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The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

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The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

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In flow, we are so focused on the task at hand that everything else falls away. Action and awareness merge. Time flies. Self vanishes. Performance goes through the roof.

Flow is an optimal state of consciousness, a peak state where we both feel our best and perform our best.

The great civil rights leader Howard Thurman once said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs most is more people who have come alive.”

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with which you should be inoculated? Behold, I teach you the overman: He is this lightning; he is this frenzy. – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

“Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.”

“Great emergencies and crisis show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”

mindset impacts emotion, which alters biology, which increases performance. Thus, it seemed, by tinkering with mindset—using everything from physical to psychological to pharmacological interventions—one could significantly enhance performance.

fact, when Csikszentmihalyi dove deeper into the data, he discovered that the happiest people on earth, the ones who felt their lives had the most meaning, were those who had the most peak experiences.

It was clear from talking to them, that what kept them motivated was the quality of the experience they felt when they were involved with the activity. The feeling didn’t come when they were relaxing, when they were taking drugs or alcohol, or when they were consuming the expensive privileges of wealth. Rather, it often involved painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.

Flow is more than an optimal state of consciousness—one where we feel our best and perform our best—it also appears to be the only practical answer to the question: What is the meaning of life? Flow is what makes life worth living.

In all other activities, flow is the hallmark of high performance, but in situations where the slightest error could be fatal, then perfection is the only choice—and flow is the only guarantee of perfection.

“Imagination,” says futurist and philosopher Jason Silva, “allows us to conceive of delightful future possibilities, pick the most amazing one, and pull the present forward to meet it.”

Clear goals: Expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities. Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high. Concentration: A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness: The merging of action and awareness. Distorted sense of time: One’s subjective experience of time is altered. Direct and immediate feedback: Successes and failures are apparent, so behavior can be adjusted as needed. Balance between ability level and challenge: The activity is neither too easy nor too difficult. A sense of personal control over the situation. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so action is effortlessness. A lack of awareness of bodily needs. Absorption: narrowing of awareness down to the activity itself.

What is jazz? It’s the acoustic result of high-speed problem solving, of near-perfect decision making.

as it now seems that without a calm, relaxed frame of mind, the brain is incapable of switching from beta-dominant localized networks to alpha-driven widespread webs.

This means flow packs a double punch: it doesn’t just increase our decision-making abilities—it increases our creative decision-making abilities. Dramatically.

This is another reason why flow states significantly enhance performance: when the “self” disappears, it takes many of our limits along for the ride.

Correct predictions result in understanding. Incorrect predictions result in confusion and prompt you to pay attention.

But they are all flow junkies—the difference is critical. And chemical. The fight-or-flight response—a.k.a. the adrenaline rush—cocktails adrenaline, cortisol (the stress hormone), and norepinephrine. It’s an extreme stress response. The brain switches to reactive survival autopilot. Options are limited to three: fight, flee, or freeze. Flow is the opposite: a creative problem-solving state, options wide open.

Risk heightens focus and flow follows focus. This means that the fight-or-flight response primes the body—chemically and psychologically—for the flow state. Athletes report moving through one to get to the other.

Training in high-stress situations increases what psychologists call “situational awareness.” Defined as the ability to absorb information accurately, assess it calmly, and respond appropriately, situational awareness is essentially the ability to keep cool when all hell breaks loose. Because attention and pattern recognition are so heightened by flow, training in the state radically increases situational awareness.

This is a very important point. Flow carries within it delicious possibility. In the state, we are aligned with our core passion and, because of flow’s incredible impact on performance, expressing that passion to our utmost. Under normal conditions (playing chess, writing a report), this is empowering.

When doing what we most love transforms us into the best possible version of ourselves and that version hints at even greater future possibilities, the urge to explore those possibilities becomes feverish compulsion. Intrinsic motivation goes through the roof. Thus flow becomes an alternative path to mastery, sans the misery.

To really achieve anything, you have to be able to tolerate and enjoy risk. It has to become a challenge to look forward to. In all fields, to make exceptional discoveries you need risk—you’re just never going to have a breakthrough without it.”

A “rich environment” is a combination platter of novelty, unpredictability, and complexity—three elements that catch and hold our attention much like risk. Novelty means both danger and opportunity. To our forbearers, a strange scent in the wind could be prey or predator, but either way it paid to pay attention. Unpredictability means we don’t know what happens next, thus we pay extra attention to what happens next. Complexity, when there’s lots of salient information coming at us at once, does more of the same.

Applying this idea in our daily life means breaking tasks into bite-size chunks and setting goals accordingly. A writer, for example, is better off trying to pen three great paragraphs at a time—the equivalent of moving through Mandy-Rae’s kick cycles—rather than attempting one great chapter. Think challenging, yet manageable—just enough stimulation to shortcut attention into the now, not enough stress to pull you back out again.

That’s why people who seek out group flow often join startups or work for themselves. Serial entrepreneurs keep starting new business as much for the flow experience, as for the additional success.”

The quality most desirable in a CEO? According to a global survey conducted by IBM of 1,500 top executives in sixty countries: creativity.

Dopamine is the pleasure chemical released whenever we take a risk or identify a pattern. We feel this inrush as excitement, engagement, and curiosity. But dopamine does more than just stimulate our emotions and increase our motivation—it also tightens focus, drives us into the now, and, thus, speeds entrance into flow. What all of this means is that the creative act (one that requires risk taking and pattern recognition) is itself an exceptionally potent flow trigger.

creativity triggers flow; then flow enhances creativity.

It’s not merely that action and adventure athletes take advantage of this flow trigger. It’s that they have made creativity so core to the culture that the culture is willing to die for their creativity.

Most people are so afraid of dying they never live.

Flow is an alternative path toward mastery, but, like any path, not without its pitfalls. There’s a serious dark side to flow,

Scientists who study human motivation have lately learned that after basic survival needs have been met, the combination of autonomy (the desire to direct your own life), mastery (the desire to learn, explore, and be creative), and purpose (the desire to matter, to contribute to the world) are our most powerful intrinsic drivers—the three things that motivate us most. All three are deeply woven through the fabric of flow. Thus toying with flow involves tinkering with primal biology: addictive neurochemistry, potent psychology, and hardwired evolutionary behaviors.

All or nothing tends to be the kind of commitment flow demands—and it demands it of everyone. If you embark down this road, the requisite risk taking will continuously back you into uncomfortable corners.

Flow forces you to evaluate life through a different lens. It gives you reason to live—but live this way long enough and those reasons become more important than dying.

Fully alive and deeply committed is a risky business.

What’s painfully ironic here is that flow is a radical and alternative path to mastery only because we have decided that play—an activity fundamental to survival, tied to the greatest neurochemical rewards the brain can produce, and flat out necessary for achieving peak performance, creative brilliance, and overall life satisfaction—is a waste of time for adults. If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round. Unless we invert this equation, much of our capacity for intrinsic motivation starts to shut down. We lose touch with our passion and become less than what we could be and that feeling never really goes away.

“Bliss junkies are people who think the magical ease of the flow state is the goal,” says Wheal. “When they confront the difficulty of the day to day, they’d rather reach for a pill or a new lover or another meditation retreat than get down to hard work. The idea being, if it was all so easy, clear, and effortless in flow, then why not wait for the next wave to hit? Not being in flow becomes an excuse to stay listless and undermotivated.”

Thus the rub: Flow, like all technologies, remains morally neutral. It can be used for good or ill or both at the same time.

As children we are taught not to play with fire, not how to play with fire. On the flow path, we are drawn forward by fire; by powerful hedonic instincts; by our deep need for autonomy, mastery, and purpose deeply fulfilled; by dizzyingly feel-good neurochemistry; by a spectrum of joy beyond common ken; by the undeniable presence of our most authentic selves; by a cognitive imperative to make meaning from experience; by the search engine that is evolution and its need for innovation; and by the simplest of truths: life is long and we’re all scared and, in flow, at least for a little while, we’re not.

There’s long tradition here—the tradition of honoring someone who has died trying to live their life to the fullest by, in turn, living your own life to the fullest.

Here—in perhaps the surest sign of a culture of innovation—we’re seeing a social extension of this same principle: when innovation leads to death, powerful tradition ensures that death leads to more innovation.

Our limits are governed by flow’s ability to amplify performance as much as by imagination’s ability to dream up that performance.

What all this means is that learning the impossible is possible augments our ability to see ourselves doing the impossible, which triggers a systemic change in the body and the brain, which closes the gap between fantasy and reality. It also makes us significantly more flow prone.

Without question, paddling fast enough to catch a possibility wave like abundance means we’ll need the most capable versions of ourselves doing the paddling. We’ll need to be better, faster, stronger, smarter. We’ll need intrinsic motivation and incredible cooperation. Our imaginations will have to be deeply engaged; our creative selves operating at their full Picasso. In other words, if we’re interested in forging a future of abundance, then we’re going to need flow.

“The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

Flow, they tell us, is the gateway to impossible, but this has never been take two pills and climb Everest in the morning. Committing to this path demands a radical restructuring of our days and our ways. It demands a considerable tolerance for risk and a considerable shift in culture. We must learn how to play with fire. We must learn to learn faster. We must learn to live thousands of lives in our lifetime—and not lives of quiet desperation, rather of raucous innovation (though naked spread-eagles are optional).

perhaps impossible is just the kind of challenge we’ve been waiting for. What the world needs most is Superman. What the world needs most is us.

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