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The Art of Impossible

By Steven Kotler

The Art of Impossible(2021) is a science-driven guide to reaching your maximum potential. By developing four key skills --⁠ motivation, learning, creativity, and flow --⁠ you'll gain the power to smash whatever goals you set. With enough time, you may even achieve the impossible.

What's in it for me? Reach your maximum potential and achieve the impossible​

There are two kinds of impossible. One is Impossible, with a capitalI. These "Impossible" feats break paradigms and shatter expectations --⁠ think landing on the moon or running a four-minute mile.

Then, there's impossible with a lowercasei. This sort of impossible still lies beyond your wildest dreams --⁠ but on a personal scale. It's the stuff you think is impossiblefor you. It could be becoming an entrepreneur, building a musical career, or simply doing what you love for a living.

Intrinsic motivators drive us toward the impossible​

There are no two ways about it: your journey to impossible is going to be long and arduous. As with any long journey, you'll need fuel to keep you going. That includes food and sleep, but you also need psychological fuel --⁠ in other words, drive.

Drive, or motivation, nudges us toward action. But what creates drive in the first place? From an evolutionary perspective, it's all about surviving in a world where resources are scarce. Drive is evolution's way of getting us to either fight each other to obtain the resources we need or to use creativity to makemoreresources.

But drive doesn't consist of just one thing. There are various drivers, like fear, curiosity, and passion. All of these provide psychological fuel --⁠ and you can harness them to achieve the impossible.

All psychological drivers are divided into one of two categories:extrinsic or intrinsic. Extrinsic drivers are things like money, fame, food, and sex. They're external to ourselves, and we chase them to win the evolutionary survival game. Intrinsic drivers, on the other hand, are within us. They're psychological and emotional concepts like curiosity, passion, meaning, and purpose.

Psychological research tells us that extrinsic drivers only motivate us to a certain extent. They get weaker once we have enough money to pay for food, clothing, and shelter. After we've met these basic needs, it's the intrinsic motivators that take over. It's those intrinsic drivers we'll be focusing on in these blinks.

The five most powerful intrinsic motivators are curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. You can stack them together so they feed off one another --⁠ and so you can achieve the impossible.

  • Write down --⁠ by hand --⁠ 25 things you're curious about

When you explore your curiosities, your brain rewards you with small amounts of a feel-good chemical known as dopamine.

  • What you need is passion, which provides a much greater dopamine boost. Often, you can find your passions by looking for intersections among your curiosities.
  • Autonomy simply means the freedom to pursue your purpose. To cultivate it, try carving out at least 15 percent of the day just for yourself. This will help increase your motivation.
  • mastery --⁠ the desire to get better at the things you do. For this motivator, you need to get into a special state of mind psychologists call flow.

Break up the impossible into large and small goals​

According to Latham, big goals lead to the largest increases in motivation and productivity. These are calledhigh, hard goals, or HHGs for short. They're the major steps on your way to achieving your purpose. Your HHG might be, for instance, getting a degree in nutrition or starting a company.

HHGs can take years to achieve. So you'll need smaller daily targets along the way. Let's call theseclear goals; theytake you closer to your HHGs. Say you're a writer, and your HHG is to pen a novel. One of your clear goals might be to write 500 words every day between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m.

Completing your clear goals will reward you with dopamine. Even so, endless persistence can be tough. That's where grit comes in --⁠ the energy it takes to push through years of hard work. Some people are more naturally gritty than others. But don't worry if that's not you. It's a skill you can improve.

One way to cultivate grit is to work around your natural energy levels. Willpower is a major aspect of grit, and it deteriorates throughout the day. So schedule your most difficult daily task for the morning, when your energy is at its peak. Then, continue your tasks in order of descending importance.

As you complete goals, your brain rewards your persistence with dopamine. Grit will become easier --⁠ and the impossible will become more realistic.

Growth mindset​

Use the five-step process to learn almost anything​

  • Reading
  • Notes
  • Questions
  • Deep dive

Creativity requires activating three different networks in the brain​

Now, neuroscientists know a little bit more about what creativity is neurologically. It involves two different networks in the brain working in tandem: attention and imagination.

Attention allows us to concentrate and make choices. Imagination takes care of what happens when our minds wander --⁠ whether it's daydreaming, making plans, or imagining future scenarios.

When we're thinking creatively, these two systems are working in tandem --⁠ something they don't normally do. Creative people can keep both systems active at once, seamlessly switching from attention to imagination and back. That's exactly what you'll need to learn to do if you want to cultivate creativity.

Salience network​

The job of this network is to let you know that an idea you've just had is worth your attention. It also controls your ability to shift between your attention and imagination faculties. And, importantly, it also conducts repetition suppression. That means it suppresses familiar stimuli so that you experience them as normal rather than new and exciting. But in creatives, the salience network doesn't engage in repetition suppression in the same way. That means they tend to notice beauty and novelty where others may not.

A positive mood boosts your creativity​

Insight, it turns out, is core to creativity. And you don't just have to wait for it to suddenly appear. Instead, you can cultivate it. How? By strengthening a particular part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC, which is part of the salience network.

Brain-imaging studies have shown that the ACC lights up right before we solve a problem using "aha" insight. So what can make the ACC more active? The answer is simpler than you might think. Put simply --⁠ a good mood.

Bad moods lead to analytical thought. That makes sense because when you feel threatened or scared, your brain wants to search for what's familiar. It makes a beeline for the path of action it knows will work.

But when you're in a good mood, the opposite is true. You don't feel threatened, and your mind is free to wander. It can switch between the attention and imagination networks. This allows you to pay attention to new, different, maybe slightly weird possibilities --⁠ and then act on them.

So how do you cultivate a good mood? There are many ways, including a daily gratitude practice, meditation, exercise, and good-quality sleep.

Take gratitude. Our brains are overwhelmingly focused on the negative since we're trained to always look out for danger. The downside is that negativity leads to high stress levels. A daily practice of gratitude --⁠ just writing down ten things you're grateful for each day --⁠ trains your brain to pay more attention to the positive instead.

Flow is the ultimate condition for achieving the impossible​

Flow - The state is characterized by complete focus on the present moment. Mood-boosting chemicals flood our brains, while stress hormones are flushed away. Productivity is amplified by up to 500 percent. Learning rates soar 230 percent

It's no wonder that flow makes us feel like we can achieve the impossible. So how do you get some flow for yourself? The process consists of four stages.

  1. Struggle - Here, you're learning, taking in loads of new information, and feeling frustrated as a result.
  2. Release - it's time to give your brain time to relax and let go by doing things like exercising, going for a walk, or engaging in a light hobby. During this time, your brain will be busy passing what you've learned into your long-term memory.
  3. Reward - To get into flow, give yourself a large chunk of time with no external distractions to work on your project.
  4. Recovery - Flow costs a lot of energy, and you've got to replenish it somehow. So have a healthy meal, get some good sleep, or take a long bath.

Final summary​

Follow the 80/20 rule​

When you're trying to master a skill, try the 80/20 approach popularized by the author and investor Tim Ferriss. The idea is that 80 percent of your results stem from 20 percent of your actions. Say you want to learn to play a new musical instrument. Most pop songs consist of just four or five chords, so mastering those chords alone can take you a long way. When you're trying to master a skill, be sure to focus on the 20 percent that really matters.