These five chemicals are flow’s mighty cocktail. Alone, each packs a punch, together a wallop. Consider the chain of events that takes us from pattern recognition through future prediction. Norepinephrine tightens focus (data acquisition); dopamine jacks pattern recognition (data processing); anandamide accelerates lateral thinking (widens the database searched by the pattern recognition system). The results, as basketball legend Bill Russell explains in his biography Second Wind, really do feel psychic:

Every so often a Celtic game would heat up so that it would become more than a physical or even mental game, and would be magical. That feeling is difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened I could feel my play rise to a new level.… At that special level all sorts of odd things happened.… It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. Even before the other team brought the ball in bounds, I could feel it so keenly that I’d want to shout to my teammates, ‘It’s coming there!’—except that I knew everything would change if I did. My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt then that I not only knew all the Celtics by heart but all the opposing players, and that they all knew me. There have been many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine.

Yet, the Transformers BASE jumpers weren’t just trying to predict the future, they were betting their lives on their predictions. And this level of psychic confidence takes an additional ingredient: trust. A lot of trust. “Three-fourths of what I saw on the way down was JT’s shoe,” says Devore. “If I didn’t trust him completely, if I decided to look away and double-check one of his actions? Most likely, I just put myself in a very bad situation.”

To this end, flow’s neurochemistry performs an added function: it accelerates social bonding. Ever fall in love? That high—the sleeplessness, giddiness, hyperactivity, loss of appetite, etc.—that’s dopamine and norepinephrine at work. These are the neurochemicals that reinforce romantic love. Endorphins serve a similar function, only showing up in maternal love (in infants) and general attachment (in adults). Serotonin, as well, further reinforces love and attachment (alongside oxytocin). And anandamide, as any pot smoker will attest, makes one feel open, expansive, and empathetic—all of which further improves connection.

About this last part there is no debate. Flow is a rush like no other. If you want grounds for comparison, consider the current use-abuse rates for mood-altering, mind-altering, and performance-enhancing drugs: In America, over 22 percent of the population has an illicit drug problem; one out of ten take antidepressants; 26 percent of kids are on stimulants, purportedly for ADHD, anecdotally for performance enhancement. And prescription drugs? They’ve just surpassed car accidents as the number one cause of accidental death. Add this up and you’ll find a trillion-dollar public-health crisis.

After Zimbardo recovered and was released, he was shocked to realize he viewed his stay in the hospital as a positive one: the time in his life that he learned to be self-reliant. “From this experience,” he later wrote, “I…learned that the past can be psychologically remodeled to make heaven of hell. Other people learn the opposite lesson, storing and recalling only the worst of times.… The horrors and sheer ugliness of the past they have experienced become a permanent filter through which they view all their current experiences.”

Zimbardo went on to become one of the most well-regarded psychologists of the twentieth century, author of more than fifty books, and past president of the American Psychological Association. He taught at both Yale and Stanford and was at the latter institution when Walter Mischel performed his famed marshmallow experiment. The results caught Zimbardo’s attention, but not because he was interested in delayed gratification. Rather, because they seemed to confirm his childhood suspicions about time.

Zimbardo noticed two competing “time perspectives” at work in Mischel’s experiment. A time perspective is the technical name for the “permanent filter” Zimbardo described. It’s essentially our attitude toward time. For example, in Mischel’s experiment, the kids who ate the marshmallow immediately were present hedonists. They lived for the now and not the later. It wasn’t that they were unable to delay gratification, it’s that not delaying gratification—the downstream result of being a present hedonist—was their strategy for living.

Obviously, Futures are more likely to achieve the 10,000 hours needed for mastery, but here too are unintentional consequences. Futures burn out. They become stressed-out workaholics. Blood pressure goes up, bowels get irritable, heart attacks increase, sex lives disintegrate, marriages fail, children become burdens, friends become memories, and the whole house of cards comes crashing down. So common is this experience that UCLA psychologist Steven Berglas has coined the term supernova burnout to describe the phenomenon. In other words, even when plans work out, Futures place a dangerous bet: too much delayed gratification can rob them of their motivation—which is the very thing that made them Futures in the first place.

After three decades of research, Zimbardo found that the healthiest, happiest, highest performers blend the best of both worlds. The optimal time perspective combines the energy, joy, and openness of Presents, with the strength, fortitude, and long-term vision of the Futures. But how to produce this blended perspective is the more important question.

Time perspective is possibly genetic, probably cultural, and definitely hard to shake. It is shaped by geography, religion, socioeconomic status, education, and a host of other powerful forces. It operates unconsciously and ubiquitously. But if optimal results require blending a present orientation and a future orientation, getting into flow is one of the most efficient mixing mechanisms at our disposal. Flow reorients Presents toward the future and Futures toward the present and both to considerable result.

Already, this has been proven correct in less extreme circumstances. In 2007, South Korean researchers looking at e-learning (electronic games, Web-based learning tools, and electronic tutoring) discovered a significant correlation between flow and positive learning attitudes and outcomes. In 2011, neuroscientists with the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) found that military snipers trained in flow decreased the time it took to acquire their targets by a factor of 2.3. Similar research run with amateur (i.e., nonmilitary) snipers found that flow cut the time it took to teach novices to shoot like experts by 50 percent. This means that flow doesn’t just provide a joyful, self-directed path toward mastery—it literally shortens the path.

Shane McConkey wasn’t so sure. He too had been eyeing Sacrifice for a while. Instead of rocks and death, he noticed that there was a tiny patch of snow above each cliff. So could he hop and pop and connect those dots? It was a tricky question. To make the entrance he’d need speed, enough to suck up his legs and sail over that boulder. And then things got interesting: a hard left midair, land on a dime, immediately leap right, zigzag a twenty-five-footer, then stomp the landing and straight-line off the monster air. Finding an interesting way to do something fun was McConkey’s modus operandi. Sacrifice was his kind of fun.

In 1998, Shane’s logic led him to Sacrifice. He nailed the line perfectly. Scott Gaffney filmed it—viewable in Something About McConkey—and the hop-and-drop ski technique known as “billy goating” was born. As billy-goating required new skills, it led Shane farther down the flow path, which led to even more skills, which opened up new possibilities, which drove him forward still. “During his big-mountain competition days,” wrote Micah Abrams in one of that era’s preeminent ski magazines, Freeze, “McConkey would routinely point out lines that snaked through rock faces and across gut-churning cliffs to his fellow competitors. More often than not, he was met with blank stares or rolled eyes, to which he would respond empathically: ‘Dude, it’s totally doable!’ Then he would go do it, and then he would win.”

For McConkey, ski-BASE gave him a way to start seeing really different lines. He has a phrase for aesthetically enticing terrain that had forever been off-limits because of gargantuan cliffs at the run’s end: “closeout lines.” With ski-BASE, these closeout lines were finally open for business. “My whole vision,” he says, “is that there are these impossible lines that no one would ever ski because they end in death cliffs. With parachutes, you can ski them. Those lines are totally doable now.”

So how far can we take this? It’s a good question, with the “we” being the most important part. Flow, as Csikszentmihalyi discovered, is ubiquitous. This means that all the superpowers detailed in this first section of the book—the fluid brain-wave control exhibited by Laird Hamilton, the deep relationship to the Voice enjoyed by Dean Potter, the near-telepathic prowess of the Red Bull Air Force, and the accelerated path to mastery trod by Shane McConkey—are available to any and all. This is who we are and how we’re wired. Flow is our birthright. But what do we do with that knowledge? As always, that part is up to us.

Ammons is a true polymath. He holds degrees in math, physics, and psychology, is a classical guitarist, black belt in karate, successful businessman, acclaimed author, respected philosopher, and, without question, one of the most revered kayakers in history. In 2000, Outside made a list of the ten greatest adventurers since 1900, with their major criterion being “their achievements permanently altered the landscape of adventure.” Ammons is number seven.

Whitewater-wise, his achievements include over fifty first descents, a sizable number of solo expeditions, and a few, um, more peculiar trips. On a number of occasions, Ammons has paddled Class V (expert only) rivers without a paddle, or hand-paddling as they call it. Many people think of hand-paddling as a stunt, and solo-paddling—especially on a big river—as suicide. To Ammons, as he explains in his book Whitewater Philosophy, both are a form of research: “Perhaps the most beautiful experience in kayaking is flow. There isn’t any other sport that demands such intimacy with nature, moving in harmony with the power and intricacy of the river, and whitewater kayaking is the preeminent flow sport. When you paddle, well, there is the feeling that you are pouring yourself right into and through the river, with no distractions at all, you can weave yourself right into the current. Soloing is the open door for understanding how close to the river you can be.”

But consequences do more than catch our attention: they also drive neurochemistry. As risk increases, so do norepinephrine and dopamine, the feel-good chemicals the brain uses to amplify focus and enhance performance. Because norepinephrine and dopamine feel really good, playing with this trigger often produces long-lasting effects: risk takers are transformed into risk seekers. “There was a rush,” Doug Ammons once wrote, “and for that moment we couldn’t tell the difference between joy and the grab in our throat, but we knew without saying that it was a new path. And from that point on nothing seemed the same.”

What all of this adds up to is options. Certainly, risk is needed for flow, but if you don’t want to take physical risks, take mental risks. Take social risks. Emotional risks. Creative risks. Especially creative risks. The application of imagination—one very shorthand definition of creativity—is all about mental chance taking. And the risk is real. Loss of respect, loss of resources, loss of time—the consequences of betting on a bad idea can certainly threaten survival.

Ammons was betting his life on the ability to summon and maintain one of the most elusive states on earth, a hefty wager to say the least. Yet he could place this bet with confidence because he wasn’t only relying on risk to trigger flow. He was also depending on two other external triggers—“rich environment” and “deep embodiment”—to keep him in the state.

A “rich environment” is a combination platter of novelty, unpredictability, and complexity—three elements that catch and hold our attention much like risk. Novelty means both danger and opportunity. To our forbearers, a strange scent in the wind could be prey or predator, but either way it paid to pay attention. Unpredictability means we don’t know what happens next, thus we pay extra attention to what happens next. Complexity, when there’s lots of salient information coming at us at once, does more of the same.

The Stikine has been described as one of the world’s forgotten wonders, but it’s unlikely to become a tourist attraction anytime soon. The weather is cold and gray on a good day, downright mean on a bad. The surrounding wilderness covers an area twice the size of France, with a human population numbering in the low thousands. Grizzly bears, meanwhile, are everywhere.

Yet the wildlife and wildlands are just sideshow attractions. The canyon is the real show: a vast gorge carved by a ferocious torrent, some sixty miles of colossal Class V+ whitewater: twenty-five “Holy Mother of God” rapids, hundreds of smaller tortures, and a reputation as the Mount Everest of expedition kayaking.

Ammons writes: The flow is between 8,000 and 20,000 cfs at low water and levels can change as much as ten feet in a day. Many sections are from 60 to over 120 feet per mile, and as any big water paddler knows, when you combine steep and narrow with lots of water, you’re talking the real shit. Attempts are made at low water in the early fall, and there’s the very real possibility of a freeze or snow, which has happened to two different teams.  For 70 percent of the canyon, it is very difficult or utterly impossible to climb out, with vertical walls on both sides rising straight out of the river. If you do have to bail and climb out, as has happened to eight teams, it is easy to get lost up on the plateau and entirely possible to get killed by the wildlife.… This isn’t California. It’s the goddamned Canadian wilderness.

Which was about the time Doug Ammons started considering a solo expedition down the Stikine.

“Soloing requires huge commitment. You can’t rely on your partners or ask their opinion, or even take solace from their presence. There’s no support. You can only reach inside yourself for answers. There’s a purity there, a stripped-down clarity that demands only one thing—belonging. To me, that’s the essence of good paddling: belonging to the place. Being a part of it, merging into it. To be a drop of water on the Stikine—that’s what I wanted. That’s when the truth would come out.”

In the world of philanthropy, helper’s high is the term for an altruism-triggered flow state, literally brought on by the act of helping another. Originally discovered in the 1990s by Big Brother/Big Sister founder Allan Luks in those involved in front-line, hands-on altruism (like volunteering in a soup kitchen), helper’s high has since turned up in a far wider range of do-gooder activities (like bidding at a charity auction). There’s even a milder flashback version—when people recall their good deeds, a helper’s high afterglow can arise.

And technology users are only half of this picture, as technology creators have also harnessed this power. “At its best, writing code happens in a state of ‘flow’?” reads a line in Oracle’s Developer Insight Series. And it’s not just Oracle employees who feel this way. So important has flow become to software development that industry analysts and authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister argue that time-based accounting (paying people for hours worked) needs to be replaced by flow-based accounting (paying people for the amount of time they spend in flow at work), writing: “The phenomena of flow and immersion give us a more realistic way to model how time is applied to a development task. What matters is not the amount of time you’re present, but the amount of time that you’re working at your full potential. An hour in flow really accomplishes something, but ten six-minute work periods sandwiched between eleven interruptions won’t accomplish anything.”

Nor is it just coders. As University of California, Berkeley, biophysicist and one of the Internet’s original architects, Reese Jones, points out: “All of the basic activities that led to today’s high-tech revolution—circuit design, software design, network design—require laser-focused attention and produce flow, and doing any of these tasks well is just not possible without the state.” So if you’re looking for a nonathletic example of the kind of revolution that occurs when a group of people begin harnessing flow on a regular basis, Silicon Valley is not a bad place to start.

Humans evolved in an era of immediacy, where threats were always of the tiger-in-the-bush variety. Immediate threats require immediate responses, and this fact has shaped our brain more than any other. Consider information processing. Every second, our senses gather way more data than we can actually handle. As a result, much of what the brain does is tease apart the critical from the casual. Since nothing is more critical than survival, the first stop most of this incoming information makes is our danger detector: the amygdala.

An almond-shaped sliver of the temporal lobe, the amygdala is responsible for primal emotions like hate, anger, and fear. It’s our early warning system, an organ always on high alert. With most incoming sensory information heading there, when there’s danger lurking in the environment, we don’t have to rely on artificial forces like office design to drive attention. Merely by plying their trade in a “high consequence” environment—with high consequence being the first of the external triggers we’ll be examining—extreme athletes rely on risk to drive focus, the requisite first step toward producing flow.

But consequences do more than catch our attention: they also drive neurochemistry. As risk increases, so do norepinephrine and dopamine, the feel-good chemicals the brain uses to amplify focus and enhance performance. Because norepinephrine and dopamine feel really good, playing with this trigger often produces long-lasting effects: risk takers are transformed into risk seekers. “There was a rush,” Doug Ammons once wrote, “and for that moment we couldn’t tell the difference between joy and the grab in our throat, but we knew without saying that it was a new path. And from that point on nothing seemed the same.”

Ammons, meanwhile, was counting on all of these external triggers to survive the Stikine. He knew all three would be present the moment his boat hit the water. No longer on land (deep embodiment), alone in one of the largest and most isolated wildernesses on the planet (rich environment), and closing in on Entry Falls, the first major rapid and the place Bob McDougall almost died (high consequence). Without question, he was primed for flow.

THE PARADOX OF CONTROL

Yet it wasn’t until “Wicked Wanda,” the Stikine’s third major rapid, that Ammons felt the state’s full embrace. A steep ramp, an evil hole, a pummeling wave-train run-out—Wanda’s is wicked all right. Ammons got spun upside down somewhere between the ramp and the hole. It could have been a disaster; it was a blessing in disguise. When he rolled to right himself, he rolled right into flow. “Up to that point,” he says, “it was taking everything to hold it together. I was so far out there. Totally alone. The intimidation factor was keeping me out of flow. But rolling required deep embodiment and that did the trick. Halfway through the roll, I just snapped into the state.”

Just in time. Located a few rapids downstream was Wasson’s—what legendary kayaker Gerry Moffat calls a “million-dollar hole.” “Meaning,” he says, “most people wouldn’t paddle it for a million dollars.” But there’s no retreat. Wasson’s is surrounded by vertical cliffs, so portaging, hiking upstream, or climbing out are impossible. It’s do or die.

For Ammons, it was almost die.

“Wasson’s has two big disaster features that have to be avoided,” he says. “But there was no line. The right side and the center were North Shore impact zones—just incredibly violent. Everything was punching left, pushing into the main hole. No matter what I did, I was 99 percent sure I would be annihilated.”

Ammons was out of options; he let himself get swallowed. “It was the most unbelievable sensation, this thing I knew was impossible, that just couldn’t work, I got to watch myself piece it together. I could feel all of the river’s reactions and could feel myself melding with them. My goal was to do this inconceivable thing, to be a drop of water. Surviving Wasson’s was proof I had done it. From that point on, I knew the impossible was possible.”

What creates this feeling is a two-part contradiction. Part one: Flow is exceptionally pleasurable, but mostly in retrospect. “It is this absence of…emotion, of almost any kind of conscious awareness of one’s state, that is at the heart of flow,” writes University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman. “Consciousness and emotion are there to correct your trajectory; when what you are doing is seamlessly perfect, you don’t need them.” Part two: You may be unemotional, but you’re not asleep. In the throes of the paradox, you’re fully aware of the ass you’re kicking—just not entirely certain you deserve all the credit.

Ammons agrees: “There aren’t any words to describe this feeling. Too frequently, athletes fall back on clichés and machismo. They paddle something hard and when someone puts a microphone in their face, all they can come up with is ‘I tamed that bitch.’ But when you’re actually in those moments, if you’re going to survive, nobody is arrogant. You have to be humble and open to access this control. Of course, since most people’s knowledge of action and adventure sports comes from energy drink ads and ‘blending with the environment’ doesn’t really move product, we’re sold this ‘extreme dude’ lie instead.”

But the extreme dude lie is hiding a potent flow hack: humility. “When you’re arrogant and egotistical,” says Dr. Olds, “you’re shutting out complexity, novelty, and unpredictability to preserve a distorted self-image. Any incoming information that could lead to self-doubt is stamped out. It’s a massive data reduction. Humility moves in the other direction, it opens us up and increases incoming information. As a result, there is more opportunity for pattern recognition, more dopamine, and less need for judgmental metacognition.”

Yet, despite the magnitude of his accomplishment, it would be a very long time before anyone heard the tale. Besides his wife and two close friends, Ammons told no one for eighteen years. Since then, other than a short essay and a few incidental mentions, this is the first time many details have seen print. He’s also refused to profit from the experience, turning down a long list of film deals and sponsorship opportunities. In fact, in the history of action and adventure sports, the Stikine solo may be the greatest story never told and one of the few times someone has pulled off the impossible and flat out refused to use it for personal gain. Humility matters.

On a final note, it’s been over two decades—but no one has yet to repeat Ammon’s solo.

On her way to never, and capitalizing on her passion for water, Cruikshank opened a scuba shop in Vancouver. She soon became friendly with another dive-operation owner, Kirk Krack, and he introduced her to the ancient sport of free diving. Arguably the simplest athletic pursuit in the world, free diving—or diving without a breathing apparatus (i.e., scuba tanks)—requires only a body and a breath. Divers suck in nearly as much air as possible, then descend into the depths of the ocean. Sometimes they use fins; sometimes they go barefoot. Occasionally, weights are involved. And every now and again, the big blue is traded for the shallow end of the pool and divers compete in “static apnea”—essentially hanging limp in the water to see who can hold their breath the longest.

There are dangers, of course. When outside pressure crushes inside airspaces, the results can be exceptionally painful. Eardrums rupture with regularity. The biggest threat is blacking out, which can happen because of low oxygen, high carbon dioxide, loss of blood pressure, or several other factors. It’s for all of these reasons that, as Alec Wilkinson explained in the pages of The New Yorker, “[Free diving] is frequently described as the world’s second most dangerous sport, after jumping off skyscrapers with parachutes.”

Krack had uncovered a technique for triggering the mammalian diving reflex, a reflex that optimizes respiration and, like dolphins, whales, and some birds, allows us to operate underwater for extended periods of time. Here’s how it works: When the nerves of the human face come in contact with water, our heartbeat begins to slow (10 to 30 percent in amateurs; up to 50 percent in professionals). A slower heart rate requires less oxygen, leaving more left over for other organs. Next, as pressure from depth increases, blood leaves our extremities—first fingers and toes, next hands and feet, finally arms and legs—and surrounds the heart and brain. Lastly, during deeper dives, organs and circulatory walls allow blood plasma and water to pass through them, preventing the chest cavity from collapsing inward with the massive pressure increase.

While the mammalian diving reflex was first discovered by navy scientists back in the 1960s, so small were free diving circles, it remained a well-kept secret until here in the twenty-first century. But Krack got obsessed. He learned everything he could about the reflex, built training programs around the ideas, then opened Performance Freediving International. He taught folks about peak inhalations (filling all pulmonary airspaces) and packing (taking in tiny sips of air after the lungs have been filled, which, if done wrong, can lead to broken ribs, punctured tracheas, and quick blackouts) and breath-ups (a way to lower heart rate, increase blood oxygen, and dispel carbon dioxide). He got very good at this teaching. By the time he was getting to know Cruikshank, Krack had already coached both Brett Leemaster and Tanya Streeter to world records.

Thus, in the Caymans and roughly eighteen months after first taking up free diving, Mandy-Rae took a very short boat ride out to the competition area—really nothing more than a square of ocean marked off by buoys—grabbed hold of that weighted sled once again, and let herself be dragged to depth. If only it were that easy. Sure, in no limits, the sled and the air bag do all the work, but that turns the trip into a purely mental game. “Physically,” says Cruickshank, “all that’s required is you hang on and go for a ride. Mentally, it’s like playing chess against yourself. Its will and technique versus panic and pressure. It’s about forcing the mind to stop thinking. It’s about flow. If you can’t get into flow, if you can’t melt into the water, become part of the water, then you can’t freedive—there’s just no other way to go deep.”

On September 23, 2001, Cruikshank set her first world record, a 136-meter “no limits” descent. The following year, she set a second world record for a 6:16 static apnea breath-hold. A year after that it was no-fins “constant ballast”—divers descend and ascend with weights and under their own power—world record of forty-one meters. And she was just getting warmed up.

In total, Cruickshank set seven world records in seven years, including her March 24, 2004, constant ballast (this time with fins) breakthrough of seventy-eight meters. “That was the one people will always remember,” says Krack. “She beat the previous record by ten meters. It was a huge jump. One of the largest single jumps in the history of the sport.” Cruikshank explains it differently: “I’m just an ordinary woman who learned she was capable of extraordinary things.”

Mandy-Rae took up an activity that demanded she live in the now. Not metaphorically. Not in some groovy hippie way. Quite simply: 300 feet underwater, there’s no way to be elsewhere. When she says, “It’s really important to not let myself get consumed,” she means, when diving, not thinking about the future (where she could run out of air) or the past (where a poor decision made her use up too much air) is survival. Instead, Cruickshank has trained herself to keep attention right here, right now—which is the only time flow can show up and the only time we’re capable of extraordinary.

Yet the here and now isn’t seen much these days. In our always-on, hyperconnected world, there are endless reasons to be elsewhere. Every time we answer an e-mail or return a text or check our Facebook page, we are there and not here. And just as frequently, we are then and not now. With inboxes piling up, today’s luncheon, tonight’s parent-teacher conference, tomorrow’s deadlines, the report due next week, the performance review right after that, well, no wonder we can’t live in the moment.

Instead, as Douglas Rushkoff writes in Present Shock, “[W]e tend to exist in a distracted present, where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored. Our ability to plan—much less follow through on it—is undermined by our need to be able to improvise our way through any number of external impacts that stand to derail us at any moment. Instead of finding a stable foothold in the here and now, we end up reacting to an ever-present assault of simultaneous impulses and commands.”

Worse, as anyone who ever attempted meditation has quickly discovered, changing this tendency is not easy. Using the mind to silence the mind is a long-term endeavor. Tibetan Buddhist meditators—who have arguably self-selected for this ability—can spend over two decades learning to wield it reliably. Yet Mandy-Rae’s ascension didn’t take decades. It didn’t even take years. She went absolute beginner to world record holder in eighteen months, and why? She took a shortcut into the now.

Just as flow states have external triggers, conditions in the outer environment that create more flow, they also have internal triggers, conditions in our inner environment that create more flow. Internal triggers are psychological strategies that drive attention into the now. Back in the 1970s, Csikszentmihalyi identified “clear goals,” “immediate feedback,” and “the challenge/skill ratio” as the three most critical. Let’s take a closer look.

In 2003, Simons showed a short film of basketball players passing a ball around a court to his students, and asked them to count the passes. When the film was over, he had one question: “How many people saw the gorilla?” As it happened, midway through the clip, a guy in a gorilla costume walked to the middle of the circle of basketball players, beat his chest a few times, then walked off. As it happened, most of the students didn’t see the gorilla.

Simon’s “invisible gorilla experiment” has since been repeated dozens of times—most recently with radiologists looking at radiological screens and a cartoon gorilla—and always with the same result. Not many people see the gorilla. In the radiologist’s version (a 2012 study run at Brigham and Woman’s Hospital in Boston), 83 percent of doctors tested failed to spot the animal. The point is this: when the brain is charged with a clear goal, focus narrows considerably, the unimportant is disregarded, and the now is all that’s left.

Just as important, in the now, there’s no past or future and a lot less room for self—which are the three intruders most likely to yank us to the then. This also tells us something about emphasis. Philip Zimbardo pointed out that Western society is dominated by Futures—i.e., those well-trained to strive for goals. Thus, when considering “clear goals,” most have a tendency to skip over the adjective (clear) to get to the noun (goals). When told to set clear goals, we immediately visualize ourselves on the Olympic podium, the Academy Award stage, or the Fortune 500 list saying, “I’ve been picturing this moment since I was fifteen,” and think that’s the point.

It’s not the point.

Those podium moments can pull us out of the present. Even if success is seconds away, it’s still a future event subject to hopes, fears, and all sorts of now-crushing distraction. Think of the long list of infamous sporting chokes: the dropped pass in the final seconds of the Super Bowl; the missed putt at the end of the Augusta Masters. In those moments, the gravity of the goal pulled the participants out of the now; when, ironically, the now was all they needed to win.

If creating more flow is our aim, then the emphasis falls on “clear” and not “goals.” Clarity gives us certainty. We know what to do and we know where to focus our attention while doing it. When goals are clear, metacognition is replaced by in-the-moment cognition, and the self stays out of the picture.

“When I dive constant ballast,” says Mandy-Rae Cruickshank, “I don’t think about breaking a record, I can’t ever think about the whole dive. It’s too overwhelming. I have to chunk it down, create tiny, clear goals. I go through kick cycles. The Voice (the voice of intuition) keeps count. I want to pay attention through one cycle, then the next, then the next. Keep the count, that’s my only goal. If I keep the count, I can stay in flow the whole dive.”

How hard is that? Answers vary, but the general thinking is about 4 percent. That’s it. That’s the sweet spot. If you want to trigger flow, the challenge should be 4 percent greater than the skills. In technical terms, the sweet spot is the end result of what’s known as the Yerkes-Dobson law—the fact that increased stress leads to increased performance up to a certain intensity, beyond which performance levels off or declines. In real-world terms, it’s not much at all.

In most situations, we blow by 4 percent without even noticing. But this is not the case in extreme sports. In the big waves, big rivers, and big-mountains, a half degree of difficulty can mean the difference between home for dinner and never home again. Under these conditions, the desire for improvement keeps athletes from understepping, and the need for survival from overstepping.

This sweet spot keeps attention locked in the present. When the challenge is firmly within the boundaries of known skills—meaning I’ve done it before and am fairly certain I can do so again—the outcome is predetermined. We’re interested, not riveted. But when we don’t know what’s going to happen next, we pay more attention to the next. Uncertainty is our rocket ride into the now.

It’s also for this reason that uncertainty causes the brain to release dopamine. A lot of dopamine. When anything can happen, survival could be at stake. Dopamine heightens attention and pattern recognition—two things that are absolutely essential to dealing with the unknown. Of course, being dopamine, this is all exceptionally pleasurable. Or, as Stanford neurologist Robert Sapolsky likes to say: “maybe (meaning uncertainty) is addictive like nothing else out there.”

And for you and me, this is all very good news. A feel-good sweet spot for flow that only requires a 4 percent increase in effort? Seriously, who can’t push 4 percent further than the last time around? Or, for that matter, clarify goals or tighten feedback loops? It’s not too difficult to keep flow’s internal triggers in mind when you’re chugging through your daily routine. Unlike flow’s external triggers—which are admittedly harder to pull without being an action and adventure sport athlete—these internal triggers are strategies accessible to any and all. In fact, the only real problem is how deceptively ordinary these strategies appear.

Don’t be fooled.

Despite the ordinary, as Mandy-Rae discovered, pull these triggers frequently enough and results get extraordinary in a hurry.

Mindset refers to our feelings toward basic qualities like intelligence and athletic talent. After more than thirty years of research, Dweck found that most of us have one of two basic mindsets. Those who have “fixed mindsets” believe abilities like intelligence and athletic talent are innate and unchangeable—i.e., fixed at birth. Those with “growth mindsets” believe abilities are gained through dedication and hard work, that natural-born talents are merely starting points for a much longer learning process. When Kirk Krack taught Mandy-Rae she was capable of the impossible—and she got curious to find out what else was possible—that’s having a growth mindset. And it’s this same mindset that Bentley and Dweck suspected was responsible for the flow states of winning racecar drivers.

The short answer is that a growth mindset is one of the secrets to maximizing the total amount of flow in your life. The longer answer starts with the challenge/skill ratio. If you consistently overestimate or underestimate your abilities, then tuning that ratio is like playing darts handcuffed and blindfolded. To find 4 percent, you need accurate self-knowledge—and this is tricky for fixed mindsetters.

“When you think about it,” Dweck writes in her book Mindset, “this makes sense. If, like those with the growth mindset, you believe you can develop yourself, then you’re open to accurate information about your current abilities, even if it’s unflattering. What’s more, if you’re oriented toward learning, you need accurate information about your current abilities in order to learn effectively. However, if everything is either good news or bad news—as it is with fixed-mindset people—distortion almost inevitably enters the picture. Some outcomes are magnified, others are explained away, and before you know it, you don’t know yourself at all.”

A growth mindset moves us in the other direction. Self-knowledge accumulates over time. Finding flow becomes less a quest than a habit. “It’s a job to continuously find flow,” says Mike Horn, arguably the greatest living adventurer (among other accomplishments, Horn and a companion became the first to hike to the North Pole during the winter). “You have to train your body to prepare for the state, you have to train your mind to prepare for the state. You have to know yourself, and your limits, know exactly what you’re afraid of and exactly how hard to push past it. That’s serious work. But get it right and not only does it become easier to find flow once, it becomes easier to find it again and again.”

There are two common misconceptions about flow. The first is that the state works like a light switch—on or off. You’re either in flow or out. Yet flow is not binary. The state is just one step in a four-part flow cycle. It’s impossible to experience flow without moving through this entire cycle. And this brings us to the second critical misconception: that flow always feels flowy.

The first step in the flow cycle is known as “struggle.” Herbert Benson, the Harvard cardiologist who did much of the foundational research on this cycle, chose that name for a reason. Struggle is a loading phase: we are overloading the brain with information. “For a businessperson,” writes Benson in his book The Breakout Principle, “this may be concentrated problem analysis or fact gathering. The serious athlete may engage in extensive and demanding physical training. The person on a spiritual quest may plunge into concentrated study…or intense prayer, meditation, or soul searching.”

The first step in the flow cycle is known as “struggle.” Herbert Benson, the Harvard cardiologist who did much of the foundational research on this cycle, chose that name for a reason. Struggle is a loading phase: we are overloading the brain with information. “For a businessperson,” writes Benson in his book The Breakout Principle, “this may be concentrated problem analysis or fact gathering. The serious athlete may engage in extensive and demanding physical training. The person on a spiritual quest may plunge into concentrated study…or intense prayer, meditation, or soul searching.”

A profound chemical change takes place during struggle. To amp up focus and alertness, stress hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine are pumped into the system. Tension rises. Frustration as well. Our problems seem unsolvable, our effort unsustainable, and the whole situation feels as far from flow as one could get.

How we handle these negative feelings is critical. In struggle, we’re using the conscious mind to identify patterns, then repeating those patterns enough times that they become chunks. Until that happens, we are awkward and uncomfortable. To move through struggle takes a leap of faith that the effort will really result in skill acquisition. By definition, this demands a growth mindset.

The next stage in the cycle is “release.” To move out of struggle and into flow, you must first pass through this second stage. Release means to take your mind off the problem, to, as Benson says, “completely sever prior thought and emotional patterns.” If you’ve been cramming for a test all day, go for a walk. If you’ve been trying to master double black-diamond ski slopes, take a few runs down the blues. If the innovation team has been pulling all-nighters for a week, send them out for dinner and a movie. The method is unimportant. The message is relaxation. The moment this occurs, another chemical change follows: nitric oxide floods the system. This endogenous gaseous signaling molecule causes stress hormones to decline and feel-good neurochemicals like dopamine and endorphins to rise in their place.

Norwegian skier and BASE jumper Karina Hollekim has a great story about release. In 2002, after meeting Shane McConkey, she decided to become the first woman to give ski-BASE a try. This was nothing she approached casually. After two years of serious preparation, Hollekim decided she was finally ready. The jump took place at Lover’s Leap, off the exact same cliff that McConkey had first ski-BASE’d. “I was really nervous,” she says. “But Shane was a great mentor. He knew I was ready, knew I had the skills, knew that the best thing he could do was take my mind off things. So he tagged along and brought his mother and a huge bag of fireworks. On top of the cliff, he lit off this rocket packed with tiny plastic skydivers. It exploded, then started raining down flaming skydivers. It was so funny. I remember rolling around in the grass laughing. And that did the trick. I relaxed and let my training take over. It made for a great jump. Just right into the zone.”

And the zone, the flow state itself, is the third stage in this cycle. Struggle gives way to release gives way to flow—hallelujah.

Afterward, we move into the fourth and final step in the cycle: “recovery.” Flow is an extremely expensive state for the body to produce and maintain. It requires a lot of energy and a lot of neurochemistry and both take a little while to replenish. This is some of what goes on in recovery. More important, memory consolidation is taking place. Information is moving from short-term holding into long-term storage. Here, to borrow the gamer’s phrase, we are “leveling up,” or, as Benson prefers, “returning to a new normal.”

But just like struggle, recovery is another cycle step that doesn’t feel flowy. Handling the massive delta between the world-at-your-feet sensation that comes with flow and the utterly ordinary, all-too-human reality that shows up afterward is not always pleasant. There’s no more feel-good neurochemistry, no more superhuman powers. It can take a considerable amount of resilience to navigate recovery; here too a growth mindset makes a difference.

“If you don’t believe developmental learning is possible,” says Jamie Wheal, high-performance expert and executive director of the Flow Genome Project, “then it’s hard to see flow as the result of something you did differently. Or could do again, or do better with more practice. After experiencing flow, the person with a fixed mindset wants to take unilateral credit for the amazing performance that came with the state. That’s the basis of their self-esteem. If I can do that, then I must be that—all the time. But we know that flow is a transitory state—it comes, and it goes. So when it leaves, the same person who took all of the credit for its presence is left with all of the blame for its absence. For someone with a fixed mindset, that’s often too much to tolerate. At the expense of health and relationships, they start seeking the high all the time; or they self-handicap their performance with substance abuse, poor training, reckless decisions—so they’ve got the easy out of ‘Well, I wasn’t really trying.’?” And for fixed mindsetters, this isn’t where problems end. To find flow again, the entire cycle needs to restart. This means moving from recovery back into struggle. But if you’re stressed out about not being in flow during recovery, then getting fired up for serious frustration of struggle becomes a much harder task. This is also where action and adventure athletes have another advantage—recovery comes built in.

Most of these sports are weather dependent. A big-wave surfer needs big waves; snowboarders prefer deep powder; kayakers want specific water levels to run rivers. These “epic conditions” do not show up every day. In this world, when the big storm blows in, everyone takes advantage. Then the storm passes, and it’s time to relax. This built-in lag time creates space for rejuvenation. It allows athletes to build up reserves during recovery and prepare for next round of struggle.

And this too doesn’t happen much anymore. In today’s world, rarely do we give ourselves permission to recover; rarely does anyone else. Finish one project and there are always a dozen more deadlines to be met. In fact, in most of our lives, the reward for having a high-flow experience and pulling off something challenging at work is usually more work, more responsibilities, and less time to meet them all. Yet if we want to flow from cycle to cycle, we need to take full advantage of recovery to regroup and recharge. In short, on this path, you have to go slow to go fast.

Equally important, as we’ll see in the next section, sometimes you don’t just have to go slow to go fast—sometimes you have to go sideways.

LATERALIZATION

Ian Walsh was born May 10, 1983, on Maui, Hawaii, and started surfing not long after he could walk. Blessed by geography and timing, Walsh grew up down the block from Jaws, the big-wave mecca of the tow-surf movement. As he was hitting puberty, the movement was hitting its stride. Forty-foot waves, fifty-foot waves, sixty-foot waves—Walsh had a front-row seat. “I grew up watching the greatest show on earth,” he says.

This also meant that two and three wave hold-downs—which would come from paddling Jaws—were too far outside his comfort zone. This is the critical detail. Walsh’s philosophy is: “It’s not how good you are; it’s how good you want to be.” He has a growth mindset. He also had a lifetime’s worth of experience with flow and knew exactly how far he could use the state to stretch performance—but multiwave wipeouts were more than he could handle. They pushed the challenge level too high. So instead of trying to muscle through, Walsh took an entirely different tack—he “lateralized.”

In technical terms, Walsh began looking outside his domain of expertise for help surmounting his problem. In nontechnical terms, on a 2008 flight to Hawaii, he opened up his in-flight magazine and saw pictures of a woman swimming with dolphins. The article was about Mandy-Rae Cruikshank and Kirk Krack and their work at Performance Freediving International. Walsh read the article and learned that there were techniques that could increase his breath-holding capabilities. Free diving, he decided, might give him the confidence boost he needed to mentally prepare to paddle Jaws.

These early Camp 4 residents chased an altered state into an alternative lifestyle and their weirdo plan worked—their incredible success on the walls was the proof. Want more proof? Powell’s innovation spread like wildfire.

Over on the North Shore of Oahu, at the same time Camp 4 was being established, Greg Noll and a handful of California transplants were creating a big-wave surfing community all their own. Pretty soon, there were skaters in Dogtown, windsurfers at Hood River, freeskiers in Jackson Hole, mountain bikers in Marin, downhill mountain bikers on Mount Fromme—this list is long. Why has there been near-exponential growth in ultimate human performance these past few decades? Because action and adventure sports athletes discovered that one of the easiest ways to find flow is to band together to chase the state.

Why is “together” such an effective strategy? For starters, the obvious. Humans are a social species. We’re competitive, cooperative, sexually attracted, and all the rest. These are all exceptionally powerful motivators. As a result, when other people are present, we pay more attention to the present. Companionship drives focus into the now—it’s arguably the simplest flow hack in the world.

And the not so obvious? Well, that’s where Keith Sawyer comes into our story. A professor of psychology, education, and business at the Washington University in St. Louis, Sawyer got interested in this question via the group dynamics of improvisational jazz. Since early childhood, Sawyer played piano. By the time he was a teenager, he was playing in groups. That’s when he first noticed it. “When you play in ensembles there’s a shift that can occur,” he says. “It’s an incredible sensation. The group finds its groove. Creativity goes through the roof. Performance soars. Suddenly everyone can anticipate what the other person is going to do before they do it. It’s an emergent property; a whole is greater than the sum of its parts effect.”

And the not so obvious? Well, that’s where Keith Sawyer comes into our story. A professor of psychology, education, and business at the Washington University in St. Louis, Sawyer got interested in this question via the group dynamics of improvisational jazz. Since early childhood, Sawyer played piano. By the time he was a teenager, he was playing in groups. That’s when he first noticed it. “When you play in ensembles there’s a shift that can occur,” he says. “It’s an incredible sensation. The group finds its groove. Creativity goes through the roof. Performance soars. Suddenly everyone can anticipate what the other person is going to do before they do it. It’s an emergent property; a whole is greater than the sum of its parts effect.”

Sawyer really wanted to understand this effect, but took a little while getting around to it. He came out of MIT with a degree in computer science, spent a few years in the business world, but eventually his old interest won out. In 1990, Sawyer began a University of Chicago doctoral program in psychology under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. His fascination with group dynamics soon led him to the literature of high performance, where he discovered a problem: “All the studies that had been run on high performance were about solo performers. There was this huge gap in what led to high performance in groups. Almost no one had done work on the topic.”

Yet Sawyer’s partnership with Csikszentmihalyi proved fortuitous. In his 1990 book Flow, Csikszentmihalyi described a peculiar phenomenon that arose in groups: “Surgeons say that during a difficult operation they have the sensation that the entire operating team is a single organism, moved by the same purpose; they describe it as a ‘ballet’ in which the individual is subordinated to the group performance, and all involved share in the feeling of harmony and power.”

Csikszentmihalyi suspected this feeling was the by-product of individual members of the group being in flow. Sawyer thought something more dynamic was going on. In Group Genius, he explains it this way: “My years of playing piano in jazz ensembles convinced me that what happened in any one person’s mind could never explain what made one night’s performance shine and another a dud. At any second during a performance, an almost invisible musical exchange could take the piece in a new direction; later, no one could remember who was responsible for what. In jazz, the group has the ideas, not the individual musicians.”

Sawyer took a field biologist’s approach to decoding this dynamic: heading out into the world to videotape incredible creative groups engaged in improvisational performance. His studies ran the gamut, from improv-theater performers to earthquake-relief workers. He developed a technique known as “interaction analysis,” a research tool that allowed him to chart the real-time conversational turns that make collaboration possible. After fifteen years of research, Sawyer realized that Csikszentmihalyi hadn’t taken things far enough. “When performance peaks in groups,” he says, “this isn’t just about individuals in flow—it’s the group entering the state together, a collective merger of action and awareness, a ‘group flow.’?”

And wherever group flow shows up, it leaves its mark. The same pleasure chemicals behind individual flow also arrive with the group variation—only we seem to like them more. In comparison studies run by St. Bonaventure University psychologist Charles Walker, “solitary flow” (what Doug Ammons experienced on the Stikine) was measured against “coactive flow” (this comes from individual activities done in groups, like surfers sharing a break) was measured against “interactive flow” (where interaction is inherent to the activity, like rock climbing with a partner). Walker discovered that the more social an activity, the higher “flow enjoyment”—the level of joy experienced in flow—was for participants.

Higher enjoyment correlates to higher motivation, of course, but these same chemicals also enhance performance and improve social bonding (more on this in a moment). As a result, in group flow, spontaneity, cooperation, communication, creativity, productivity, and overall performance all go through the roof. “In a study of more than 300 professionals at a strategy consulting firm, a government agency, and a petrochemical company,” writes Sawyer, “…the people who participated in group flow were the highest performers.”

And the better news: Group flow is eminently hackable. In fact, in Yosemite, this is exactly what happened. By banding together to chase flow, those climbers turned life in Camp 4 into one giant group flow trigger.

The 10 percent of American households who owned VCRs in 1983 blossomed to 30 percent by 1985. Historians feel 1986 was the turning point, the year video-rental sales eclipsed movie-ticket sales and the moment the technology truly exploded. And with his résumé of perfect timing, there was Stacy Peralta, ready to ride that wave.

Before the availability of cheap VCRs, the fragmented nature of the action and adventure sports world acted like a brake on innovation. With communities isolated from one another and magazines the only available messenger—and the difficulty of dissecting dynamic moves through static images—novelty spread slowly. When someone in California developed a new trick, years could pass before skaters in Wisconsin were throwing them consistently. The VCR changed the game. Flicks like Chin became training tools, with guys like Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen as de facto professors. Skaters could rewind and rewatch. They could pause. In other words, in action and adventure sports, the arrival of the VCR marked the moment innovation became open sourced.

While most skydivers put in a minimum of 200 airplane leaps before attempting a BASE jump, the Gambler gave it a go after twelve. He never looked back. Gambalie went on to set a number of BASE records, including the longest free fall—twenty-six seconds, off the Troll Wall in Norway—and also found ways to put his security training to good use. For “insurance” reasons, jumping off buildings is frowned upon, so he would dress as a technician to sneak past security, then use his knowledge of locks and alarms to get to the launch site. These tactics helped him become the first to leap off New York’s Chrysler Building, wherein, after hiding in the building all night, Gambalie got off a 5 A.M. launch, silently floated to the ground, then cemented his legend by hailing a cab to flee the scene.

In 1998, the Gambler began teaching both McConkey and Daisher to BASE jump. By 1999 the lessons were over. In June of that year, Gambalie leapt off of Yosemite’s El Cap, landed safely in the meadow below, and was immediately greeted by two rangers. BASE jumping is against the law in all national parks, and Yosemite’s rangers are particularly zealous. Fearing arrest and a $5,000 fine, Gambalie fled toward the Merced River, dumped his chute on the bank, then dove in. The cold water sapped his strength, the current did the rest. Divers didn’t recover his body for twenty-eight days.

There was “skyaking,” which is skydiving in a kayak into a river. There was a bicycle jump—when Daisher road a mountain bike out of an airplane. Ski-BASE emerged from this period as well, then wingsuit ski-BASE. “That was a big deal,” Holmes says. “Wingsuit ski-BASE jumping didn’t come from a Bond film; it came from our imagination. No one had done it before. So when Shane had to try it out for the first time, yeah, we were all pretty nervous.”

Then Holmes invented a new way to attach a parachute to another parachute—which meant they could deploy one chute, cut it away, and deploy the next. “We had this idea about a double ski-BASE,” says Daisher, “where you would jump off a cliff and deploy your chute, then land on a hanging snowfield, cut away that chute, rip these amazing turns in a place no one had ever been before, leap off a giant cliff at the end, deploy that second parachute, and land somewhere far below.”

In March 2009, the double ski-BASE was pitched to Red Bull (who sponsor all three athletes). Daisher was elsewhere, but Holmes and McConkey got backing to fly to Italy’s Dolomites range and make the attempt. It was by far the farthest anyone had ever taken either of these sports; it was so far beyond imagination that even today most people still can’t wrap their heads around the idea—but that’s probably because they’re looking in the wrong direction.

Even better, the flow state itself acts like a force multiplier for creativity. In flow, beyond this neurochemical reaction, there are also neuroanatomical and neuroelectrical changes taking place. Neuroanatomically, with large swatches of the prefrontal cortex deactivated, our inner critic is shut off and our inner monologue rendered silent. As a result, we’re more receptive to novel experiences (the building blocks of new ideas) and much less inhibited (thus more likely to present those new ideas to the world). This is why, for example, in studies run by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Sharon Thompson-Schill, when transient hypofrontality was artificially induced and subjects were presented with creative problems to solve, the hypofrontal subjects came up with more novel insights in far shorter time frames than control subjects.

Neuroelectrically, flow’s baseline brain-wave pattern of low alpha/high theta also boosts creativity. Alpha means we’re calm, confident, and content (thus more willing to take risks) and that the lines of communication between the subconscious mind and the conscious mind are wide open (thus more chances for pattern recognition and novel insight). Theta, meanwhile, is a relaxed state where the brain can move from notion to notion without much internal resistance—like what happens when you’re about to fall asleep—and has long been associated with intuition and idea generation.

Still, the launch would be critical. McConkey and Holmes built a big jump at the cliff’s edge, but the snow was crappy, so they started over. The second time was the charm. With the kicker dialed, they climbed into their flight gear and snapped into their skis. Holmes went first. He pointed his boards toward the cliff, made a few quick turns, then nailed a perfect double backflip into the abyss. McConkey was left alone on the side of the mountain. He had a Go Pro camera on his head and was wired for sound. “Oh yeah,” he said into the microphone, “here we go, another wingsuit ski-BASE.”

Then he exhaled deeply, just once, and pointed his tips toward the edge.

It was a fantastic takeoff. He hit the jump perfectly, sailed off the Sass Pordoi, and did what he could not back in Crested Butte so many years before: a perfect double backflip.

It was the last time something in his life went right.

It’s impossible to steer a wingsuit with skis on, so McConkey had invented a release system—really just a strap to yank on that unlatched his bindings. But when he yanked, only his right ski popped off. It then got tangled with his left. He reached down to manually release the binding, but the move flipped him upside down—which meant he could neither see the ground approaching nor deploy his parachute for fear of further entanglement. Some people, including Daisher, believe you should throw the chute anyway, but McConkey had long argued for the need to release the skis first, get into a stable position for flight, and then throw the chute. He did, in fact, manage to release his ski and get into a stable position. “It was an amazing recovery,” Holmes said afterward, “but he was already too late.”

McConkey died on impact. He left behind a wife, a three-year-old daughter, and a fifteen-year legacy that, despite the startling rate of progression in these sports, will most likely remain unmatched for some time. As former Powder magazine managing editor Leslie Anthony wrote in White Planet, “The ski world’s superman was gone.” The double ski-BASE remains, though, the chapter yet unwritten. Holmes says it’s only a matter of time, and if he doesn’t do it, someone else will. That’s the tradition. That’s how these things get done. That’s really why McConkey was considered a genius. He did what all geniuses do: He shifted the paradigm. He opened our eyes. He gave his life so that, maybe, we could reinvent ours.

Scientists who study human motivation have lately learned that after basic survival needs have been met, the combination of autonomy (the desire to direct your own life), mastery (the desire to learn, explore, and be creative), and purpose (the desire to matter, to contribute to the world) are our most powerful intrinsic drivers—the three things that motivate us most. All three are deeply woven through the fabric of flow. Thus toying with flow involves tinkering with primal biology: addictive neurochemistry, potent psychology, and hardwired evolutionary behaviors. Seriously, what could go wrong?

Equally insidious is how flow prepares us to handle these dangers. In the state, our skills are peaking, our inner critic shut down, and our ability to feel fear significantly dampened. “I felt I could not be hurt…,” wrote Brazilian soccer star Pelé in his autobiography, My Life and the Beautiful Game. “Perhaps it was merely confidence, but I have felt confident many times before without that strange feeling of invincibility.” And while Pelé’s correct, there’s a serious catch—flow makes you feel invincible, right up to the moment you’re not. After all, Shane McConkey was the closest thing to Superman the world has yet seen and he didn’t beat those odds.

Nor is he alone. “The joy I get from skiing, that’s worth dying for,” said C. R. Johnson—not long before he died skiing. Canadian freestyle skier and four-time X Games champ Sarah Burke is now sorely missed. So are Arne Backstrom, Caleb Moore, Jeremy Lusk, Ryan Hawks, Aaron Robinson, Kip Garre, Antoine Montant, and many more. ESPN called 2011 the “grimmest year in [action] sports’ collective history,” and then explained why: “[T]he action-sports community averaged one pro athlete death every three weeks.” The year 2013—while not yet in the books—is starting to look grimmer than 2011.

No one really knows exactly when the four-minute mile first seemed possible. Certainly, in 1923, when Finnish runner Paavo Numi clocked a 4:10.4, it wasn’t beyond the pale. Yet eight years passed before anyone sliced a second from Numi’s time, and it took ten more for the next three to fall. By 1942, runners had cut it down to 4:04.6; then 4:02.6 by 1943. Two years later, Swedish miler Gunder Hagg clocked 4:01.4 and impossible seemed within reach. A good tailwind, a better track surface, slicing one tick off the time—it was bound to happen.

But nothing happened.

Not in 1946. Or 1947. Or 1948. The issue, turns out, wasn’t merely physical. It was mental. “Most people considered running four laps of the track in four minutes to be beyond the limits of human speed,” explains Neal Bascomb in The Perfect Mile. “It was foolhardy and possibly dangerous to attempt. Some thought that rather than a lifetime of glory, honor and fortune, a hearse would be waiting for the first person to accomplish that feat.”

It was Englishman Roger Bannister who—nine years after Hagg’s near miss—finally broke this mental barrier and accomplished the feat, running 3:59.4 on May 6, 1954. And when we retell this tale, this is typically the point where the story stops, yet two months after Bannister did the impossible and lived, Australian John Landy did it again and then some—cutting 1.4 seconds off Bannister’s time with 3:58 flat. Within five years two other runners had bested that mark; within ten the first sub-four mile had been run by a high school student. Think about this for a moment. Thirty years of collective running effort were required to do the impossible, yet it took less than a month for someone to better the feat? And less than a decade for five more people—including a teenager—to do the same?

How did this happen? The physical challenge didn’t get any easier. Running a sub-four-minute mile still required running a sub-four-minute mile. All that changed was thought, assumption, the mental frame built around the challenge. Every athlete interviewed for this book agrees: after something has been done once, it becomes considerably easier to repeat. Yet why is this so? What is it, exactly, about learning that the impossible is possible that makes it suddenly possible?

It was Harvard physiologist Edmund Jacobson who first discovered this link. Back in the 1930s, Jacobson found that imagining oneself lifting an object triggered corresponding electrical activity in the muscles involved in the lift. Between then and now dozens and dozens of studies have born this out, repeatedly finding strong correlations between mental rehearsal—i.e., visualization—and better performance. Everything from giving a speech to running a business meeting to spinning a 1080 are all significantly enhanced by the practice.

We also know that the benefits extend beyond the psychological (increased confidence and motivation) and into the physiological. In 2004, for example, Cleveland Clinic physiologist Guang Yue wanted to know if merely thinking about lifting weights was enough to increase strength. Study subjects were divided into four groups. One group tried to strengthen their finger muscles with physical exercise; one tried to strengthen their finger muscles by only visualizing the exercise; another tried to increase arm strength through visualization; while the last group did nothing at all. The trial lasted twelve weeks. When it was over, those who did nothing saw no gains. The group that relied on physical training saw the greatest increase in strength—at 53 percent. But it’s the mental groups where things got curious. Folks who did no physical training but merely imagined their fingers going through precise exercise motions saw a 35 percent increase in strength, while the ones who visualized arm exercises saw a 13.5 percent increase in strength. How tightly are imagination and physiology coupled? Strength is among the most baseline of all performance measures and we humans can get stronger simply by thinking hard about it.

Probably the biggest insight arrived a few years before Yue’s experiment, when neuroscientists found no difference between performing an action and merely imagining oneself performing that action—the same neuronal circuits fire in either case. This means that visualization impacts a slew of cognitive processes—motor control, memory, attention, perception, planning—essentially accelerating chunking by shortening the time it takes us to learn new patterns. Since the first stage of the flow cycle—the struggle stage—involves exactly this learning process, visualization is an essential flow hack: it shortens struggle.

Visualization also firms up aims and objectives, further amplifying flow. With an image of perfect performance fixed in our mind, the intrinsic system knows what needs to happens, keeping the extrinsic system from getting too involved. Similarly, when attempting something that’s never been done before, we’re much more likely to keep fear at bay and stay in the challenge/skill sweet spot if we’ve mentally rehearsed an action ahead of time.

But it’s not just Tom Schaar. In fact, when it comes to examples of the accelerated progression that results from raising children in high-flow environments, we can look much closer to home: in the classrooms, gardens, and playgrounds of Montessori schools the world over. While exploring the threads of his seminal research on flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his graduate students went on a quest to find the most “flow-prone” learning environments around. Montessori topped the list.

The educational philosophy pioneered by Maria Montessori in the early portion of the twentieth century is built around self-directed learning, long periods of intense concentration, and deep physicality (it’s often called “embodied education”) and has been repeatedly shown to produce far greater amounts of flow than more traditional methodologies. The results? While the data is still far from complete, a 2006 study published in the journal Science by University of Virginia psychologist Angeline Lillard found Montessori kids outperformed regular students on everything from academic tests to social skills to creative abilities to executive function. Other studies have extended these findings from the classroom to the boardroom. When professors Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of the globe-spanning business school INSEAD surveyed over 3,000 executives and interviewed 500 people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products, they too found a Montessori connection. As Gregersen told the Wall Street Journal: “A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity. To paraphrase the famous Apple ad campaign, innovators not only learned early on to think different, they act different (and even talk different).”

At the Flow Genome Project we’re taking advantage of both of these lines of development to build a series of dedicated flow research labs—a.k.a. Flow Dojos. Think Cirque du Soleil meets X Games meets the Science Exploratorium. The goal is to simulate all of the high-risk conditions that extreme performers rely upon to trigger flow—just without the risk. Our equipment is of the extreme playground variety, like a giant looping swing that lets almost anyone be safely upside down and twenty-five feet off the ground at the top of the loop, and pulling over three and half Gs at the bottom—which is enough risk and novelty to push most into flow.

Moreover, the swing is lined with LED lights that are connected to sensors like BrainSport. The closer a rider comes to the theta/alpha brain-wave border of baseline flow, the redder the lights turn. This allows the trainee to use real-time neurofeedback without having to break state to look at a data screen. Of course, with all these sensors, we’re also data capturing along the way, and using this information to construct a more accurate “heat map of flow”—a map that will fine-tune our knowledge of the state and its triggers and thus provide everyone with easier access to the zone.

And ours is only one approach. There are many more, and from dozens of angles. But that’s not even the half of it. Alongside these technological developments increasing our in-the-moment access to flow, there’s also an entirely different line of development increasing the total amount of time we can stay in the flow-hacking game. Welcome to the world of bionics.

What is the adjacent possible for strap-on bionics? What promise do exoskeletons hold for the future of progression? What about flow hacking? Until recently, older and wiser meant creakier and slower. But with biotechnology expanding at an exponential rate, we can now refresh the physical line of development, while our cognitive and creative lines continue to grow. For the first time in history, anyone looking to push the upper edge of human performance will be able to combine the wisdom of the decades with the sprightliness of youth. So again, where do our limits lie?

“I’m certain we can’t answer that question,” says Michael Gervais. “At the world-class level, where talent differences are marginal, we estimate that 90 percent of success for elite performers is mental—yet this is the one measurement milestone we haven’t hit. We don’t know how to measure thought. What is it? Where does it begin? Where does it go? Can we track it? Can we track its effects? What’s an accurate picture of its total impact on biology? Until we know these things, psychology remains a fuzzy science. But that’s what’s next. That’s where this technological revolution is leading. That’s why predicting limits is so difficult—because we’re about to be able to take control of the one aspect of performance that trumps all others.”

Alex Honnold started climbing at indoor gyms in 1996, when he was eleven years old. At nineteen, Honnold moved outdoors, where he soon developed a preference for big walls. Free soloing came next. In 2007, this twenty-two-year-old self-described “dork” and total climbing unknown free-soloed Yosemite’s Astroman and the Rostrum in a day—a feat so difficult it’s only been done twice before and both times by legendary hard men, Peter Croft and Dean Potter.

The following year, Honnold started thinking about free soloing the northwest face of Yosemite’s Half Dome. It was a notion beyond the beyond. “When you talk about what the next generation of athletes considers possible,” says Jimmy Chin, who has climbed with Honnold and directed a documentary on him for National Geographic, “Alex is the case study. His imaginative capabilities are just so far beyond everyone else in the sport. Back when he started thinking about Half Dome, no one else I knew—and I probably know most of the elite climbing community—was even considering a solo.”

And for good reason.

Astroman and the Rostrum are medium-size climbs, both in the intermediate 5.11 range. Half Dome is a big wall—a 2,000-foot face that most teams take multiple days to complete—and the route Alex had in mind went expert-only, 5.12c. Worse, the route gets harder as it goes higher. Chin explains further: “The route Alex chose wasn’t impossible for him. He could do the moves. But it’s such an exhausting mental game. And with the hardest moves near the top, it’s the equivalent of an NBA basketball player, under last game of the finals pressure, having to execute 1,000 free throws; step back to the three-point line and shoot 100 three-pointers; and then, after all that physical and mental exhaustion, step back and shoot one half-court shot. And this isn’t about winning. All the shots have to go in, because any miss is fatal.”

To help Baumgartner avoid having to think about such things, and because redundancy was security, when the balloon reached its top altitude, Mission Control ran through a forty-item checklist: “Item twenty-six, move seat to rear of capsule; item twenty-seven, lift legs onto the door threshold.” The whole process was designed to calm nerves with clear goals. Of course, 128,100 feet in the air, calm’s a relative matter.

When the list was complete, Baumgartner stood outside the capsule, on a tiny exterior step, the Earth, quite literally, at his feet. He took a moment to take in the view, then said a few words into his microphone: “Sometimes you have to go up really high to understand how small you really are.”

In total, Baumgartner’s free fall lasted four minutes nineteen seconds; his complete air time approximately ten minutes; his top speed 833.9 miles per hour—Mach 1.24. Baumgartner also took over the records for the highest manned balloon flight and the highest altitude jump and, with YouTube broadcasting a live feed of the event, the highest numbers of concurrent viewers—at 8 million.

Perhaps more interesting than these records is the deeper why. On the Stratos website there’s a short list of potential applications for the knowledge gained from Baumgartner’s jump: “Passenger/crew exit from space; developing protocols for exposure to high-altitude and high-acceleration environments; exploring the effects of supersonic acceleration and deceleration on the human body; and testing the latest innovations in parachute systems.” To put this in plainer language, experts have said that if the passengers on the space shuttle Challenger had been equipped with Baumgartner’s suit, they might have lived through their midair crack-up.

And along just these lines, some six months after Baumgartner’s jump, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo powered up its engines for the first time. SpaceShipOne, you might remember, was the craft that won the Ansari X Prize in 2004. This original X Prize was a demonstration project, both proof that a private company could produce an affordable, reusable spaceship and the necessary first step in opening the space frontier. The idea behind SpaceShipTwo is the next step: tourism—taking paying customers on suborbital cruises.

And that goal is not far away. SpaceShipTwo’s flight was a test burn, the first in a series that ends with actual space flights (some 550 people have purchased $200,000 tickets). According to Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, if everything goes according to plan, the plan is to have paying customers going rocket man before 2015.

This is why Baumgartner’s jump is critical. We’re going to space. That’s what’s next. Within a few years, human beings will be routinely visiting low-Earth orbit. In fact, Bigelow Aerospace, another private space company, is now developing an inflatable space hotel that’s scheduled for 2017 deployment. With these developments around the corner, having basic space evacuation procedures in place—including a supersonic-capable space suit—just seems to make sense.

But if you want to really talk about the adjacent possible: the combination of Baumgartner’s success and the birth of the space tourism industry means that space diving could be the next extreme sport frontier. It sounds silly, of course, but it wasn’t too long ago that surfing a 100-foot wave or free-soloing Half Dome was equally ludicrous. Plus, consider the space-diving upside. Imagine having twenty-five miles of fall time to work with. Talk about possibilities for seeing lines. Talk about the potential for creative innovation. Baumgartner touched down in the desert, but sooner or later isn’t someone going to try to land on a ski slope? How long then until we turn the space dive into the first stage of a double ski-BASE? How long until it gets stranger than that?

If it seems too much of a stretch to connect individual athletes rewriting the rulebook on human potential to society as a whole solving the world’s biggest problems, then consider the research of Arie de Geus. In the early 1980s, de Geus was the director of strategic planning for Royal Dutch Shell and deeply curious about corporate longevity. At the time, Shell was seventy-three years old—already an anomaly. The average corporate lifespan is twelve and a half years; the average multinational roughly forty. Yet, like Shell, a tiny fraction of corporations have thrived for centuries.

Why does this matter so much? Because, to thrive for centuries, these corporations have had to tackle wars, famines, plagues, droughts, floods, depressions, recessions, climate shifts, technological revolutions, political instability, and regime changes. Everything on this list is a variation of a woe the world now faces. These too are our grand challenges. So figuring out how these rare organizations succeeded in the past gives us a time-tested, battle-hardened strategy to do the same in the future.