Ep. 48 - The Secret to Disrupting Human Performance - with Steven Kotler

This week we’re kicking off the disruption series. We’re going to discover how incredible people disrupt their lives, their industries, and the world to create a powerful impact.

 

Today’s guest, Steven Kotler, is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the Co-Founder / Director of Research for the Flow Genome Project.

 

He is one of the world’s leading experts on ultimate human performance and he has spent his entire career exploring how people do the impossible.

 

• Rise of Superman is about how action and adventure sports athletes reinvent kinesthetic possibility.

 

• Abundance and Bold are about the entrepreneurs who have built the fastest and largest companies in the shortest amount of time.

 

• Small Furry Prayer is about the cutting edge of empathy and altruism.

• Stealing Fire (Steven’s newest book) is about a $4 trillion underground movement to harness alternate states of consciousness to massively uplevel performance.

 

 

Through years of research, Steven has discovered that the secret to disrupting human performance is the same across the board: altered states of consciousness. This includes flow states, meditative states, psychedelic states, and more.

 

“One of the most well-established facts in the whole history of psychology is that altered states are incredibly good for us, and it’s not common knowledge.”

 

If you’re not familiar, altered states of consciousness can be defined as a specific bandwidth of non-ordinary states of consciousness where...

• our normal sense of self vanishes
• our normal sense of time disappears
• we are freed from the drudgery of daily life
• we get a sense of effortless motivation
• and we can tap into a level of inspiration information that is normally unavailable.

 

In Stealing Fire, Steven uses the Greek term ecstasis to refer to this phenomenon and bypass the negative stigma placed upon altered states of consciousness. He also discusses the four forces accelerating this movement towards the upper possibility space of human experience, which he calls the Four Forces for Ecstasy:

1. Psychology
2. Neurobiology
3. Pharmacology
4. Technology

 

Altered states of consciousness aren’t just for team building at Burning Man. They can be directly applied to your life and workspace.

• After rolling out mindfulness training at Aetna, they gained $3,000 per employee in productivity and saved $2,000 per employee in healthcare costs.
• At Patagonia, the Founder has a “let my people go surfing” policy to encourage flow.
• Standing in a power pose for a few minutes can change your physiology and empower you.
• We get more flow any time the challenge at hand slightly exceeds our skillset.
• Physical, emotional, psychological, and social risk can all focus our attention.

 

We are all created with the potential to do more than we could possibly ask for or possibly imagine. Steven’s research is a gift that will help us take a few steps towards disrupting what is possible. If you’re interested in exploring the fringes of human possibility, you can’t do better than Steven’s books.

 

These are a few of my favorites…

• BOLD – This book challenged me to have a bigger vision for my life and the impact I'm capable of having. I still don't believe I am thinking boldly enough.
  
  
• Abundance – Beyond loving the word, this book woke me up to the fact that NOW is the best time in human history to create and innovate amazing solutions to today's problems and tomorrow's challenges. Contrary to past experience or what one may have been led to believe, the resources are abundantly available.
  
  
• Rise of Superman – We all have the ability to perform at super optimized levels. We refer to it as being "in the zone." God created us with an amazing organ - the brain - and if we put ourselves in the right environment it is amazing what each of us is capable of doing.

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Don’t be a podcast junkie…

Resources:

• Pre-Order Stealing Fire through StealingFireBook.com to receive some awesome bonuses
• Connect with Steven on Twitter @steven_kotler
• Discover your Flow Profile for free at FlowGenomeProject.com

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