The Art of Impossible

by Steven Kotler

  Psychologist William James agreed. Over a hundred years ago, in an address to the American Philosophical Association titled “The Energies of Man,” James pointed out that:

  The existence of reservoirs of energy that habitually are not tapped is most familiar to us as the phenomenon of “second wind.” Ordinarily we stop when we meet the first effective layer, so to call it, of fatigue. We have then walked, played or worked “enough,” and desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction, on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a new level of energy. There may be layer after layer of this experience. A third and a fourth “wind” may supervene. Mental activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own—sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points.37

  The good news: there are easy ways to train this kind of grit. The bad news: it doesn’t feel very good along the way. In fact, the only way to train being your best when at your worst is to, well, you guessed it, train when you’re at your worst.

  In action sports, for example, one of the secrets to staying out of the hospital is learning to maintain balance under conditions of exhaustion. To train for this, at the tail end of every workout, I close with a high-intensity jump rope session (to ensure exhaustion), and then get on an Indo Board (a very dynamic balance board) for ten minutes. If the board touches the ground during that period, I start over. It’s a way of training balance under conditions of serious distress—a best-at-worst exercise that has definitely reduced my medical bills.

  I take a similar approach to training cognitive skills. When practicing a new speech, I always do one run-through from hell. I pick a time when I haven’t gotten enough sleep, have already worked for ten hours, and put in a heavy training session at the gym. After all that, I take my dogs into the backcountry, hike up a mountain, and give my speech along the way. If I can sound coherent scrambling up cliffs, I can sound coherent under any conditions.

  Or almost any conditions. When it comes to creativity, learning to be your best when conditions are at their worst requires an additional step. The reason is physiological. Bad conditions mean more stress, yet the more stress hormones, the less divergent thinking.38

  Tufts professor emeritus of psychiatry Keith Ablow solves this with a bit of cognitive reframing. “I maintain a very strong philosophical position that being burnt out is a good thing. When I’m exhausted because of work done for a worthy goal, my exhaustion is an offering. By seeing it this way, I’m reframing exhaustion from a negative to a positive, and this confers a certain immunity to exhaustion. It also dampens down fear, which can often be the by-product of exhaustion, but is a huge barrier to creativity. Just lowering anxiety a bit seems to free up hidden levels of innovative thinking.”39

  THE GRIT TO TRAIN YOUR WEAKNESSES

  In the last section, we saw that training to be at your best when you’re at your worst requires practicing under conditions of extreme duress. The kind of grit that results from this practice ensures that when those conditions show up in the real world, you’ve got the prior experience to control fear, maintain focus, and utilize your skills to the utmost. But this is only the first half of the equation.

  The second half involves training your weaknesses. Even if you practice being your best when you’re at your worst, there will always be a few weak links in that chain. And these potential fail points become actual fail points once the pressure gets turned up.

  There’s nothing surprising here. Our weaknesses tend to be the stuff we like the least and are least motivated to train. Unfortunately, in a crisis situation, as the Greek poet Archilochus pointed out so long ago: “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”40

  Once again, the issue is fear. The more fear in the equation, the fewer options at our disposal. In times of strife, the brain limits our choices to speed up our reaction times, the extreme example being fight or flight, where the situation is so dire that the brain gives us only three potential actions (freezing is the third).41 Yet, the same thing happens to a lesser degree under any high-stress conditions. And the responses we fall back upon under duress are the ones we’ve fully automatized—those habitual patterns we’ve executed over and over again.

  Thus, the solution: identify your biggest weaknesses and get to work. This is why skier Shane McConkey would consistently seek out the worst conditions on the mountain, why Arnold Schwarzenegger always began his weight lifting sessions targeting his weakest muscle group, and why Nobel laureate Richard Feynman decided, late in his life, to learn how to speak to women. Of course, Feynman decides to train this particular weakness by hanging out at strip clubs—but that’s a different story.42

  The bigger issue is that training our weaknesses can be trickier than it sounds. Cognitive biases impact perception, so getting a clear bead on ourselves can be difficult. One way around this problem: Ask for help. Ask friends to identify your weaknesses. You want them to be truthful but not go overboard. A list of your top three weaknesses is often enough to provide fodder for training, without the ego blow that comes from hearing everything that’s wrong with you. More important, your friends also come with built-in biases, so don’t just ask one. Ask three or four or five and look for correlations among their answers. If a weakness shows up on five different lists, that’s a pretty good place to start.

  Chances are the items on your list fall into three categories: physical, emotional, and cognitive. Lack of stamina is a physical weakness. A hair-trigger temper is an emotional issue. The inability to think at scale is a cognitive problem. But all three can’t be approached in the same way.

  The best way to train up physical and emotional weaknesses is head-on, but slowly. Don’t expect you’ll solve these problems in a week or two. Old habits die hard. Learn to love slow progress. Learn to forgive yourself for the inevitable backsliding.

  And, of course, expect to be uncomfortable along the way.

  Tackling our cognitive weaknesses is perhaps the more difficult challenge, but Josh Waitzkin has developed a method that gets consistently good results. He suggests reviewing the past three months of your life and asking: “What did I believe three months ago that I know is not true today?” Then follow that up with two key questions: “Why did I believe that? What kind of thinking error did I commit to arrive at that erroneous conclusion?”

  The good news is that these sorts of thinking errors tend to be categorical. We have blind spots that lend our mistakes a certain consistency. So weaknesses tend to have root causes. By training the root causes, you can erase whole categories of weakness at once.

  THE GRIT TO RECOVER

  There’s a dark side to all this grit: exhaustion and overwhelm. Burnout isn’t just extreme stress; it’s peak performance gone off the rails.

  Burnout is identified by three symptoms: exhaustion, depression, and cynicism.43 It is the by-product of repeated and prolonged stress. Not the result of working long hours, but rather the result of working long hours under specific conditions: high risk, a lack of sense of control, a misalignment of passion and purpose, and long and uncertain gaps between effort and reward. Unfortunately, these are all conditions that arise during our pursuit of high, hard goals.

  This is why it’s time to get gritty about recovery.

  And grit tends to be required. It’s hard for peak performers to relax. If momentum matters most, sitting still feels like laziness. And the more aligned with passion and purpose we become, the more “wasteful” time off starts to feel. Yet, since burnout leads to significant decline in cognitive function—making i
t one of the most common enemies of sustained peak performance—you absolutely have to get gritty about recovery.

  And not all recovery strategies are the same.

  The main choices are passive and active. Passive recovery is TV and a beer—sound familiar?

  Unfortunately, alcohol disrupts sleep, and TV keeps the brain active in an unusual way.44 Real recovery requires shifting brain waves into the alpha range. And while TV shuts down your higher cortical centers—which is good for recovery—those constantly shifting images overstimulate the visual system, pulling the brain right out of alpha and into beta—which is the brainwave signature of awake and alert.45

  Active recovery is the opposite. It ensures that the brain stays off and the body can mend. By flushing stress hormones from the system and shifting brain waves into alpha (first), then delta (later), active recovery practices allow us to reset. Sure, peak performers take this to considerable extremes: hyperbaric chambers, sensory deprivation tanks, nutritional specialists micro-counting caloric intake. These are useful tools, and go this route if interested, but the research shows you can get gritty about recovery in three simpler steps.

  First, protect your sleep. Deep delta-wave sleep is critical for recovery and for learning—it’s when memory consolidation takes place.46 You need a dark room, cold temperatures, and no screens. Our cell phone’s glow is in the same frequency range as daylight, and this messes with the brain’s ability to shut down completely.

  And shut the cell phone down for a while. Most people need seven to eight hours of sleep a night, but figure out what’s optimal for you, then make sure you consistently get what you need.

  Second, put an active recovery protocol into place. Body work, restorative yoga, Tai Chi, long walks in the woods (what people have begun calling, much to my chagrin, “nature-bathing”), Epsom salt baths, saunas, and hot tub soaks are the traditional methods. My personal preference is an infrared sauna. I try to do three sessions a week, forty-five minutes each. In the sauna, I split my time between reading a book and practicing mindfulness. Saunas lower cortisol. When coupled to the stress reduction produced by mindfulness, this one-two punch hyper-accelerates recovery.

  Third, total resets matter. Everybody has a point of no return. If your work is consistently subpar and frustration levels are growing, it’s time to step away for a few days. For me, this is once every ten to twelve weeks. My go-to break is a solitary two-day ski trip. I’ll read books, slide down snow, and try to talk to no one. But that’s me. Figure out what’s you.

  Most important, stay in front of this problem. Burnout costs you both motivation and momentum. In the short run, because chronic stress interferes with cognitive function, it’ll have you producing poor-quality work that needs to be redone. In the long run, because burnout has permanent neurological effects on everything from problem-solving to memory to emotional regulation, it can completely derail a quest for the impossible.47 So, while inserting mandatory time-outs into your schedule can feel like a waste of time, it’s nothing compared to the time you’ll waste once burnout sets in. If you get gritty about recovery sooner rather than later, you’ll go farther faster as a result.

  6

  The Habit of Ferocity

  Peter Diamandis is busy.1 My good friend and frequent writing partner (Abundance, Bold, and The Future Is Faster Than You Think) is the founder of the XPRIZE Foundation, the cofounder of Singularity University, and the entrepreneurial force behind twenty-two different companies. In 2014, Fortune put him on their list of “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” and he remains the only person I know who has ever appeared on a stamp. Yet, at the time we got to know each other, all of this was still to come.

  Peter and I met in 1999, in the early days of our careers. We met because I wrote one of the first major articles on the XPRIZE, which was both Peter’s mad attempt to open the space frontier and a $10 million purse for the first person to build and fly a spaceship into low-earth orbit twice in two weeks.

  A reusable spaceship was the very thing NASA couldn’t build, but it remained a tantalizing possibility. If we didn’t burn up our rockets every time we left the planet, then the cost of getting off-world would plummet. It was, Peter felt, the necessary first step to opening the space frontier.

  I spent six months reporting the story, interviewing dozens of experts along the way. Everybody agreed: Peter was out of his mind. A reusable spaceship was never gonna happen. NASA said it would cost billions of dollars and require tens of thousands of engineers. All of the major aerospace manufacturers reiterated NASA’s point, only in far more colorful language. Winning the XPRIZE, according to all of the world’s leading experts, was absolutely impossible.

  Not for long.

  Less than a decade later, maverick aerospace designer Burt Rutan launched SpaceShipOne into low-earth orbit. Two weeks later, he did it again. Did he have ten thousand engineers aiding his cause? Nope. He had around thirty. Did it cost billions of dollars? Nah. Twenty-five million dollars was the actual price tag. The impossible had become possible and because Peter and I had become good friends along the way, I got to watch the feat, up close and in person.

  So what does impossible really look like?

  It looks familiar.

  Here’s how Peter helped unlock the space frontier: He woke up, typed at his computer for a while, then had breakfast. Then he went someplace and had a conversation, then he went someplace else and had another conversation, then he opened up his computer and punched the keys again. Eventually, he had lunch. After lunch he went somewhere else and had another conversation, then he talked on the phone a while, then he punched more keys on the computer. There were airplane rides and trips to the gym. Every now and again, he grabbed a shower, got some sleep, or went to the bathroom. And repeat. And repeat.

  This is what pulling off the impossible looks like up close. But not just for Peter—for just about everyone.

  Excellence always has a cost. On a daily basis, if your goal is greatness, then you’re going to put just about every available hour toward that goal. From this perspective, it takes the same amount of time and energy to be the very best dry cleaner in Cleveland, Ohio, as it does to unlock the space frontier. Of course it does. Excellence, no matter what level, will always take everything we’ve got.

  So what really sets impossible stalkers apart?

  As far as I can tell, three core characteristics. The first is the size of the original vision. It’s hard to achieve the amazing by accident. You have to dream big. Peter wanted to go into space. He wanted other people to come along for the ride. His dream was unreasonable and irrational, but, as Peter loves to say, “The day before something’s truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”

  And here, we’ve already taken care of business. If you’ve turned curiosity into passion and passion into purpose and used that information to sculpt a massively transformative purpose, you’re already dangerous. If you’re building on that foundation by walking the path to mastery, just keep walking—as that’s the path toward impossible.

  The second characteristic is the amount of flow in the equation. Impossible will always be a lengthy journey. Flow is one of the key ingredients in long-term perseverance. The amount of flow an activity produces directly equates to our willingness to pursue it for years on end. But here, too, you’re covered. All the steps in this primer have been built around flow’s triggers, so just following along should increase the time you spend in state (and more on this later).

  The third characteristic shared by impossible slayers is what I’ve come to call the “habit of ferocity.” This is the ability to immediately and automatically rise to any challenge. Whenever peak performers encounter life’s difficulties, they instinctively lean in. In fact, they lean in before they can even think about not leaning in. In the face of life’s obstacles, the best of the best don’t have to worry about staying the course. So well arranged is their motivational stack and so well trained are their grit reflexes that rising to a
challenge happens without their even noticing.

  This matters for a couple of reasons.

  First, there’s our familiar problem: we don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we sink to the level of our training. Anxiety, inside an fMRI, looks a little like OCD.2 A small network, a tight thought loop, the brain running circles around itself, with no way to stop and no new solutions. On any path to peak performance, if you don’t develop the habit of ferocity—that is, automatize the motivation triad of drive, goals, and grit—sooner or later you’ll trip over your own fear.

  It’s basic biology.

  Second, the obvious: impossible is not easy. But the habit of ferocity allows you to take all the energy that comes from suffering and turn it into fuel. My best friend, Michael Wharton, ran track in high school.3 He had a great coach with unusual methods. When they went out for long runs, whenever they encountered a hill, the team had to shift their focus entirely to core running skills: long strides, strong arms, high kicks. Note the focus wasn’t on speed or acceleration, it was on the perfect technique that—over time—results in speed and acceleration.

  At first, of course, this sucked. It made for incredibly grueling workouts. But, pretty soon, they got used to it. Then it became a challenge they could lean into. Then their skill increased, their speed increased, and suddenly, uphill sprints were part of the program.

  After a little while, the team didn’t even notice. A hill would present itself and before any of them had even realized what they were doing, they were halfway up the hill and climbing fast. This was a distinct advantage. When most runners encounter hills, everyone except the uber-elite slows down. It’s an automatic response, the brain trying to conserve energy. The uber-elite, meanwhile, try to keep their pace the same. But Michael’s team learned to accelerate in the face of the challenge—this is a ferocious habit.