daniel sabsay

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

This book explores flow (the mental state associated with high performance and distorted sense of time, among other things). It does so primarily by chronicling the training and great feats of several action and adventure (extreme) sports athletes. It also provides a brief background on flow research. In the introductory pages, the author claims that although the book is about the athletes, the larger goal of the narrative is to uncover how flow works so we can harness it in our own lives.

A brief history of flow research is provided, as well as an overview of our current understanding of "flow triggers" and the brain activity (chemical and electrical) that shows up in the state of flow. Again, it's not an incredibly deep survey of the research, but is a good introduction for those unfamiliar (like I was). From my memory, here are a few of the concepts:

• Characteristics of the flow state
  • Flow is autotelic, pleasurable and rewarding in and of itself
  • Loss of sense of time. Sometimes a slowing of time.
  • In extreme cases, loss of sense of self (i.e. the boundaries between self and "everything else").
  • Each action flows naturally from one to the next.
  • Focus is purely on here and now; the rest of the world slides away from conscious perception.
  • Measures of mental and physical performance skyrocket.
  • Creative solutions seem to appear out of nowhere into consciousness.
  • Transient hypofrontality - A decrease in activity of the brain's prefrontal cortex. Presumed to be why one's "inner critic" is switched off (or at least reduced) in the state.
• External triggers of flow:
  • Rich environment - lots of stimulus
  • Clear goals
  • Fast feedback - Your environment gives you fast/immediate feedback to your every action.
  • Risk and danger - Physical risk sharpens focus. But creative and social risks can have similar effects.
• Internal triggers of flow:
  • Challenge/skills balance - If the task at hand is too difficult, one experiences stress and doesn't enter flow. Too easy, and the brain isn't engaged with the activity; boredom is the result.
• Accumulative impact of repeated flow "sessions". Repeatedly entering the flow state, repeatedly pushing one's boundaries that little bit further is what brought the athletes to their most groundbreaking accomplishments.

The majority of the book is about action and adventure athletes (think big wave surfers, skiiers, kayakers, mountaineers, climbers, etc.). Kotler, turns out, was an action and aventure sports journalist for a time and it shows. Lots of extreme feats are recounted. It seemed every such tale was about "the most daring, impossible, ridiculous X ever seen in the history of the sport of Y". Perhaps such diction is an accurate portrayal of these accomplishements, but I must trust the author on this as I know very little about extreme sports.

The narrative often follows the evolution of individual athletes and sports, showing how one "impossible" stunt led to the next. However, in my view, this "pushing the impossible of given sport X" thread doesn't speak to the power of flow as well as other aspects of these stories. Kotler says that flow is the reason for the speed with which action sports have advanced. Fast compared to what? It just doesn't seem a useful statement to me, but it does sound good (as in headline-worthy). That aside, there are aspects of these stories that are fascinating. One of the big-wave surfers saved himself in a giant wave (~60ft tall if I remember correctly) by pulling a move that he never practiced and had never been used before by other surfers. See "creative solutions appearing out of nowhere" above. The Red Bull Air Force learned how to interpret and predict a teammate's intentions based solely on subtle movements of their feet. Not something you'd think ordinarily possible (see "skyrocketing mental performance" above). This helped them coordinate the group wingsuit BASE jump off the top of Sears Tower in Chicago.

So what I'm saying is: yes, these events are spectacular; yes, they redefined what most people thought possible in the sport; but restating that over and over again didn't help me understand flow any better.

This brings me to the last aspect of the book: applying what we know about flow to cultivate more of it in our lives. Of the three main "threads" of this book ((1) flow research, (2) extreme athletes, and (3) practical advice), this had the fewest words spent on it. Knowing the characteristics of flow can help us understand why it has the effects it does. Seeing how extreme atheletes train can also give us ideas, but it's usually not clear how to apply them to more "normal" endeavors. Knowing the flow triggers (environmental and internal factors known to cause the state) can inform how we structure our lives and training to invite the state; this is the most directly applicable knowledge presented in the book. There's just not much discussion of it compared to the other content. The passages that do focus on it mostly feel like brief asides; I would have appreciated more elaboration. That being said, there were some useful and thought-provoking bits. Here are a couple examples:

• One professor interviewed for the book drives a different route to and from work everyday. This is (supposedly) a way to increase the novelty in his environment (which is a trigger of flow).
• Though most of our daily lives don't offer ample opportunity to risk life and limb, taking social and emotional risks can be a powerful flow trigger. Examples:
  • Risk humiliation by performing an instrument to an audience.
  • Give a presentation at work.
• Developing/improving a skill slightly outside your area of expertise (lateralizing) in order to mitigate challenges that are too stressful otherwise. This is about (a) tuning the challenge/skills balance, and (b) maintaining momentum and forward progress.
• "The absence of self-knowledge makes it harder to tune the challenge/skill ratio." (Location 2307 in Kindle edition)
  • Self-awareness is key for tuning the challenge/skills ratio. As an aside, this is easier with physical exercise. It's pretty obvious when you're at the limits of your current strength/stamina/speed because you can't bring the weight off the floor anymore or you can't move your legs any faster. These limits are less obvious for purely intellectual activities. Finding good ways to gauge them is difficult, but doable. For example, if you read an article on astrophysics (for example) and find you aren't understanding most of it, then it's clearly beyond your current "skills" and some background reading on fundamental concepts would be prudent.
• Break tasks into challenging, but manageable chunks. Trying to tackle something too large induces stress, which kicks you out of flow.

See the section below for how I've applied some of these ideas to my own life.

I'll mention one last topic treated toward the end of the book: group flow. The main point was that flow can occur simulataneously in a group of people, with potentially greater effects than individuals experiencing flow alone. Here are some loosely related ideas that I found interesting:

• Flow often happens in work conversations for a few reasons:
  • Shared goals
  • Shared background and knowledge, which eases communication
• Ways to encourage group flow:
  • Shared goals
  • A shared "language" or background that the whole group can understand.
  • Blending egos. People shouldn't be hogging the spotlight.
  • "Always say yes." - Think "yes, and" instead of "yes, but".
  • Listen fully. You shouldn't be consciously thinking about what to say next while listening to someone else speak.
  • Foster autonomy and competence.

Style 1¶

The narrative tends to jump around quite often (from sport to sport and athlete to athlete), requiring context switches that were jarring at times.

Aside from this, the writing is approachable. Reads more like a long news article than an essay. Lots of hypophoras. I just didn't love the writing style for some reason, though. It wasn't bad. Just wasn't particularly attractive to me.

Things from this book I applied to my own life¶

If you're not throwing yourself off skyscrapers for "sport", it's harder to get into flow. But this book gave me a few ideas I was able to apply to my life and work to positive effect.

1. Decomposing work tasks into small chunks and setting time-based goals (e.g. complete XYZ in the next 1 hour). This was largely inspired by this excerpt:

   "Applying this idea in our daily life means breaking tasks into bite-size chunks and setting goals accordingly. A writer, for example, is better off trying to pen three great paragraphs at a time—the equivalent of moving through Mandy-Rae’s kick cycles—rather than attempting one great chapter. Think challenging, yet manageable —just enough stimulation to shortcut attention into the now, not enough stress to pull you back out again."

   (Location 2235 in Kindle edition)

   I used this strategy to break down my programming tasks at work and found it particularly effective. Trying to tackle too large of a task/feature all at once makes my brain hurt, and I can spend lots of time thinking about it without getting much done. If I instead ask "What's the smallest step I can make right now toward this larger goal?" and focus on that smaller task (with a clearly defined expected result), then it's much easier to make progress and stay engaged. By putting more focus on this task decomposition process, I saw more consistent productivity in my day-to-day work.

2. Tightening feedback loops:

   "Tighten feedback loops. Put mechanisms in place so attention doesn’t have to wander. Ask for more input. How much input? Well, forget quarterly reviews. Think daily reviews. Studies have found that in professions with less direct feedback loops—stock analysis, psychiatry, and medicine—even the best get worse over time."

   (Location 2248 in Kindle edition)

   Breaking large tasks in programming into smaller chunks naturally tightens the feedback loops involved. For example, if you set out to write some code that parses file type A, B, and C and then wait until implementing the parsing for all file types before running/testing it, your feedback is very slow. You write a lot of code first, then test later. This delayed feedback makes it difficult to track down the parts of the code that need to change based on that feedback; if there are bugs, you need to go back and check much more code to find the cause. Instead, if you set a goal of only parsing file type A, then check and verify that it works, you (a) get feedback much more quickly, and (b) reduce the amount of code you have to review to debug.

   But aside from problem decomposition, there are two other ways I've found to tighten feedback loops in programming: automated testing and making good use of REPLs.

   Automated tests, such as unit tests, provide extremely fast feedback. In many cases, you can run them after every change you make. Depending on what those tests cover, they can give you an immediate signal when you break something. If you continually run them as you work, then you have very few changes to review when a test starts failing. Automated testing is a great way to get fast feedback, especially while working in all but the smallest codebases, adding features, refactoring, etc. The downside is that writing automated tests isn't possible until you have a good idea of what your chunk of code under test should do. And writing tests also requires you to make decisions about design: What parameters should I pass in here? How should the output be structured?. Sometimes you may not know all the parameters required, or the best way to structure the output until you do some experimentation.

   REPLs provide another way to get feedback that (a) can happen in much faster cycles, and (b) can be used while in an "exploratory" coding mode. Imagine you want to write a function that retrieves data from some external API, picks out some important bits of data, and returns it. Let's say you don't yet know what that incoming data will look like, and you're not sure what things you need in order to retrieve that data (API keys, query parameters, etc.). With a REPL, you can write one line of code (or a few) and execute it, instantly seeing the result. You can even combine this with "source code in a file" programming too, which I've found especially helpful for getting quicker feedback. I've used IPython and it's autoreload module to quickly write chunks of code and test them out. I can edit a function's code (in my text editor) and with a couple of keystrokes execute the function in a REPL. If I want to try the function with different inputs, I just type out the function call in the REPL. I get lots of feedback with very few decisions required. Even writing a simple unit test requires a lot of decisions: What do I name the test? How many cases should I test? Which cases are most important? How will my other code interact with this function? Is the code I'm working on even easy to get under test using my testing tools, or do I need to set up the scaffolding to do that? If I change my mind about what inputs the function should accept, I have to go change all the tests I wrote. Long story short, if you're finding it hard to focus on the task at hand, or you have uncertainty about how to write a particular passage of code, I recommend trying this approach. Build up a single function, one line at a time, running it in the REPL as you go, seeing the results of each small change you make. It's very engaging.

3. More video games. As discussed in the book, playing video games is prone to creating lots of flow. Personally, I can't just jump into a game and be "in the zone" instantly. Recently, I've found I need to spend a significant period of time playing before it happens (i.e. upwards of 30 minutes). But interestingly, once I'm into the game, I'm pretty solidly "in the zone". Even if I need to take a quick break (get water, bio-break, etc.), it's usually easy to jump back into the flow of the game after.

4. More consistent exercise. Intense physical exercise can trigger the flow state. Recently, I've developed a more consistent exercise routine than I've had in the past few years. I don't know how much flow I'm creating directly as a result of this, but I'm certainly much happier for it and believe it helps me perform better throughout the day.