Quotes from Steven Kotler

Buckminster Fuller said don't try to change human behavior. It's s a waste of time. Evolution doesn't mess around; the patterns are too deep. Fuller said go after the tools. Better tools lead to better people. Arctic doesn't develop products. We may cultivate them, occasionally, in our own particular way, but our business is change. Significant change.

Flirting has to be the original form of guerrilla marketing, from back before markets even existed.

Rilke knew what was up. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, one distant day, live right into the answer. What's truer than that...

Emoticons as a new class of oversignifying precision grammar.

You can't scrub everything," says Lorenzo. "Information gets what it wants, and it wants to be free.

Neurons that fire together wire together.

The happiest people on earth worked hard for their fulfillment. They didn't just have the most peak experiences, they had devoted their lives to having these experiences, often

Not only is the distracted present a miserable place to be, it's also the worst kind of self-handicapping. Study after study shows that we're terrible multitaskers. By trying to improve performance by being everywhere and everywhen, we end up nowhere and never. The sad truth is that our lives are pulling us in every direction save the one where we're most effective.

We pay to watch, read, or be in the presence of a flow experience. If quantified, you'd find it's a major chunk of the GDP.

Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code. It's wired into every stage of meaning-making, from basic emotions all the way up to abstract thought. Once you can speak a language, you can feel in that language. It's automatic. It creates empathy.

Temple University sports psychologist Michael Sachs, who made an extensive study of these states, summed this up nicely: "Every gold medal or world championship that's ever been won, most likely, we now know, there's a flow state behind the victory.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,"24 William Blake

After three decades of research, Zimbardo found that the healthiest, happiest, highest performers blend the best of both worlds. The optimal time perspective combines the energy, joy, and openness of Presents, with the strength, fortitude, and long-term vision of the Futures.

If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me, I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities. . . . I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures.

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.

there's a difference between when this happens in an artist's studio or on the tennis court versus inside the barrel of a fifty-foot wave. When you tap into that much force while pushing the absolute limits of human performance, that's more than just an imaginative breakthrough—that's bending reality to your will.

The United States is in a tough spot.

This isn't just your mind paying more attention—suddenly your entire body is paying attention. When this happens, it's outside our conscious capabilities. There are no words. Our language becomes that of the river. All the features of the river speak to you and you to them through motion. There is tension, threat, there is joy and release, and overall, a deep, deep sense of flow. You are literally part of the flow of the world.

listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go. — E. E. CUMMINGS

Ecstatic technology isn't limited to silicon chips and display screens. As John Lilly's early research established, it's the knowledge of how to tweak the knobs and levers in our brain. When we get it right, it produces those invaluable sensations of selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness.

Creativity has a brain wave signature as well: alpha waves pulsing out of the brain's right hemisphere.

He defined the state as "being so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.

Here, we want to break that mission statement down into smaller chunks, dividing up the impossible into a long series of difficult but doable goals that, if accomplished, render said impossible much more probable.