Steven Kotler

As far as I can tell, the only thing more difficult
than the emotional toil of pursuing true excellence is the emotional toil of not pursuing true excellence.

Of course, describing flow as an “optimal state of consciousness” doesn’t get us very far. More specifically, the term refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption when you get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Action and awareness merge. Your sense of self vanishes. Time passes strangely. And performance—performance just soars.

Of course, describing flow as an “optimal state of consciousness” doesn’t get us very far. More specifically, the term refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption when you get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears. Action and awareness merge. Your sense of self vanishes. Time passes strangely. And performance—performance just soars.

Evolution shaped the brain to enable survival. But evolution itself is driven forward by the availability of resources. Scarcity of resources is always the largest threat to our survival, making it the largest driver of evolution. And there are only two possible responses to this threat. You can fight over dwindling resources, or you can go exploring, get creative, innovative, and cooperative, and make new resources.

The human individual lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts
which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in coordination, in power of inhibition and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject—but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us, it is only an inveterate habit—the habit of inferiority to our full self—that is bad.

James’s point is that the reason we’re not living up to our potential is that we’re not in the habit of living up to our potential. We’ve automatized the wrong processes. We’re playing the wrong game. And it’s bad.

The more modern version belongs to the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and the opening lines of the 2002 film Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: “When you’re young, your potential is infinite. You might do anything, really. You might be Einstein. You might be DiMaggio. Then you get to an age when what you might be gives way to what you have been. You weren’t Einstein. You weren’t anything. That’s a bad moment.”

Fear is a psychological driver because it drives us to fight over resources, to flee and avoid becoming someone else’s resources, or to pack up the family and sail across an ocean in a quest to, you guessed it, find more resources. Curiosity is another driver because it makes us wonder if there might be more resources across that ocean. Passion drives us to master the skills required to successfully sail that ocean. Goals drive us because they tell us what resources we’re trying to find on the other side of that ocean and the reason we’re trying to find them.

As high-minded as something like “meaning and purpose” might seem as a driver, this is actually evolution’s way of saying: Okay, you’ve got enough resources for yourself and your family. Now it’s time to help your tribe or your species get more.

The messages themselves are basic.5 In the brain, electrical signals have only one meaning: do more of what you’re doing.