Steven Kotler - The Art of Achieving the Impossible: A Journey into the Neurobiology of Flow

The Casey Adams Show

Listener.com Podcast Network

Business, Entrepreneurship

4.8 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 19 April 2023

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this episode of The Casey Adams Show, I sat down with Steven Kotler. Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. He is the author of 11 bestsellers (out of fourteen books), including The Art of Impossible, The Future is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, Bold and Abundance. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 50 languages, and has appeared in over 100 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, TIME, and the Harvard Business Review. Follow Steven: Website: https://www.stevenkotler.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stevenkotler/ - Subscribe to The Casey Adams Show on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-casey-adams-show/id1328795944 Follow Casey on social media: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casey Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/CaseyAdams TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@caseyadams YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CaseyAdams - Follow The Casey Adams Show on social media: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caseyadamsshow Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/CaseyAdamsShow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@caseyadamsshow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CaseyAdamsShow - [00:00:01] - Exploring peak human performance. [00:01:00] - Optimal state of consciousness: Flow. [00:03:50] - "Peak Performance: A Daily Checklist" [00:06:47] - "Peak Performance Aging: Mindset Matters" [00:07:59] - Exploring curiosity to peak performance. [00:10:32] - "Witnessing impossible feats become reality." [00:14:03] - Transitioning from Extreme Sports: Easy, Creative, Not Professional. [00:14:53] - Dreaming of the future: Flow. [00:17:40] - Curious, amazing, pushing limits. [00:19:00] - Achieve flow in business and physical pursuits. [00:21:41] - Flow psychology: 5% challenge skill balance. [00:22:49] - Get comfortable with discomfort. [00:24:59] - Continual improvement, autonomy, flow, peak performance. [00:28:43] - Group flow triggers replace dopamine triggers. [00:30:23] - Twelve-month journey from start to exit. [00:32:23] - Optimizing peak performance through flow. [00:33:26] - Mystical to reliable, repeatable. [00:34:08] - Optimized peak performance writing tip. [00:35:38] - Start hardest task early, align with circadian rhythms. [00:36:22] - Bed to Desk in 5 Minutes. [00:43:22] - "Double down on flow activities: 20s" [00:45:47] - Find Steven on Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Casey Adams show. Today I'm joined by Stephen Kotler.
0:07.2	Stephen is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective.
0:14.6	Thank you so much for coming to the show, Stephen.
0:16.6	It's good to be with you, Casey.
0:18.7	Well, I've been so fascinated with your work, Stephen, and I've listened to other podcasts
0:24.3	that you've been on.
0:25.0	And I'm really excited to dive into, you know, the whole realm of human performance with
0:30.8	you.
0:31.1	And before we dive into your story and in that whole world, I would love for you to give the
0:35.9	audience some context of what the flow
0:37.8	research collective is and a little bit of a high level understanding of what the work that
0:41.8	you do.
0:43.5	Perfect.
0:44.7	So I'm the executive director of the flow research collective and we study the neurobiology,
0:50.5	big word, neurobiology of peak human performance.
0:53.4	In other words, we study what's going on in the brain and the body when people are performing at their very best. And our work is mostly focused on the state of consciousness known to researchers as flow. You may call flow by a lot of other names. Runnerside being in the zone.
1:10.9	If the basketball is being unconscious, if you're a jazz musician, you're in the pocket.
1:14.8	The lingo is sort of endless. It refers to, technically, it's an optimal state of consciousness.
1:19.7	We feel our best and perform our best. More specifically, it's any of those moments of
1:23.6	wrapped attention and total absorption. You get so focused on what you're doing so focused on the task again everything else just starts to melt away right self-consciousness sense of self-diminishes
1:33.1	time passes strangely sometimes occasionally get that freeze frame effect my name has been in a car crash
1:38.4	much more frequently just get so sucked into what you're doing that five hours go by in like five
	...

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