What does it take to do the impossible?
I came to this question of impossibility through an unusual door.
I walked in through the door of journalism. In the early 1990s,
when I became a journalist, action/adventure sports were a really
hot topic, and the X Games were starting out, the Gravity Games. And back then,
if you could write and ski, or write and surf, or write and
rock climb, there was work. I couldn't do any of those things
very well. But I really needed the work, so I lied to my editors,
and I was lucky enough to spend the better portion of 10 years chasing extreme
athletes around mountains and across oceans. And I'll tell you that if you are
not an extreme athlete and you spend all your time chasing extreme athletes
around mountains, across oceans, you tend to break things.
I broke a lot of things and then I have to take four months, five months off.
And when I came back, the progress I saw was astounding.
It was amazing. It was leaps and bounds kind of progress. Stuff that had been
absolutely impossible just four months ago was not just being done,
it was being iterated upon. Now, this caught my attention for a number
of reasons. The first is that back in the early 1990s, action and adventure sports
was a punk rock pastime, practiced by rowdy, irreverent people
without a lot of natural advantages. So, most of the people I spent my time with,
they had very, very little education, they had almost no money,
and the vast majority of people I knew came from horrifically
difficult childhoods, destroyed homes. Not just broken homes, destroyed homes.
And yet, here they were, on a regular basis, reinventing what was
possible for our species, right? Extending the limits
of kinesthetic possibility. So, surfing is a very old sport,
dates back to 400 A.D. And from 400 A.D. until 1996, progress was really slow,
incremental at best. Twenty-five feet was the biggest wave
anybody had ever surfed, and above that, everybody believed it was impossible.
There were physics papers written about how it was impossible to paddle into a
wave over 25 feet and impossible to surf a wave over 25 feet. As you can see
from this photo, today, less than 2 decades later,
surfers are routinely pulling into waves over 100 feet tall. This caught
my attention. What the heck was going on? But I also knew, because I had broken 82
bones at that point, that if I didn't take my question
out of action sports and into other places, I was probably going
to kill myself. So that's what I did, and I really took this question pretty
much into every domain imaginable. I focused on those maverick innovators who
turned science fiction ideas into science, fact, technology, who did the impossible
of literally dreaming up the future. In bold, I looked
at upstart entrepreneurs, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk,
people who had built world-changing, impossible businesses in near-record time.
"In Abundance", the book that Vishen mentioned, we looked at small teams and
individuals who are going after grand global challenges, things like poverty,
or healthcare, or energy scarcity, or water scarcity. These are things that,
just a few decades back, had been the sole province of large
corporations and big governments, and yet, here were individuals tackling these
impossible challenges. So what I discovered in all these domains
is that it doesn't actually matter where you look. You could be talking about the
action/adventure sport athletes, you can be talking about business tycoons,
you can be talking about technologists or artists. It doesn't matter.
Every domain you find, ultimate human performance has the exact
same signature: the state of consciousness known to researchers as flow.
Now, you may now flow by other names, right? You may call it runner's high or
being in the zone. If you happen to play basketball, you might call it
being unconscious. If you're a beatnik jazz musician, you're being in the pocket.
If you do stand-up comedy, you're in the forever box.
Flow is a technical term. As I mentioned earlier,
it is technically defined as an optimal state of consciousness,
when we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically,
it refers to those moments of rapt attention and total absorption.
We get so focused on the task at hand, everything else just disappears.
Action and awareness will start to merge. Your sense of self will vanish.
Time will dilate, which is a fancy way of saying it passes strangely. So sometimes,
occasionally, it'll slow down. You get that freeze frame effect
from anybody who has been in a car crash. And more frequently, it speeds up,
and five hours go by in, like, five minutes. And throughout,
all aspects of performance, both mental and physical,
go through the roof. Now, flow science is actually quite old.
It dates back to the late 1880s, which was the very first time that someone
figured out that an altered state of consciousness, which is what flow is,
had a radical impact on performance. The science of flow took a huge step
forward in the '60s, '70s, '80s thanks to this man.
This is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He is often called the godfather
of flow psychology, and he conducted one of the largest global studies on optimal
performance anyone's ever done and he learned three things about flow that are
really fundamental. The first thing he discovered is that flow is definable.
It has seven core characteristics: uninterrupted concentration on the
present moment, vanishing of self, time dilation and so forth.
And because it is definable, it is measurable, so we have extremely
well-validated psychometric instruments to measure flow at this point.
Csikszentmihalyi also discovered that flow is universal. It shows up in everyone,
everywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met. He also discovered why
flow is flowy, and why it's called flow. So, in his giant study,
ran around the world, talking to people, saying, "Hey, tell me about the time
in your life when you feel your best, you perform your best."
And the vast majority, tens of thousands of people said,
"You know, when I'm at my best, I'm in this state and every action,
every decision flows seamlessly, perfectly, effortlessly from the last."
So flow is actually a phenomenal logical description. It's how the state makes
us feel. Interestingly, for the state to make us feel flowy,
right, underneath that, you actually get a really good shorthand
definition of what flow is. For every action, every decision
to lead seamlessly, perfectly, effortlessly to the last,
flow has to be as close to near-perfect, high-speed, creative decision-making as we
can get. So that's a quick, shorthand way of thinking about what flow
actually is. Final thing that Csikszentmihalyi discovered is that flow
is fundamental. Flow is fundamental to well-being and overall life satisfaction.
In fact, in his study, he found that the people who score
off the charts, highest in the world for overall life satisfaction and well-being
are the people with the most flow in their lives. The next question researchers
turned their attention to was, "All right. So this is optimal performance.
Great. How optimal?" But we now know, in athletics, for example,
pretty much every gold medal or world championship that's ever been won,
there's a flow state at its heart. We know that flow in the arts,
in technology and science, accounts for significant progress,
major paradigm shifts. Usually, a flow state of the heart. So, McKinsey,
the global consultancy, did a 10-year study,
and they found that top executives in flow are 5 times more productive
than out of flow. Five times more productive is 500% more productive.
It means you could go to work on Monday, take Tuesday through Friday off,
and get as much done as your steady state peers.
Interestingly, two days a week in flow? You are 1000% more productive
than the competition. So, think about this for a second.
We work with a lot of top organizations, lot of top businesses,
that are now starting to incorporate flow into their fundamental DNA.
Anybody who is not doing this at this point, if employees in flow are 1000% more
productive versus company over here that doesn't have any employees in flow,
you can see the problem.