The Art of Impossible

by Steven Kotler

  Now that you have this list, it’s time to hunt for intersections. At the beginning of this book, we identified places where our core passions intersected our core purposes, then used this information to derive massively transformative purposes, big goals, and clear goals. Here, we want to further this process by finding places where our strengths align with our motivational stack.

  Say your MTP is to “end world hunger.” One of your high, hard goals is to advance the field of vertical farming. Then, in the list of clear goals you create on a daily basis, lean on your strengths. If you’re strong in people skills like teamwork, social intelligence, and leadership—well, community activism is going to be a better fit than a quiet life in a research lab.

  Once you’ve identified a core strength that serves your MTP, Seligman recommends you try to use that strength once a week, in a new way and in an environment that matters—with family, for example, or at work.5 Spend two to three months training up one strength (that is, trying it out in a new way in a new situation at least once a week) before moving on to another. Over the course of a year, you’ll find places where multiple strengths directly intersect with your MTP. That’s the real goal. If you can work toward your life’s purpose by utilizing core strengths, you’ll end up significantly increasing the amount of flow in your life. Once again, you’ll go farther faster.

  And this answers our question, What should I learn? Learn to sharpen your sword. Learn to use your strengths to advance your cause. If what we’re learning completely aligns with who we are, we speed the plow. The work gets done faster, and you’ll reap a more bountiful harvest in the end.

  13

  The 80/20 of Emotional Intelligence

  At the center of this book is the question of extreme innovation. What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take to do what’s never been done? Or, with less hyperbole, what does it take to sustain high levels of peak performance long enough to accomplish a series of high, hard goals?

  One answer comes from University of Michigan psychologist Chris Peterson, who believes you can sum up most of the lessons of positive psychology in a single phrase: “Other people matter.”1 Peterson is talking about the fact that, if you’re interested in happiness, well-being, and overall life satisfaction, you need other people in the equation. Social support—love, empathy, caring, connection, and so on—is foundational to mental health. Other people matter. “It sounds like a bumper sticker,” explained Peterson in an article for Psychology Today, “but it is actually a good summary of what positive psychology research has shown about the good life broadly construed.”

  And this is especially true if you’re interested in impossible.

  Whenever we encounter a difficult situation, the brain makes a basic risk assessment based on the quality and quantity of our close relationships. If you have friends and family around to help you attack a problem, your potential for actually solving that problem increases significantly. The brain treats the situation as an interesting challenge, not a dangerous threat. The result is dopamine. The brain gives you a squirt of the good stuff to prepare you to rise to that challenge.

  But if you have to face that situation alone, without emotional support or outside assistance, your likelihood of success decreases and your anxiety levels increase. Instead of dopamine, you get stress chemicals like cortisol. Since these chemicals can crush performance, if you’re interested in the impossible, the basic biology of your nervous system demands that you take other people along for the ride.

  Equally important, between you and your dreams, are other people. Sometimes, these people are obstacles, sometimes they’re opportunities, but in either case, very few people manage to accomplish the impossible on their own. For these reasons alone, your list of peak performance skills has to include interpersonal skills such as communication, collaboration, and cooperation.

  Of course, this sounds self-serving. But the point remains: if impossible is your goal, then developing deep emotional intelligence is crucial to your chances of success.

  “Emotional intelligence,” or EQ for short, is a catchall used to describe our ability to accurately perceive, express, appraise, understand, and regulate emotions, in ourselves and others. In psychological terms, it’s personal skills like motivation, self-awareness, and self-control, as well as interpersonal skills such as care, concern, and empathy. In neurobiological terms, EQ takes some explaining.2

  The first thing to know is that until very recently we knew very little. The long shadow of B. F. Skinner and behaviorism claimed that emotions were not a topic for serious scientists.3 Too squishy. Too subjective. But in the 1990s, brain-imaging technology improved to the point that scientists could begin to map the neuron-by-neuron pathways of our basic emotions.4 This work ended a half century’s worth of controversy and led to the discovery of the seven aforementioned emotional systems present in all animals, including humans.

  And systems is the operative word. Emotions don’t come from any single location in the brain. Instead, they’re generated by those seven core networks: fear, lust, care, play, rage, seeking, and panic/grief. Each of these networks is a specific electrochemical pathway through the brain that produces specific feelings and behaviors. Thus, emotional intelligence, from a neurobiological perspective, can be thought of as the cognitive capacities needed to effectively “manage” each of these seven networks.

  There’s also a growing consensus about the parts of the brain required to do just that. While the list is far from complete, the structures involved include a cluster of deeper brain regions—the thalamus, hypothalamus, basal ganglia, amygdala, hippocampus, and anterior cingulate cortex—and a trio of areas in the prefrontal cortex—the dorsolateral, ventromedial, and orbitofrontal prefrontal cortex.5 In a very real sense, training EQ involves learning to recognize the signals sent by these regions and learning to act on them or not act on them, accordingly.

  And there are very good reasons for learning these skills.

  In decades of studies in dozens of domains, EQ remains one of the highest indicators of high achievement. High EQ correlates to everything from good moods to good relationships to really good chances of success. As journalist Nancy Gibbs once quipped in Time magazine, “IQ gets you hired, but EQ gets you promoted.”6

  And this brings us to the next thing we need to learn in the learning section: how to supercharge emotional intelligence. To do this, it helps to start with the basics.

  Researchers break EQ into four areas: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management.7 The first two categories, self-awareness and self-management, involve our relationship with ourselves. Self-awareness is usually defined as knowledge of one’s own feelings, motives, desires, and character, while self-management involves taking responsibility for one’s own behavior and well-being.

  The latter two categories, social awareness and relationship management, involve our relations with others. Social awareness requires the ability to comprehend both the interpersonal struggles of another and the broader problems of society (for example, awareness of racism and misogyny). Finally, relationship management is all about your interpersonal communication skills.

  Many of the skills found in Part One are what’s required to train up these categories. For example, the mindfulness exercises covered in the grit section are among the very best ways to stretch the gap between thought and emotion, giving you awareness of the first and control over the second. The passion recipe and the goal-setting exercises, to offer a second example, enhance motivation, a self-management skill, and expand self-awareness.

  More important, most self-awareness/self-management tactics share one essential commonality: autopilot awareness. As William James pointed out, humans are habit machines. He called habit “the great fly-wheel of society,” and more recent research backs up this claim.8 We now know that somewhere between 40 percent and 80 percent of what we do is done automatically, mostly unconsciously, out of habit.
9 This is the exact strategy the brain uses to conserve energy, but—especially if we’ve got the wrong habits—it can wreak havoc on our lives.

  Thus, you can take a page out of Tim Ferriss’s book and 80/20 an approach to emotional intelligence by developing autopilot awareness. If you can start to notice your knee-jerk reactions, you can start to make choices. Is this a good knee-jerk reaction or a bad one? A helpful habit or a disaster waiting to happen? If we notice our patterns, we can break those patterns and create better ones. In fact, a great many of the brain structures involved in emotional intelligence are structures in the prefrontal cortex that help us overwrite our automatic behavior. That’s autopilot awareness and, at least on paper, it’s not all that hard to train.

  One easy way to begin is to pause for a breath before you speak, act, or react, especially in situations of high emotion. In that pause, get clear on your motives. Ask yourself why you’re about to do what you’re about to do, then evaluate your response. Be accountable for your flaws, monitor and overwrite negative self-talk, and widen your emotional vocabulary. Don’t sleep on this last item. Being able to describe what you’re feeling in increasing detail, and with more precise language, expands your feelings landscape. “The limits of my language,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein reminds us, “are the limits of my world.”10

  We can also take an 80/20 approach to the equally crucial second half of the emotional intelligence equation: social awareness and relationship management. To do this, we’re going to focus on the two skills researchers emphasize most consistently for these categories: active listening and empathy.

  Active listening is the art of engaged presence. It’s listening with genuine curiosity, but without judgment or attachment to outcome. No daydreaming. No thinking about whatever smart thing you’re going to say next. Patience is key. Genuine relating means listening until the other is done and asking only clarifying questions along the way. A lot of experts recommend summarizing what’s been said aloud, which both enhances communication and tightens social bonds, ensuring that both parties feel seen and heard.

  Active listening also lines up with other performance tactics we’ve been employing. It automatically activates curiosity, releasing a little dopamine and norepinephrine into our system. These chemicals heighten attention, prime learning, and give us the best chance of using what we’re hearing to find connections with older ideas—thus creating conditions for pattern recognition (and more dopamine release). The result of all these neurochemicals in our system is a much greater chance of getting into flow, which is why University of North Carolina psychologist Keith Sawyer identified “active listening” as a flow trigger—and a topic to which we’ll return.11

  For now, let’s turn to the next skill: empathy.

  The ability to share and understand the feelings of another is one of the fastest paths toward emotional intelligence. Learning to develop empathy promotes both self-awareness and social awareness, deepening our ability to understand ourselves and to understand our impact on others. This leads to greater efficacy on the individual side and better communication and collaboration on the social side.

  In recent years, scientists have made serious inroads into understanding empathy, including coming to realize that it’s an easily trainable skill.

  For a variety of not-completely-understood reasons, “motor resonance leads to emotional resonance,” which means that when we see someone else perform an action or experience a sensation, the same parts of our brains light up, as if we, ourselves, were actually performing that same action or experiencing that same sensation.12 It happens automatically. And we can take advantage of this biological fact to train up empathy.

  To do that, researchers have identified two key strategies: imagination and meditation. Imagination means putting the cliché into action—literally asking yourself how it would feel to walk a mile in the other person’s shoes. Start with the obvious question. Ask yourself: If this were happening to me, how would I feel? Be exploratory in your approach. Consider the situation from multiple angles so you can come to understand the full range of emotional possibilities that the situation might produce. Additionally, really feel the resulting emotions. Locate the somatic address of those feelings, noting where in your body the sensations occur. Notice the quality and depth of the emotions. Do they manifest as a tingle or an ache? Are they twitchy or solid? Most crucially, notice how emotions can color perception.

  The second strategy for empathy expansion is “compassion-enhancing meditation.” In research conducted by Harvard psychologist Daniel Goleman and University of Wisconsin psychologist Richard Davidson, seven hours of compassion-enhancing meditation produced a noticeable uptick in empathy and permanent changes in the brains of practitioners.13 After seven hours, there was stronger activity in the insula, a part of the brain that helps us detect emotion, and in the temporal-parietal junction, a part of the brain that lets us see things from alternative perspectives and helps generate empathy.

  To try out compassion-enhancing meditation for yourself, simply find a quiet spot, sit down, and close your eyes. Bring to mind someone who has been kind to you and toward whom you feel gratitude. Silently wish them well and wish for their safety, happiness, health, and well-being. Next, do the same for other people you love, mainly friends and family members. Work outward: coworkers, acquaintances, strangers, the man who works at the dry cleaner’s, the woman who repairs your computer. Finally, bestow those same wishes upon yourself.

  The research shows that twenty minutes a day for two weeks will seriously move the empathy needle. And pay close attention to the results. One of the inherent difficulties with mindfulness practices—including this compassion exercise—is the sizable gap between cause and effect. We sit still twenty minutes today and five days later we’re nicer to our mother on the phone. But look for that increase in niceness and keep a running tally of results. Being able to trust that the practice is working is critical for sustaining motivation.

  And when it comes to the work, don’t use a compassion-enhancing meditation by itself. Combining imagination and meditation produces the best results. When we put ourselves in another’s shoes, especially if that person is in a particularly distressing situation, the brain does something sneaky. Because we don’t enjoy suffering—even if the suffering isn’t our own—the brain eases our pain by tuning out the other person. As Daniel Goleman explained in an article for Fast Company, “[This] is a recipe for indifference rather than kindness.”14

  But there’s a handy solution.

  Scientists at the Max Planck Institutes found that combining empathy-imagination exercises with a compassion-enhancing meditation actually changes the neuronal circuits activated by another’s suffering. Instead of tuning out the other’s pain, the circuits that light up are the same ones that are activated when a mother responds to her child’s distress. This not only overrides the brain’s built-in shutdown valve, it builds empathy even faster.15

  And when we combine active listening with deeper empathy, we get the feel-good neurochemistry that comes from positive social interaction: dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin—that’s a lot of feel-good. This is why EQ is such a consistent indicator of high achievement. It means that both our actions and our emotions are fueling our quest for impossible.

  14

  The Shortest Path to Superman

  It wouldn’t be a chapter on learning if we didn’t explore psychologist Anders Ericsson’s so-called ten-thousand-hour rule. When it comes to peak performance, the rule suggests, talent is a myth. Training is the key.

  And not just any kind of training.

  To achieve mastery in a given field, Ericsson’s research showed that ten thousand hours of “deliberate practice” is required.1 Practice is deliberate because it meets three conditions: the learner receives explicit instructions about the very best method, has access to immediate feedback and performance results, and can repeat the same or very similar tasks. In short, Ericsson’s results argu
e for early specialization and extreme repetition.

  These results have produced results. They were canonized in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance and popularized by writers like Malcolm Gladwell.2 They also spawned an industry of specialization advocates: tiger moms, helicopter parenting, take your pick. Yet, there’s a rub. Early specialization hasn’t produced anything close to the expertise it was designed to create.

  Quite often, with younger children, this approach has them quitting the very activity they were once trying to master.3 With adults, the impact is equally damaging. In older learners, extreme specialization tends to make people narrow-minded and overconfident, essentially blind to most facts and too dependent on the few facts they do know. And this brings us to the three major challenges to the ten-thousand-hour rule.

  The first challenge was mounted by Ericsson himself.4 When Malcolm Gladwell published Outliers, which was the book that made this idea into an industry, Ericsson pointed out that, while he had studied expertise in very specific areas (the ten thousand hours initially came from a study of violinists), and his findings have been duplicated in other domains (golf, for example), they definitely did not apply in every field. Furthermore, those ten thousand hours were an average tally of an arbitrary marker. Gladwell chose ten thousand hours because that was the average time a twenty-year-old top-tier violinist had practiced. If he had made the cutoff eighteen years old or twenty-two years old, the results would have been a very different number.5 In short, most people take much longer than ten thousand hours to achieve mastery. Occasionally, in certain fields, certain people can get there much more quickly. But using it as a hard-and-fast metric for expertise, Ericsson feels, isn’t justified by his findings.