The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance Hardcover – March 4, 2014

Review – The Rise of Superman Steven Kolter“The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance” by Steven Kolter, founder and director of the Flow Genome Project, is a masterful followup to what Abraham Maslow and Mihaly Csikzentmihalya started years ago with the “Hierarchy of Needs” and “Flow.” This book traces the thoughts and achievements made possible by Flow through ultimate sports rapidly escalating achievements and then into music, play, work, and art. Kolter then projects what a possible future could be like, what with youth seeing the already high achievements, and then using heightened imagination and Flow technics to achieve even more astounding levels of achievement in nearly every field of human endeavor. Along the way Steven Kolter maps out the necessary triggers and bases for Flow to occur. These are well laid out.Steven Kolter devotes a chapter to the Dark Side of Flow. That is, what happens to individuals who find themselves in the doldrums, in life circumstances where time and priorities of life do not allow time for Flow. Mr. Kolter also addresses that Flow, with it's constant need for challenge, does lead many people into very risky areas of achievement, and that many have lost their lives or livelihood in the chase of Flow. Mr. Kolter emphasizes that Flow is the left hand path to success, not the right hand path of 10,000 hours practice. This is a scary chapter, but an aspect of Flow that must be addressed.The book reads well. I would put the grade level at about 11 or 12. The book is exciting, replete with lots of stories of extreme sports with rule breaking achievements and world record setting in such as skateboarding, snowboarding, acrobatic skiing, rock climbing, and the individuals who made the jumps in achievements in the ultimate sports. I feared in the third chapter that Mr. Kolter was going to go ultra technical in biometrics, bioanatomy, and bioneural chemistry, but he did not, pulling up just short of going overboard with those concepts. Yes, he does refer repeatedly to hypofrontality, and names serotonin and norepinephrine and other brain chemicals, but these are well explained and demonstrated.Not all of the material in the book is new. Mr. Kolter is standing on the shoulders of the giants who have gone before him. Mr. Kolter acknowledges those giants. But Mr. Kolter has achieved making the concepts of ultimate human performance accessible and understandable.

I picked up Rise of Superman because I would like to spend more time in flow states. I believe in hustling hard and hustling smart but I know that I don't actually spend that much time in flow. Flow states are a result of evolutionary psychology that drastically increases awareness of the world around us. The book does a great job of illustrating flow state science by telling stories of superhuman feats accomplished by action & adventure athletes in flow. for these kinds of athletes reaching flow states is literally a matter of life and death, so they make great case studies of something that for everyone else is kind of nebulous. However, sometimes it's difficult to visualize a complex skate boarding trick, if you are not a skater. It would have been neat if the kindle version of the book linked to Youtube videos. It would have been interesting to see the book say more about addicts and flow states. As flow states naturally recreate the cocktail of neurotransmitters that addicts chase. You always hear that addicts need to replace one addiction with another, it would be really fascinating to see some research done on training addicts to enter flow states. I've said before that I think that the human capacity for invention, creativity, collaboration and generosity multiplied by the steep growth curves in technology have a real chance in the next 50 years of eradicating: poverty, war, hunger, disease, environmental issues, lack of education, even aging and death. If we can harness the power of flow, 50 years from now we will be able to look at the world and see these demons vanquished from the world.

We may have heard in our youth that we only use 10% of our brains. David Eagleman gave us “Incognito” to teach us that the other 90% (our subconscious) is very much in use and quite literally controls much more of us than we think. Nassim Taleb showed us in “Antifragile” that the most resilient and productive things become so when subjected to extreme variation in stressors. Norman Doidge in “The Brain That Changes Itself” helped us understand that our brains are not simply software running on top of hardware, but can actually be rewired with experience throughout life.To me, Steve Kotler gives us a first glimpse at what it might look like to rewire our brains to become hugely more productive by intentionally triggering stressors that take us into a scientifically based new mental state of ‘flow.’ This book is not about a metaphor, it’s about a relevant field of study in human neuroscience. Reading it, you will understand how when stressed under the right conditoins, the brain produces cocktails of key chemicals like norepinephrine to tighten focus (data acquisition), dopamine to enhance pattern recognition (data processing), and anandamide accelerates lateral thinking (widens search by pattern recognition system). These 3 chemicals mimic the effects of cocaine, LSD and marijuana, but so far no one has been able to mimic the balance and timing of the cocktail that internal generation creates.It also ties in the work of Charles Limb at Johns Hopkins who I had seen talk once on how jazz musicians experience deactivatation of their ‘dorsolateral prefrontal cortex’ when they go into flow. This means that going into flow requires turning off those parts that handle self-monitoring, control and thus inhibition. Some of these effects can now be triggered intentionally with electromagnetic pulses – something I first saw in the work for Allan Snyder at the ‘Centre for the Mind’ in Australia, but this integrates those observations with a broader view.It helps us begin to understand why freedom from rules and flexibility of action are key to innovation. It helps us understand how Taleb’s ‘skin in the game’ is actually important neurologically, and why humility, not arrogance, is key to breakthrough innovation.Although cast using a breadth of examples of extreme action sports, I agree this book signals the possibility of a whole new world of human productivity and creativity ahead. If there is a ‘new world’ of human productivity ahead, this book is the beach on a small island in the Caribbean.This book may be the most important book for innovation since Clayton Christensen’s “Innovator’s Dilemma”, and can’t wait to see where the seemingly emerging community of ‘flow hackers’ might take us? If we figure out how to trigger ourselves into flow in a wider array of tasks, I expect an avalanche of innovation for otherwise seemingly insurmountable problems – very exciting to think about!