The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer by Steven Kotler

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BINOD’S RATING: 8/10

The top 20 takeaways:

1.     Motivation is a psychological catch-all term for a few categories of skills. The motivation triad comprises of Drive, Grit and Goals.

2.     When it comes to peak performance, you have few big levers to reach for. The 2 things that you have is your focus & the action you will take to accomplish whatever it is you’re doing. There’s not a lot you can do on the action side other than repeating for years until you get better. So, focus is your big lever. Motivation gives you focus for free. It’s a huge deal. 

3.     Extrinsic motivators (drivers) are things we want that are outside of ourselves. Money, sex, fame. Then there are intrinsic motivators (drivers). Curiosity, mastery, autonomy, passion and purpose are the biggest 5. They’re also all flow triggers.

4.     Most normal people tend to come off because they haven’t optimized all of the different quantities of intrinsic motivation. They don’t have all their intrinsic motivators pointing in the same direction

5.     When people talk about motivation, they’re also talking about grit. There are actually 6 levels of grit skills and they all seem to be needed to be trained independently.

6.     Grit starts with persistence. Start with physical persistence. Once you have physical grit, you work on mental grit. And ultimately, you’re going towards the grit to control your thoughts. Then you need the grit to be your best when you’re at your worst. Then you can start working on the grit to train up your weaknesses. Then there’s also the grit to face your fear. And the last grit is the grit to recover.

7.     Everything starts with curiosity. It’s the foundational human motivator, and it gives us a little bit of focus for free. When we’re curious about something, it is much easier to retain that information for later. 

8.     Passion is what follows curiosity. Passion is nothing more than the intersection of multiple curiosities plus playing at that intersection and producing a series of wins.

9.     Once we can take that Passion and couple it to a purpose greater than ourselves, a cause outside of ourselves, that’s Purpose.

10.Once we have our Purpose, what do you need next is obvious; you need the freedom, the Autonomy to pursue that purpose.

11.Once you have the freedom and autonomy to pursue that purpose, you need the skills to pursue it well (Mastery).

12.You want to start with extrinsic motivation until your basic safety and security needs are met. Once we get past that, we’ve to start allowing intrinsic motivators to consistently achieve peak performance.

13.Once you have your 5 intrinsic motivators set up and pointing in the right direction, goals are next. You need three levels of goals in your life for peak performance- mission-level goals (massively transformative purpose), high, hard goals (one-to-five-year projects) & clear goals (your daily action plans).

14.We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge and the task at hand slightly exceeds our skill sets. So you want to stretch, but not snap.

15.If you’re looking for learning, books give you the most bang for your buck for your time.

16.The best way to learn a subject is to follow your curiosity through the subject. Take notes around the things that naturally catch your attention. Because that naturally will produce a lot of Norepinephrine, which primes the brain for learning, and you’ll have an easier time remembering it.

17.McKinsey studied top executives over the course of 10 years and they were looking at productivity. On average, top executives reported being 500% more productive when in flow state.

18.Flow is directly tied to happiness, well-being, meaning and purpose.

19.In your 30s in everybody’s career you end up hitching yourself to a company. And then they want you to be creative or work inside of their boxes. That phase lasts about a decade. And you can either use it to move towards mastering your skills or not.

20.Motivation gets you into the game. Goals tell you where you’re going. And then you need Grit because motivation will run out, and not all tasks will produce flow.

Concise, comprehensive & clear guide for peak performance.

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