Steven Kotler quotes:

...Suddenly normal wasn't good enough.

Time slows down. Self vanishes. Action and Awareness merge. Welcome to Flow.

When people say that animal rescuers are crazy, what they really mean is that animal rescuers share a number of fundamental beliefs that makes them easy to marginalize. Among those is the belief that Rene Descartes was a jackass.

When doing what we most love transforms us into the best possible version of ourselves and that version hints at even greater future possibilities, the urge to explore those possibilities becomes feverish compulsion. Intrinsic motivation goes through the roof. Thus flow becomes an alternative path to mastery, sans the misery.

After all those neurochemicals are drained out, it takes a while for them to replenish so on the back end of flow state...I can barely string sentences together. I become stupid.

That's why people who seek out group flow often join startups or work for themselves. Serial entrepreneurs keep starting new business as much for the flow experience, as for the additional success.

With our sense of self out of the the way we are liberated from doubt and insecurity.

Creatives fail and the really good ones fail often.

Instead, over the past thirty years, in the world of action and adventure sports, in situations where asses really were on the line, the bounds of the possible have been pushed further and faster than ever before in history. We've seen near-exponential growth in ultimate human performance, which is both hyperbolic paradox and considerable mystery. Somehow, a generation's worth of iconoclastic misfits have rewritten the rules of the feasible, not just raising the bar but often obliterating it altogether. And this brings up one final question: Where-if anywhere-do our actual limits lie?

It was even odds that the thing I was the most afraid of didn't actually exist at all.

The reasons there are so many clichés about universes inside of dewdrops is because there are universes inside of dewdrops.