Quotes from Steven Kotler

Tell me what you value and I might believe you," management guru Peter Drucker once said, "but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I'll show you what you really value." So

Tell me what you value and I might believe you," management guru Peter Drucker once said, "but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I'll show you what you really value.

If you're interested in mastery," says University of Cambridge, England, neuropsychologist Barbara Sahakian, "you have to learn this lesson. 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.

We are the ones that we've been waiting for. — ALICE WALKER

It was clear from talking to them, that what kept them motivated was the quality of the experience they felt when they were involved with the activity. The feeling didn't come when they were relaxing, when they were taking drugs or alcohol, or when they were consuming the expensive privileges of wealth. Rather, it often involved painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person's capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.

Creatives fail and the really good ones fail often.

Flow is more than an optimal state of consciousness—one where we feel our best and perform our best—it also appears to be the only practical answer to the question: What is the meaning of life? Flow is what makes life worth living.

In Lovelock's view the earth was a 'super-organism,' a cybernetic feedback system that 'seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.' At the suggestion of his neighbor, author and screenwriter William Goldman, he called the system Gaia after the ancient Greek Earth goddess.

The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.

What all this means is that learning the impossible is possible augments our ability to see ourselves doing the impossible, which triggers a systemic change in the body and the brain, which closes the gap between fantasy and reality. It also makes us significantly more flow prone.

It was a silly time to try to make a living out of words, but it was a silly time in general.

Where–if anywhere–do our actual limits lie?

The second is trickier: the person who knows what to do next is the leader. We're entirely nonhierarchical in that way. But in a combat environment, when split seconds make all the difference, there's no time for second-guessing. When someone steps up to become the new leader, everyone, immediately, automatically, moves with him. It's the only way we win.

the failure of language." "It's a creative destruction. Out of that failure comes culture. Out of culture comes desire. Out of desire come products.

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.