Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award winning journalist and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. He's one of the world's leading experts on human performance. He's the author of nine bestselling books, including The Future is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, The Rise of Superman, and the most recent one, The Art of Impossible, which we are talking about in this episode. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, translated into over 40 languages, and appeared in over 100 publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Time and the Harvard Business Review.

Steven is a remarkably productive person, and he puts a lot of that extraordinary productivity down to what he's been doing for the last 30 years, and what he's writing about in The Art of Impossible. In this book, he refers to the work of our previous guests Mike Gervais and Angela Duckworth, and talks about the topics that we’ve explored with Frans Johansson and Scott Page in previous episodes. Steven Kotler is making his third appearance on this podcast, and if you are looking for, as he describes it, a practical playbook for impractical people, this is another powerful, relevant, and compelling conversation about the results of his decades long research into peak performance.

What is Covered:

• The sequence of external and intrinsic motivators that produce peak performance
• How extraordinary capability emerges in individuals
• The compounding effect of long-term practice for achieving peak performance
• Neurochemistry of fear and why peak performers set unrealistic expectations for themselves

Key Takeaways and Learnings:

• Peak performance is getting your biology to work for you, rather than against you. It’s a limited set of skills shaped by biology, which are meant to be deployed in a sequence and in certain order.
• Challenge to skills ratio is the most important of flow's triggers. When the challenge of the task at hand slightly exceeds our skill set, when we are stretching our skills to the utmost, it is a precondition for flow.
• Peak performers are always going to look for something that really scares them, because they are going to get a lot of energy and a lot of focus for free. But they don't take on huge fears all at once. They chunk them down, one step at a time, and often.

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler https://www.theartofimpossible.com/ 
• Steven Kotler’s other books https://www.stevenkotler.com/books   
• The Flow Research Collective https://www.flowresearchcollective.com/ 
• Animals in Translation, a book by Temple Grandin https://www.amazon.com/Animals-Translation-Mysteries-Behavior-Harvest/dp/0156031442 
• Bone Games, a book by Rob Schultheis https://www.amazon.com/Bone-Games-Extreme-Shamanism-Transcendence/dp/1558215069 
• The Space Between Commitment and Hesitation with Michael Gervais on OutsideVoices Podcast https://outsidelens.com/the-space-between-hesitation-and-commitment-with-michael-gervais/ 
• Angela Duckworth: Grit - The Power of Passion and Perseverance on OutsideVoices Podcast https://outsidelens.com/angela-duckworth-grit-the-power-of-passion-and-perseverance/ 
• Ignoring the Siren Call of Sameness Creates Lasting Value with Scott Page on OutsideVoices Podcast https://outsidelens.com/ignoring-the-siren-call-of-sameness-creates-lasting-value-with-scott-page/ 
• Innovating, Medici Style with Frans Johansson on OutsideVoices Podcast https://outsidelens.com/innovating-medici-style-with-frans-johansson/ 

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Gillian Zoe Segal is the author of Getting There: A Book of Mentors. In that book, Gillian interviews incredibly successful entrepreneurs, mentors and people like Warren Buffett, to discover their secrets to success and innovation. On today's show, she discusses some of the insights into the lives of these successful and driven people and talks on what truly makes them tick.

What Is Covered

• 02:35 - Why did Gillian write Getting There?
• 03:10 - You don't need to know where you're heading when you're starting out.
• 03:45 - Successful people have a very fluid mindset and they're open to change.
• 05:35 - Everybody in Gillian's book is an entrepreneur and a trail blazer.
• 06:30 - How does innovation really happen?
• 06:45 - All of Gillian's entrepreneurs question everything and they don't blindly follow others.
• 07:20 - Gillian talks about Warren Buffett.
• 10:20 - How important is luck?
• 12:15 - Get ready to hear the word 'no' multiple times.
• 13:05 - Resilience is the key to success.
• 14:35 - Gillian was so confident in what she was doing, she didn't mind the word 'no'. Her drive kept her going for five years, which is how long it took to complete the book.
• 15:35 - You have to believe in your product.
• 17:35 - What advice does Gillian have for executives who are struggling to make an impact?
• 18:45 - If you remember who you are, you can do anything.
• 19:40 - You have to create your own opportunities.
• 21:00 - Don't let the fear of failure deter you.
• 22:15 - If you don't want to quit at least once a month, you're not trying hard enough.
• 25:00 - If Gillian had to do this all over again, who would she put in the book?
• 27:25 - How did Gillian manage to interview all these people for her book?
• 29:05 - Surround yourself with high-grade people.
• 30:15 - What are Gillian's morning rituals?
• 30:25 - What has Gillian changed her mind about recently?
• 31:25 - What advice does Gillian have for her 25-year-old self?
• 33:25 - What's Gillian's next project? That's a secret for right now!

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode: 

• Getting There: A Book of Mentors by Gillian Zoe Segal https://www.amazon.com/Getting-There-Gillian-Zoe-Segal/dp/1419715704 
• Connect with Gillian Zoe Segal on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillian-zoe-segal-64041021/ 
• Anyone Can Do It: Sahar's Remarkable Entrepreneurial Journey, OutsideVoices Podcast https://outsidelens.com/anyone-can-do-it-sahars-remarkable-entrepreneurial-journey/ 
• Hacking Flow: How to Make Outperformance a Habit, OutsideVoices Podcast https://outsidelens.com/hacking-flow-how-to-make-outperformance-a-habit/ 

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In this episode, we are joined by David Marquet, who was the Captain of the USS Santa Fe from 1990 to 2001 and now works as a leadership expert with businesses worldwide. We cover his book, Turn The Ship Around! A True Story of Building Leaders by Breaking Rules, which has been recently re-released with a new companion workbook.

What Is Covered

• Why it is essential to have a longer-term perspective in your people development processes. Because while achievement scorecard runs while you're at an organization, your leadership scorecard starts counting the day you leave
• Why leadership should be centered on ‘leaning back’ and inviting your team to ‘lean forward’
• Why David believes it is important to alternate between two sets of behaviors, languages, and mindsets to optimize between production and  decision-making scenarios

Key Takeaways and Learnings

• How pausing – and fighting the urge to take immediate action – is essential to developing the  ‘leadership muscle’ of a team
• The differences between a ‘prove’ and ‘improve’ mindset and how to signal to your team which mindset should be adopted in different situations
• Actions to create a system thinkers and leaders at every level, how this develops organizational resilience and inoculates it against stupid decisions
• How leaders need to ‘flatten the power gradient’, to make themselves accessible and create the environment for others to contribute

Links and Resources Covered in this Episode

• Get in touch with David Marquet via LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook
• David Marquet's website
• Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, a book by David Marquet
• United States Naval Academy, website
• Talking 100% Entrepreneurship & 0% Bureaucracy with Heiko Fischer of Resourceful Humans on OutsideVoices