Steven Kotler
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The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · The Science of Doing Your Best Work
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How Did Surfing Help Steven Kotler's Lyme Disease?
Steven Kotler was bitten by a tick on a walk through an arboretum at a friend's wedding on Long Island, then spent three years in bed. He was one of the first cases in California, so nobody knew what was wrong or how to fix it. Doctors kept him on doxycycline for a year and a half, until his stomach lining bled, and then told him they were done. He was functional about 10 percent of the time. His memory was gone, and he could not walk across a room.
A friend refused to leave until he went to the ocean. He expected to sit in the sun. Less than 30 seconds after a wave came, he stood up, time slowed, his head cleared, and the pain was gone. He caught four more waves, then could not get out of
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Why Do the Best People Learn When Nobody Is Watching?
Shane Parrish says the best people in the world learn in the dark hours. Nobody is watching, there is no boss, and the field does not matter. The work happens after 5 p.m., and it can be 10 at night. The session is an Excel spreadsheet, a wave, or whatever the craft is. Failure has no consequences, so playing and learning happen in the same stretch. He does not like being bad in public. When he skis, he gets far from the chairlift and iterates in the woods, out of sight.
The privacy is how a craft gets honed. Steven Kotler keeps the same kind of privacy on a different clock. He starts writing around 4 a.m., because nobody owns the hours from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. When he was a poor West Coast re
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Why Does Frustration Help You Learn?
Steven Kotler says frustration while learning means a person is moving in the right direction, not that they picked the wrong path or should stop. The feeling is still awful. The direction is still right. Frustration is feedback that working memory is overloaded. Colleen Seifert at the University of Michigan found that the more frustrated someone gets during the struggle, the better the chance they later solve the problem and enter flow. The same pattern shows up when someone wants an intuitive breakthrough. More frustration, a better chance of later seeing the answer.
Learning needs a little norepinephrine. Low levels are curiosity. High levels are anxiety. With none of the chemical, learn
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Why Does Deliberate Play Beat Deliberate Practice?
Steven Kotler says the change that raises learning and peak performance is to be more playful. Defense Department research found that people learn 230 percent faster than normal in flow. The familiar 10,000-hour figure is a fantasy number. The number he gives instead is 10,000 iterations, and even that depends on the domain. He knew Anders Ericsson. Deliberate practice, Ericsson's method, is repetition with incremental improvement. Deliberate play is repetition with improvisation.
In tightly bounded fields such as mathematics and the violin, the disciplines Ericsson studied, deliberate practice works. Outside bounded fields, which is almost everything else, deliberate play wins by a wide ma
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Why Can ADHD Be a Flow Advantage?
Steven Kotler treats ADHD as an evolutionary superpower because it is hyper-focus, not an inability to focus. The problem is work you do not care about. On work you do care about, the lock-in can last for months. He has met very few people at the top of business, athletics, or the arts who do not have it, and he calls it a superpower in business and everywhere else. Ned Hallowell, the Harvard psychologist who coined the term ADHD, shares the view.
Autonomy and attention are coupled systems in the brain, so focus cannot be maximized unless the person is the one driving. When a boss assigns a hated task, reframe it. Most of the task can be irrelevant, and the remaining slice can be the skill
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What Is the 4 Percent Flow Sweet Spot?
Steven Kotler says people pay the most attention when the challenge of a task sits just above their skill, a stretch that does not snap. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and a Google mathematician tried to put a number on the balance and landed on 4 percent. They called it a back-of-the-envelope calculation, not science. Emotionally the spot sits between boredom, when stimulation is too low to hold attention, and anxiety, when the load is far too high. Flow scientists call the middle the flow channel.
A properly set hard goal gives an 11 to 22 percent boost in motivation. The task in front of someone still has to sit in the 4 percent spot, so a huge goal gets chunked down. A hard-charging person wil
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Why Keep a Primary Flow Activity?
Steven Kotler calls a primary flow activity the thing a person has done since childhood and still gets lost in. Skiing is his. About 90 percent of the time he skis, he enters flow. The shared version shows up as group flow with an editor he has worked with for 25 years, or as a conversation where an hour disappears.
Adults drop the activity when a job and a family arrive, and quitting it is the single worst thing they can do for focus. Flow is a trainable focusing skill, different from meditation but the same kind of skill. A Sunday in flow makes flow easier at work on Tuesday, and the activity lowers the anxiety that blocks it. Two to four hours a week is about what it takes. In real burno
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What Are the Six Signs of Flow?
Steven Kotler defines flow, the term Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced, as an optimal state of consciousness where people feel their best and perform their best. It is rapt attention and total absorption. Focus gets so tight on the task that everything else fades, and mental, physical, and emotional performance rise together.
Csikszentmihalyi asked people around the world when they felt their best and performed their best, and found six core characteristics: complete concentration on the task, a merger of action and awareness, a smaller sense of self, distorted time, a feeling of control over things usually out of reach, and an autotelic quality. Autotelic means the experience is an end in
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What Is the Learning Loop?
Shane Parrish calls the learning loop a path from experience to action. Someone has an experience, reflects on it, creates a compression, and then acts on that compression. When people communicate, they often pass along only the compression, and in a lot of cases that is an illusion of knowledge.
A cookbook makes the gap plain. He can go home, pull out a cookbook, and make the recipe, but if something goes wrong he has no idea what went wrong or why. The chef who had the experience, reflected on it, and then handed over the recipe knows exactly what went wrong. There is too much salt, the oven is not the right temperature, or the cook did not start enough. The chef knows all of that at once