Quotes from Steven Kotler

Most people are so afraid of dying they never live.

Psychologist Robert Kegan,8 chair of adult development at Harvard, has a term for unzipping those costumes. He calls it "the subject-object shift" and argues that it's the single most important move we can make to accelerate personal growth.

Hallucinogens then do the same job as religion - they provide proof of unity, which is still the only known cure for fear of death.

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

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

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

creativity triggers flow; then flow enhances creativity.

By using the tanks to eliminate all distraction, entrain specific brainwaves, and regulate heart rate frequency, the SEALs are able to cut the time it takes to learn a foreign language from six months to six weeks.

Dado que lo imposible es siempre un camino arduo, los artistas de élite nunca dependen de una única fuente de combustible para mantenerse en el camino.

Our facial expressions are hardwired5 into our emotions: we can't have one without the other. Botox lessens depression because it prevents us from making sad faces. But it also dampens our connection to those around us because we feel empathy by mimicking each other's facial expressions.

La motivación es un mensaje. Es el cerebro diciendo: Oye, levántate del sofá, haz esta cosa, es superimportante para tu supervivencia. Para enviar este mensaje, el cerebro se apoya en cuatro componentes básicos: la neuroquímica y la neuroelectricidad, que son los mensajes propiamente dichos, y la neuroanatomía y las redes, que son los lugares donde se envían y reciben esos mensajes.

When people say that animal rescuers are crazy, what they really mean is that animal rescuers share a number of fundamental beliefs that makes them easy to marginalize. Among those is the belief that Rene Descartes was a jackass.

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.

When risk is a challenge, fear becomes a compass—literally pointing people in the direction they need to go next

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.

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.

When free from the confines of our normal identity, we are able to look at life, and the often repetitive stories we tell about it, with fresh eyes. Come Monday morning, we may still clamber back into the monkey suits of our everyday roles—parent, spouse, employee, boss, neighbor—but, by then, we know they're just costumes with zippers.

As children we are taught not to play with fire, not how to play with fire.

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.

The reasons there are so many clichés about universes inside of dewdrops is because there are universes inside of dewdrops.

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.

This is what the self-help books don't tell you. Fully alive and deeply committed is a risky business. Once you strip away the platitudes, a life of passion and purpose will always cost, as T. S. Eliot reminds us, "Not less than everything.

It was even odds that the thing I was the most afraid of didn't actually exist at all.

In an environment of turbulent change, as de Geus famously wrote: "The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.