Quotes from Steven Kotler

the concept of wabi sabi30—or the ability to find beauty in imperfection. If a vase is accidentally broken, for example, they don't throw the pieces away or try to patch it up to hide the accident. Instead, they take golden glue and painstakingly reassemble the vessel, so its unique flaws make the piece more beautiful.

secure base." Out of Bowlby's attachment theory.

Pitch black again. Like someone extinguished an angel.

Most of us arrive in our fifties feeling that the cage has gotten smaller. What's actually shrunk is our mindset. We're in a prison of our own making. Once we discover we can keep on learning later in life, that mindset shifts. The cage vanishes. This changes everything.

Some revolutions begin with a gunshot, others with a party. This

Those highlight moments forever seared in your memory: that too is group flow in action.

Flow may be the biggest neurochemical cocktail of all. The state appears to blend all six of the brain's major pleasure chemicals and may be one of the few times you get all six at once. This potent mix explains why people describe flow as their "favorite experience," while psychologists refer to it as "the source code of intrinsic motivation.

Rather than treating our psychology like the unquestioned operating system (or OS) of our entire lives, we can repurpose it to function more like a user interface (or UI)—that easy-to-use dashboard that sits atop all the other, more complex programs. By treating the mind like a dashboard, by treating different states of consciousness like apps to be judiciously deployed, we can bypass a lot of psychological storytelling and get results faster and, often, with less frustration.

No one can claim their particular vision of the divine as correct, if there are thousands of other 'visions' with which to compare it. And anyone who does try to claim the spotlight? Even a few decades ago, they could have started a cult. These days, they'll just get trolled online, then ignored.

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.

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.

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.

It's why action and adventure athletes routinely risk life and limb for their sports and why spiritual ascetics willingly trade creature comforts for a chance to glimpse God.

It's time to abandon the Greek idea that hubris is bad and face a simple fact — hubris is what the cosmos seems to want from us.

we start to see that what feels supernatural might just be super-natural: beyond our normal experience, for sure, but not beyond our actual capabilities.

Umwelt is the technical term34 for the sliver of the data stream that we normally apprehend. It's the reality our senses can perceive.

Happiness becomes untethered to income, because once we can meet our basic needs, the lure of all the stuff it took to meet them, begins to lose its luster. Once extrinsic drivers start to fade, intrinsic drivers take over.

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

Guilford also realized that divergent thinking wasn't entirely free wheeling: It had four core characteristics. Fluency, the ability to produce a great number of ideas in a short time-frame; flexibility, the ability to approach a problem from multiple angles; originality, the ability to produce novel ideas; elaboration, the ability to organize those ideas and execute on them.

The Greeks called that sudden understanding anamnesis. Literally, "the forgetting of the forgetting.

After all those neurochemicals are drained out, it takes a while for them to replenish so on the back end of flow state...I can barely string sentences together. I become stupid.

According to the official numbers, shelters take in somewhere between six million and eight million dogs and cats every year and euthanize about half of them. And this is an improvement. While it was back in the 1970s that the HSUS began trying to raise awareness

of the benefits of spaying and neutering, it wasn't until the 1990s that their catchy tag line, "Less born, less killed, less cruelty," really caught on. In the 1980s, shelters were euthanizing twenty million animals each year. But then birth rates dropped and admission rates dropped, and today, while the three to four million animals they kill annually is a slaughter, it's also a significant improvement over the massacre that came before.

There wasn't anything wrong with these dogs. I wanted to take them all home with me. The whole damn warehouse of misery. Just strap it to my back and get the fuck out of the way.