Summary of Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

“I want to build my life around flow states [the sense of being ‘in the zone’].” TF: This is something Josh Waitzkin (here) talks about often: journaling and using tools like HRV (heart-rate variability) devices to identify the patterns and prerequisites that create peak flow states or their opposites.

People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems,” and their descriptions of the joy of that state are so compelling that Csikszentmihalyi has called it an “optimal experience.” Many activities can induce a sense of flow, from painting to raci

The most highly creative form of normal absorption has been called flow. Flow occurs when one’s skills perfectly match the challenge of a task, when there is a sense of pleasure or “high,” when attention is totally focused on one’s activity, a loss of self-consciousness (but not necessarily self-awareness), and an expansion of the felt sense of tim