The Art of Impossible Read online

  And this leads us to the next question: What’s the biological formula for the impossible?

  The answer is flow.

  Flow is defined as “an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.”10 It is the state created by evolution to enable peak performance. This is why, in every domain, whenever the impossible becomes possible, flow always plays a starring role. The neurobiology of flow is the mechanism beneath the art of impossible.

  Of course, describing flow as an “optimal state of consciousness” doesn’t get us very far. More specifically, the term refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption when you get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Action and awareness merge. Your sense of self vanishes. Time passes strangely. And performance—performance just soars.

  Flow’s impact on both our physical and our mental abilities is considerable.11 On the physical side, strength, endurance, and muscle reaction times all significantly increase while our sense of pain, exertion, and exhaustion all significantly decrease.

  Yet the bigger impacts are cognitive. Motivation and productivity, creativity and innovation, learning and memory, empathy and environmental awareness, and cooperation and collaboration all skyrocket—in some studies as high as 500 percent above baseline.

  And this brings us to our final question: Why would evolution create a state of consciousness that amplifies all of these particular skills?

  Evolution shaped the brain to enable survival. But evolution itself is driven forward by the availability of resources. Scarcity of resources is always the largest threat to our survival, making it the largest driver of evolution. And there are only two possible responses to this threat. You can fight over dwindling resources, or you can go exploring, get creative, innovative, and cooperative, and make new resources.

  This is what explains the skills that flow amplifies. This wide variety turns out to be everything you need to fight, flee, explore, or innovate. And since impossible is a form of extreme innovation, this explains why the state is always present when the impossible becomes possible. It’s tautological. Flow is to extreme innovation what oxygen is to breathing—simply the biology of how it gets done.

  Yet, this is a story I’ve explored elsewhere.

  And while this primer will definitely expand on that work, its main purpose is to unpack an equally crucial idea: when it comes to tackling the impossible, flow is necessary but not sufficient.

  Pulling off the impossible—or, for that matter, significantly leveling up your own game—absolutely requires flow, but it also requires training up many of the same skills that flow amplifies: motivation, learning, and creativity. This may seem confusing, even contradictory, but the road toward impossible is long, and there will be lengthy stretches that we need to navigate without flow. What’s more, to handle the massive amplification the state provides, we need an exceptionally stable foundation. A car that hits a wall at ten miles per hour will dent a fender. Hit that same wall at a hundred miles per hour, and it’s a hell of a lot more than a fender that’s dented. The same is true for flow.

  For these reasons and more, we’re going to spend the rest of this book exploring a quartet of cognitive abilities—motivation, learning, creativity, and flow. We’ll come to understand why these skills are so crucial to peak performance. We’ll see how they work in the brain and the body. And we’ll use this information to significantly accelerate ourselves down the path toward impossible. But before we do any of this, it’s worth considering these same skills from a slightly more philosophical perspective.

  THE HABIT OF INFERIORITY

  The philosopher James Carse uses the terms “finite games” and “infinite games” to describe the main ways we live and play here on Earth.12 A finite game is just that—finite. It has a finite number of options and players, clearly defined winners and losers, and an established set of rules. This is chess or checkers, for sure, but it’s also politics, sports, and war.

  Infinite games are the opposite. They have no clear winners or losers, no established time frame for play, and no fixed rules. In infinite games, the field of play is mutable, the number of participants keeps changing, and the only goal is to keep on playing. Art, science, and love are infinite games. Most important: so is peak performance.

  Peak performance isn’t something we win. There are no fixed rules, no established time frame for the contest, and the field of play is as big or as small as you choose to live your life. Instead, peak performance is an infinite game—but not quite.

  Peak performance is an unusual kind of infinite game. It may be unwinnable, but you can definitely lose. The brilliant Harvard psychologist William James explained it like this: “The human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in coordination, in power of inhibition and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject—but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us, it is only an inveterate habit—the habit of inferiority to our full self—that is bad.”13

  James’s point is that the reason we’re not living up to our potential is that we’re not in the habit of living up to our potential. We’ve automatized the wrong processes. We’re playing the wrong game. And it’s bad.

  James penned those words in the late 1800s, in the very first psychological textbook ever published. The more modern version belongs to the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and the opening lines of the 2002 film Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: “When you’re young, your potential is infinite. You might do anything, really. You might be Einstein. You might be DiMaggio. Then you get to an age when what you might be gives way to what you have been. You weren’t Einstein. You weren’t anything. That’s a bad moment.”14

  What do we know for sure?

  You get one shot at this life, and you’re going to spend one-third of it asleep. So what do you choose to do with the remaining two-thirds? That is the only question that matters.

  Does this mean you lose the infinite game if you’re not a paradigm-shifting physicist or a record-breaking ballplayer? No. It means you lose by not trying to play full out, by not trying to do the impossible—whatever that is for you.

  We are all capable of so much more than we know. This is the main lesson a lifetime in peak performance has taught me. Each of us, right here, right now, contains the possibility of extraordinary. Yet, this extraordinary capability is an emergent property, one that only arises when we push ourselves toward the edge of our abilities. Far beyond our comfort zone, that’s where we find out who we are and what we can be. In other words, the only real way to discover if you are capable of pulling off the impossible—whatever that is for you—is by attempting to pull off the impossible.

  This is another reason why peak performance is an infinite game. But it’s also why the quartet of skills at the heart of this book matters so much. Motivation is what gets you into this game; learning is what helps you continue to play; creativity is how you steer; and flow is how you turbo-boost the results beyond all rational standards and reasonable expectations. That, my friends, is the real art of impossible.

  Welcome to the infinite game.

  Part I

  Motivation

  If this life not be a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatrics from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we . . . are needed to redeem.

  —WILLIAM JAMES1

  1

  Motivation Decoded

  The central premise of this book is that impossible has a formula. Whenever we see the impossible become possible, we are witnessing the end result of a quartet of skills—motivation, learning, creativity, and flow—expertly appli
ed and significantly amplified.

  The goal of this book is to use science to decipher these skills. We want to get at the basic biological mechanisms that make each of them run, then use what we learn to make them run better—which is really what I mean by getting our biology to work for us rather than against us.

  In practice, we are going to work our way through four main sections, exploring motivation, learning, creativity, and flow in turn. In each section, I’m going to break down what science can tell us about how these skills work in the brain and body, then, through a series of exercises, teach you the best ways to apply this information in your own life.

  The place to begin is with motivation, which is what starts us down the path of peak performance. Yet, motivation, as psychologists use the term, is actually a catch-all for three subsets of skills: drive, grit, and goals.

  Drive, the subject of the next two chapters, refers to powerful emotional motivators such as curiosity, passion, and purpose. These are feelings that drive behavior automatically.1 This is the big deal. When most people think about motivation, they’re actually thinking about persistence—meaning the stuff we need to keep going once our drive has left us. Consider the simplest drive: curiosity. When we’re curious about a subject, doing the hard work to learn more about that subject doesn’t feel like hard work. It requires effort, for certain, but it feels like play. And when work becomes play, that’s one way to know for sure: Now, you’re playing the infinite game.

  Goals, the topic of chapter 4, are about figuring out exactly where we’re actually trying to go. For a host of neurobiological reasons that will be explored later, when we know where we’re trying to go, we get there much more quickly. Since the road to impossible is long by definition, we’ll need this boost in acceleration to achieve our mission.

  Grit, the subject of chapter 5, is what most people think of when they think of motivation. It’s persistence, determination, and fortitude—the ability to continue with the journey no matter the difficulty involved.

  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

  For now, our quest starts with drive. And the reason is simple: there’s really no other option.

  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DRIVE

  Stalking the impossible demands digging deep on a daily basis. Laotzu wasn’t wrong: the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.2 But it’s still a journey of a thousand miles. Uphill, in the dark, both ways.

  Since impossible is always an arduous trek, elite-level performers never rely on a single source of fuel to sustain them along the way. And this is true for both physical fuel and psychological fuel.

  On the physical side, even though this is not the point of this book, elite performers always try to get enough sleep and exercise and maintain proper hydration and nutrition. They “stack”—that is, cultivate, amplify, and align—the foundational requirements for producing physical energy.

  Equally crucial, elite performers stack psychological fuel sources. They cultivate and align drivers such as curiosity, passion, and purpose. By stacking these sources of mental energy, they ensure on-demand access to all of life’s most potent emotional fuels.

  So what drives us?

  One way to think about this question is from an evolutionary perspective. We know that scarcity drives evolution. Any problem regularly encountered on a quest to gather resources is a problem that evolution already spent millions of years driving us to solve.

  Think of evolution as a video game with two main levels. To win on level one, a player must obtain more resources—food, water, shelter, mates, and so on—than the other players in the game. On level two, the player must turn those resources into children and help those children survive, either by having so many that there’s no way predators can eat them all (which is what fish do), or by keeping those children safe and teaching them how to obtain resources for themselves (which is the human method).

  At each level, resource acquisition is key.

  As discussed, only two strategies are available. Either you fight over dwindling resources, or you get creative and make more resources. Thus, when we talk about drive from an evolutionary perspective, what we’re really talking about are the psychological fuels that energize behaviors that best solve resource scarcity: fight/flee and explore/innovate.

  Fear is a psychological driver because it drives us to fight over resources, to flee and avoid becoming someone else’s resources, or to pack up the family and sail across an ocean in a quest to, you guessed it, find more resources. Curiosity is another driver because it makes us wonder if there might be more resources across that ocean. Passion drives us to master the skills required to successfully sail that ocean. Goals drive us because they tell us what resources we’re trying to find on the other side of that ocean and the reason we’re trying to find them.

  And this list goes on.

  To make things more manageable, scientists split our psychological drivers into two categories: extrinsic and intrinsic.3 Extrinsic drivers are rewards that are external to ourselves. These are things like money, fame, and sex, and they’re definitely potent. Money translates into food, clothing, and shelter, so the brain treats our desire for it as a basic survival need. Fame might seem trivial, but famous people often have significantly more access to resources—food, water, shelter, mates, and so on—so we’re wired to want it. And sex is the only way for humans to win evolution’s game of survival, which is why sex sells and the bars are always packed on Friday night.

  Intrinsic drivers are the opposite. These are psychological and emotional forces such as curiosity, passion, meaning, and purpose. The pleasure of mastery, which we feel as the sensation of a job well done, is another potent example. Autonomy, the desire to be in charge of one’s own life, is yet another.

  For most of the last century, researchers believed that extrinsic drivers were the more powerful of the pair, but this shifted over the past few decades, as intrinsic drivers have become better understood. What we now know is that there’s a motivational hierarchy at work. External drivers are fantastic, but only until we feel safe and secure—meaning that we have enough money to pay for food, clothing, and shelter and have a little left over for fun. In US dollars and today’s economy, the research shows that this is somewhere around $75,000 a year.4 Measure happiness levels among Americans, as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman discovered, and they rise in direct proportion to income, but only until we earn about $75,000 a year. After that point, they start to diverge wildly. 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. In business, we see this played out in how companies try to motivate employees. Once people feel fairly compensated for their time—meaning once that number starts to creep over $75,000 a year—big raises and annual bonuses won’t actually improve their productivity or performance. After that basic-needs line is crossed, employees want intrinsic rewards. They want to be in control of their own time (autonomy), they want to work on projects that interest them (curiosity/passion), and they want to work on projects that matter (meaning and purpose).

  This, too, is evolution at work. It’s not that evolution ever lets us stop playing the “get more resources” game, it’s that our strategy evolves. Once baseline needs are met, you can devote yourself to ways to get, well, you guessed it, seriously more resources—for yourself, for your family, for your tribe, for your species. As high-minded as something like “meaning and purpose” might seem as a driver, this is actually evolution’s way of saying: Okay, you’ve got enough resources for yourself and your family. Now it’s time to help your tribe or your species get more. This is also why, in the brain, there’s really not much difference between drivers. Intrinsic drivers, extrinsic drivers, it doesn’t matter. In the end, like so much of life, it all comes down to neurochemistry.

  THE NEUROCHEMISTRY OF REWARD

  Motivation
is message. It’s the brain saying: Hey, get off the couch, do this thing, it’s super important to your survival. In order to send this message, the brain relies on four basic components: neurochemistry and neuroelectricity, which are the messages themselves, and neuroanatomy and networks, which are the places those messages are sent from and received.

  The messages themselves are basic.5 In the brain, electrical signals have only one meaning: do more of what you’re doing.

  If enough electricity pours into a neuron, that neuron fires, sending that electricity onward to the next neuron. If enough electricity pours into that next neuron, it fires, too. It’s like water in a bucket on a waterwheel. Pour enough water into a bucket, and sooner or later it spills into the next bucket, and the next. It’s that mechanical.

  Chemical signals are similarly simple, though they can have one of two meanings: do more of what you’re doing, or do less of what you’re been doing.

  Yet, neurochemicals aren’t intelligent. When we say neurochemicals carry messages—do more of this or do less of that—they themselves are the messages. On the inside of synapses, which is the little gap between neurons where neurochemicals do their jobs, there are receptors. Each receptor has a particular geometric shape. Each neurochemical has a particular geometric shape. Either these shapes line up—so the round neurochemical blob fits inside the round neurochemical blob hole—or they don’t. If the round key of the neurochemical dopamine fits inside the round lock of a dopamine receptor, then the message gets sent.

  Neuroanatomy and networks, meanwhile, are the places those messages are sent from and received, the where in the brain something is taking place.6

  Neuroanatomy describes specific brain structures: the insula or the medial prefrontal cortex. But, in the brain, structures are designed to perform specific functions. The medial prefrontal cortex, for example, aids in decision-making and the retrieval of long-term memories.7 So, if a particular “do more” message arrives in the medial prefrontal cortex, the result is more, or sometimes more finely tuned, decision-making and long-term memory retrieval.