its neuro-chemistry gives us a big clue.
First of all, it enhances all aspects of physical performance: muscle reaction time increases; our sense of pain gets dead and so strength increases.
But the bigger impact is cognitive: Mental performance. These neural chemicals surround all three sides of the so-called high-performance triangle: motivation; creativity; and learning.
In motivation, these five chemicals that show up, they are all pleasure drugs. In fact, they’re the five most potent pleasure drugs the brain can produce, which means flow is one of the most addictive states on earth. Researchers don’t like the word addictive. So instead they talk about it as the source code of intrinsic motivation.
But this motivation is so great that when McKinsey did a ten-year study, they found that top executives in flow report being 500% more productive than out of flow. That’s a huge leap in productivity; that’s a huge leap in motivation.
We see something similar with creativity. Creativity is a word that gets mistaken a lot, but it fundamentally is a recombinantory process; it’s what happens when the brain takes in novel information, combines it with old ideas to come up with something startlingly new.
And the neural chemicals that show up in flow surround this process. When you’re in the state, you take in more information per second, you pay more attention to that information. You find greater links between that information and closely-related ideas, what’s called pattern recognition and you find greater links between that information and far-flung ideas, what’s called lateral thinking.
In fact, creativity is so surrounded that most researchers have found that creativity spikes 400% in flow.
Something similar happens to learning. Quick shorthand for how learning works in the brain is the more neural chemicals that show up during an experience, the better chance that experience has of moving from short-term holding into long-term storage.
Flow is this huge neural chemical dump, which is why in experiments run by the US military on soldiers, they found that soldiers in flow learned 240% to 500% faster than normal. So we’ve all heard about Malcolm Gladwell’s fabled 10,000 hours to mastery. What the research suggests is that flow can cut that in half.
More interestingly, and I’m biased here, because this is a lot of the work that my organization, the Flow Genome Project has been involved in. We’ve been able to combine this kind of new neuroscience with these high performing groups like the action-adventure sport athletes. We’ve been able to work backwards to what is causing them to get so much access to flow and figure out how to apply this in all of our lives.
What we’ve discovered is two things that are important. The first is that flow is ubiquitous, shows up in anyone, anywhere provided certain initial conditions are met.
Second of all, what are those conditions? Turns out, flow states have triggers. These are preconditions that lead to more flow. There are 20 of them in total. The first thing to know is that flow follows focus. It can only show up when all our attention is focused on the right here, right now. That’s what these triggers do. They drive attention into the present moment.
Another way of thinking about this is these are 20 of the things that evolution shaped our brain to pay the most attention to. And what we see in action-adventure sport athletes is they built their lives around these triggers. They’re extremely passionate about what they do. And that matters here because we pay more attention to those things that we believe in. They take very very big risks and risk is another great focusing mechanism, drives attention into the now.
And they take those risks in novel unpredictable complex environments that produce a lot of fast feedback and a lot of sensory input. All these things grab hold of attention and drive it into the now and allow them to produce tremendous amounts of flow.
But it turns out it’s not actually just action-adventure sport athletes who do this. Pretty much every high-performing individual and organization you can think of, we’ve looked at, and we found they all do the same thing. So Navy SEALs, the top educational institutions in America, the best startups in Silicon Valley, Fortune 500 companies, the people who are running Fortune 500 companies, they have built their organizations around these triggers to maximize flow.
The most interesting part is that it’s actually really easy. Last year we did a training, we did a six-week training at Google. We trained people up in only four of these triggers over a six-week period. What we found on the back end was a 35% to 80% increase in flow. It’s that easy.
And I think this information puts a wonderful, a sort of terrible burden on all of us. What grand challenges are you aching to solve? What in your life currently seems impossible? What would you go after if you could be 500% more productive, could be 400% more creative, you could cut your learning times in half? This is what flow makes possible; this is what’s available to you today.
But what you do with this information, that’s up to you.
Resources for Further Reading:
Focus – The Secret to High Performance and Fulfilment: Daniel Goleman (Transcript)
How Everyone Can Make Their Dreams Reality: Tom Oliver (Transcript)
A Powerful Way to Unleash Your Natural Creativity: Tim Harford (Transcript)
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