The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
Steven Kotler
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1477800832
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Wall Street Journal Bestseller
In this groundbreaking book, New York Times–bestselling author Steven Kotler decodes the mystery of ultimate human performance. Drawing on over a decade of research and first-hand reporting with dozens of top action and adventure sports athletes like big wave legend Laird Hamilton, big mountain snowboarder Jeremy Jones, and skateboarding pioneer Danny Way, Kotler explores the frontier science of “flow,” an optimal state of consciousness in which we perform and feel our best.
Building a bridge between the extreme and the mainstream, The Rise of Superman explains how these athletes are using flow to do the impossible and how we can use this information to radically accelerate performance in our own lives.
At its core, this is a book about profound possibility; about what is actually possible for our species; about where—if anywhere—our limits lie.
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significant risk involved in every step of this process: Greg Berns, Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (Harvard Business Review Press, 2010). “Creativity is just connecting things”: Gary Wolf, “Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing,” Wired, April 2002. 145 the creative act: For links between creativity and dopamine, see: S. A. Chermahini and B. Hommel, “The (B)link Between Creativity and Dopamine: Spontaneous Eye Blink Rates Predict and Dissociate Divergent and
Applications,” in Principles and Practices of Stress Management, Third Edition, edited by Paul Lehrer, Robert Woolfolk, and Wesley Sime (Guilford Press, 2008), pp. 57–71. lifting weights was enough to increase strength: Guang Yue and K. J. Cole, “Strength Increases from the Motor Program: Comparison of Training with Maximal Voluntary and Imagined Muscle Contractions,” Journal of Neurophysiology 67, no. 5 (May 1992), pp. 1114–23. 176 further amplifying flow: Angie LeVan, “Seeing Is Believing:
often flawed. But spirituality isn’t their intention. Action and adventure athletes want to experience oneness because it enhances their performance—it makes them better athletes. This performance benefit emerges from a number of different places, but for starters, let’s return to where we began: enhanced decision making. Since flow is a fluid action state, making better decisions isn’t enough: we also have to act on those decisions. The problem is fear, which stands between us and all actions.
Zimbardo’s family was too poor for private care, so he was sent to the charity ward of the Willard Parker Hospital for Children with Contagious Diseases. In those days before antibiotics, 63 percent of all children with whooping cough or double pneumonia did not recover. Many a friend Zimbardo made in that hospital died in that hospital. Zimbardo found that the only way he could stop himself from sinking into despair was imagination—he kept imagining better possible futures. And to considerable
skills, which opened up new possibilities, which drove him forward still. “During his big-mountain competition days,” wrote Micah Abrams in one of that era’s preeminent ski magazines, Freeze, “McConkey would routinely point out lines that snaked through rock faces and across gut-churning cliffs to his fellow competitors. More often than not, he was met with blank stares or rolled eyes, to which he would respond empathically: ‘Dude, it’s totally doable!’ Then he would go do it, and then he would