The Art of Impossible

by Steven Kotler

  The habit of ferocity is the same philosophy applied to every aspect of your life. Of course, this application can take a while. Peter likes to say, “Figure out what you would die for, then live for it.” But really live for it—weeks, months, years. In psychological terms, what you’re trying to develop is an “action orientation”—though taken to the extreme.

  The good news: an action orientation produces more flow, primarily because it primes you to always be pushing on that challenge-skills balance. The bad news: nothing here happens quickly. The habit you’re hunting is hard work, yet without it, the impossible remains just that: the impossible.

  In different terms, William James opens the very first psychology textbook ever written with a discussion of habit.4 Why habit? Because James was convinced that human beings are habit machines and the easiest way to live an extraordinary life is to develop extraordinary habits. As the saying goes: “Sow an action and you reap a habit, sow a habit and you reap a character, sow a character and you reap a destiny.”

  Pretty much everything we’ve learned since has confirmed James’s suspicions, meaning his advice is fantastic overall, and doubly critical when applied to the habit of ferocity.

  It comes down to saved time.

  If your interest is extreme accomplishment, the habit of ferocity helps us maximize our twenty-four hours. To go back to my friend’s track team: Most of us are just regular runners—meaning we slow down when the challenge level rises. But once the habit of ferocity takes hold, you’re in before you know you’re in. Sure, maybe this only saves ten minutes per challenge, but that adds up over time. If you’re solving a few hard problems a day, this twenty-minute total becomes more than a hundred hours a year, which adds up to a five-day advantage over the competition.

  What’s more, developing the habit of ferocity also lowers cognitive load. We burn a lot of calories being anxious about the task ahead. But once we can automatize our lean-in instinct, we not only save time, we save energy. So you’ll not only gain five days over the competition, you’ll have more fuel in the tank with which to attack those days. Call it compound, compound interest.

  So how to develop the habit of ferocity? Follow the exercises in this book. Align all of your intrinsic motivators. Augment this stack with proper goal setting. Train all six levels of grit.

  And just keep on keeping on.

  So how do you measure progress? How to know you’ve truly developed the habit of ferocity? Easy. When someone asks what you’ve been working on and the list of accomplishments that tumbles out of your mouth surprises both of you—now you know.

  Part II

  Learning

  How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

  —ANNIE DILLARD1

  7

  The Ingredients of Impossible

  If you’re hunting high achievement, motivation is what gets you into the game, but learning is what keeps you there. Whether your interest is capital I Impossible, doing what’s never been done, or small i impossible, doing what you’ve never done, both paths demand that you develop actual expertise.

  In his classic book on decision-making, Sources of Power, psychologist Gary Klein makes exactly this point, identifying eight types of knowledge that are visible to experts yet invisible to everyone else:

  Patterns that novices don’t notice.

  Anomalies or events that didn’t happen or events that violate expectations.

  The big picture.

  The way things work.

  Opportunities and improvisations.

  Events that already happened (the past) or will happen (the future).

  Differences that are too small for novices to detect.

  Their own limitations.1

  Without all the knowledge on Klein’s list, the impossible remains impossible because the items on Klein’s list are literally the ingredients of impossible. They are the requisite knowledge base. But developing this base requires learning.

  A ton of learning.

  Lifelong learning is the technical term for this ton.

  Lifelong learning keeps the brain sharp, both preventing cognitive decline and training up memory. It also boosts confidence, communication skills, and career opportunities. These improvements are the reasons psychologists consider lifelong learning foundational to satisfaction and well-being.2 But for those interested in peak performance, there’s also flow to consider.

  If our goal is to stay in the challenge-skills sweet spot to maximize the time we spend in the zone, then we need to be constantly stretching ourselves to the edge of our abilities. This means we are constantly learning and improving and, as a result, constantly increasing the size of the next challenge. But to meet these greater challenges, we have to acquire even more skills and more knowledge. Lifelong learning is how we can keep pace with the moving target that is the challenge-skills sweet spot. It’s the bedrock foundation of a high-flow lifestyle.

  Yet, here’s where things get tricky. Learning is an invisible skill. For the most part, you’re bad until you’re better. Sure, you can make a conscious choice to dig into a particular information stream and have the grit to put in the necessary legwork, but the bulk of the process takes place out of sight. The major neurological mechanisms of learning—pattern recognition, memory consolidation, network construction—are, by design, beyond our ken.

  And this raises an important question: How do you improve what you cannot see?

  8

  Growth Mindsets and Truth Filters

  Pretty much anything you want to learn comes with basic requirements. No matter how big the desire, if you don’t own poles, boots, and bindings, then figuring out how to ski is a nonstarter. The same is true for the act of learning itself. If you’re interested in amplifying and accelerating this process, then you need to start with the right equipment: a growth mindset and a truth filter.

  Let’s take them one at a time.

  The first of these, the growth mindset, has already been covered. I’m bringing it up again as a reminder. Without a growth mindset, learning is all but impossible. Having a “fixed mindset” alters our underlying neurobiology, making the acquisition of new information exceptionally difficult. So before we can begin learning, we need to believe that learning is possible.1

  What’s more, a growth mindset saves you time. It means your brain is ready to absorb new knowledge, so you don’t waste hours spinning wheels. It’s also a critical way to limit negative self-talk, which, because it impacts our ability to find connections between ideas, is another barrier to learning. More crucial, a growth mindset helps you see mistakes as opportunities for improvement rather than condemnations of character, ensuring you’ll get farther faster, and with much less emotional turmoil along the way.

  While the right mindset prepares the brain for learning, the right “truth filter” helps us to assess and evaluate what is being learned. Nearly every peak performer I’ve met has developed some kind of truth filter. A great many have discovered theirs the hard way, through trial and error. My suggestion: shortcut the process. Consistent peak performance requires constant learning. So the best way to improve this portion of the process: learn to learn faster. Learn the meta-skills that surround the learning process and use them to amplify the invisible. And having a system in place for fast and accurate information evaluation does just that.

  My own truth filter was definitely developed the hard way. My background is journalism, which—alongside science and engineering—is one of the industries where a truth filter is how business gets done. In science and engineering, the scientific method serves this function. Newspapers and magazines, meanwhile, rely on a different metric for determining if a bit of information is true and can be published. If someone tells you something and you can get three other experts to confirm their statement—it’s a fact. You can publish without peril.

  But not so fast.

  In the early 2000s, a major magazine hired me to do a story about the neuroscience of mystica
l experiences. One of the first things I discovered was that scientists had made some serious progress in this arena. Experiences that were once seen as “mystical” were starting to become known as “biological,” and this seemed like big news. I wanted to know why more people didn’t know about this progress.

  I asked my main subject this question. The problem, he said, was that two other “researchers”—not respectable scientists, more like spiritual charlatans, in his opinion—had written best-selling books on the topic. These books had obscured the hard science with mystical speculation, and that was the end of the line. Scientific curiosity went in less metaphysical directions and research funding dried up.

  As a reporter receiving this information, I did what I was supposed to do: I asked three other experts. All three confirmed. They all gave me the same two names for the same two researchers who had written those same two best-selling books. Done deal. The article went to press.

  Afterward, my editor got an angry telephone from one of the researchers whose name I’d named. Turns out, this man was a thoroughly respected, extremely well-published, PhD-level neuropsychologist whose book on the science of mystical experiences was (a) not a best seller; (b) not spiritual at all; and (c) not even a book—it was a collection of peer-reviewed journal articles by a lot of different researchers.

  And he was right. Sure, I had an excuse. Four people had given me the exact same wrong fact—like, what are the odds? But the fault was mine: I didn’t do the extra legwork and instead had slandered a good scientist. My truth filter, even though it was an industry standard, wasn’t good enough.

  This is when I decided, if publication standards demand triplicate fact confirmation, I would always go for quintuplicate proof. I would always fact-check my facts with five experts. And that’s when I discovered something strange. Ask four people a question and you’ll likely get very similar answers. Sometimes this happens because you get the name of the next person to talk to from the last; sometimes it happens because fields have dominant trends. But if you take the time to ask a fifth person, chances are they’ll tell you something that conflicts with just about everything you’ve learned so far—which, in turn, usually requires another five discussions with five more experts to sort out. So that’s my truth filter. Five experts per question, and if those five disagree, then talk to five more.

  In Bold, to offer a different example, I described Elon Musk’s “first-principle thinking,” or what might be called a “reductionist truth filter.”2 The idea originates with Aristotle, who described “first principles” as “the first basis from which a thing is known,” but it’s easier to explain via example.

  When Musk was considering entering into the solar energy business, he knew one of the biggest bottlenecks was intermittent power and the resulting storage problem. Since the sun doesn’t shine after dark (intermittent power), we need to be able to save energy gathered during the day in batteries for deployment at night (storage). Yet instead of basing his solar go or no-go decision on what the market was doing or what his competitors were offering, Musk got online and visited the London Metal Exchange.3 What did he look up? The base price of nickel, cadmium, lithium, and such. How much do the fundamental component parts of a battery actually cost? He knew that technology itself always improves. No matter how expensive it is right now, later it’s always cheaper. So once Musk saw that these basic parts were selling for pennies on the dollar, he saw a ton of room for technological improvement. That’s when SolarCity was born. That’s first-principle thinking. It’s a truth filter, a system for information assessment that allows us to make better choices faster.

  Musk used this same approach when founding SpaceX, his rocket company. At the time, he wasn’t thinking of going into the space business, he was instead trying to figure out the cost of purchasing a rocket so he could run an experiment on the surface of Mars. After talking to a bunch of aerospace executives, he discovered the cost was sky high—up to $65 million.

  But, as he told Wired magazine, “So I said, OK, let’s look at first principles. What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was about 2 percent of the typical price.”4 Thus, SpaceX was born. And within a few years, building up from first-principle thinking, Musk had managed to slash the cost of launching a rocket by more than 90 percent.

  First-principle thinking, the scientific method, my five-expert rule—these are all truth filters. Feel free to borrow my rule or adopt Musk’s approach or come up with your own. What really matters is that you create a rigorous truth filter and put it to use. You can’t get to impossible on bad information.

  Plus, there are performance benefits to consider. Being able to trust the information you’re working with lowers anxiety, doubt, and cognitive load—which are three things that loosen our focus, hamper our ability to get into flow, and block learning itself. But with the right mindset to approach new information and a rigorous truth filter with which to judge that information, you’ve laid the necessary foundation for amplifying the invisible.

  9

  The ROI on Reading

  A growth mindset puts the brain in the ready condition for learning; a truth filter gives you a way to evaluate what you’ve learned. And this raises the next question, the question of learning materials: From which source, exactly, should we try to learn?

  This brings us to a hard truth: if you’re interested in learning, then you’re interested in books. Certainly, as an author, this might seem entirely self-serving, but hear me out. One of the most unsettling facts about my chosen profession in this digital age is how frequently people tell me they don’t read books anymore. Sometimes they read magazine articles. Often blogs. “A book is too much of a commitment” is one comment, frequently heard.

  This isn’t surprising. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, most adults spend an average of seven minutes a day reading for pleasure.1 A few years back, the Pew Research Center reported that nearly one-quarter of American adults hadn’t read a single book in the past year.2

  While it may not be surprising, it’s devastating to anyone interested in mastering the art of learning. To explain why, let’s start with the main response I hear: a book is too much of a commitment. Fair enough, but let’s talk about what you’re getting in return for that commitment. There’s a value proposition at work here. You give an author your time in exchange for their ideas. So let’s break down the exact nature of this trade. We’ll start with blogs.

  The average adult reading speed is about 250 words per minute.3 The average blog post is about 800 words long. This means that most of us read the average blog post in three and a half minutes. So what do you get for those minutes?

  Well, in my case, about three days’ worth of effort.

  For a typical blog, I usually spend about a day and a half researching a topic and an equal amount of time writing. The research mainly involves reading books and articles. I also talk to experts. If the topic is in my wheelhouse, usually one or two conversations suffice. Outside my wheelhouse kicks that up to three or four. The writing usually requires some more reading and an extra conversation or two and the hard work of putting words together in a straight line.

  That’s the value exchange. Your three and a half minutes in exchange for me digesting fifty to one hundred pages’ worth of material, then spending three to five hours talking about it, then spending another day and a half adding in my new ideas and restructuring the whole result into something to read.

  Now, let’s look at a long-form magazine article, the kind you would find in Wired or the Atlantic Monthly. These articles are usually about 5,000 words long, meaning it takes the average person twenty minutes to read. So, again, what do you get in return for your twenty minutes?

  In my case, you get about a month of research before the actual reporting starts, another six weeks
spent reporting (figure twenty-five conversations with experts and far more reading), and another six weeks of writing and editing. So, in return for you agreeing to give my words about twenty minutes of your time, you’re getting access to about four months of my brain power, labor, whatever.

  I think, if you look at it this way, you’ll see the average magazine article makes for a fairly good trade. Your time as a reader quintuples, but my time as an author has increased thirtyfold—and that’s a fairly incredible bargain. But a book is an entirely different ball game.

  Let’s take The Rise of Superman, my book on flow and the science of ultimate human performance. The book is around 75,000 words long, so it takes the average reader about five hours’ worth of effort. So what do you get for your five hours? In the case of Rise, about fifteen years’ worth of my life.

  Look at these figures listed below:

  Blogs: Three minutes gets you three days.

  Articles: Twenty minutes gets you four months.

  Books: Five hours gets you fifteen years.

  So why is it better to read books than blogs? Condensed knowledge. If you go on a blog bender and spend five hours reading my blogs, at three and a half minutes per blog, you’ll manage to slog through about eighty-six of them—thus you’re trading those five hours for 257 days’ worth of my effort.

  Meanwhile, if you had spent those same five hours reading Rise, you would have gotten 5,475 days. Books are the most radically condensed form of knowledge on the planet. Every hour you spend with Rise is actually about three years of my life. You just can’t beat numbers like that.