The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer

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One way to think about this question is from an evolutionary perspective. We know that scarcity drives evolution. Any problem regularly encountered on a quest to gather resources is a problem that evolution already spent millions of years driving us to solve. The goal is to feed those curiosities a little bit at a time, and feed them on a daily basis. This slow-growth strategy takes advantage of the brain’s inherent learning software.6 When you advance your knowledge a little bit at a time, you’re giving your adaptive unconscious a chance to process that information. In the study of creativity, this process is known as “incubation.”7 What’s actually happening is pattern recognition. Automatically, the brain begins looking for connections between older bits of info you’ve already learned and the newer bits you’re currently learning. Over time, this means more patterns, more dopamine, more motivation, and, eventually, a bit of expertise.8

The Art of Impossible: A Peak Performance Primer (Audio

And that instruction occurs automatically. When we play, the brain releases dopamine and oxytocin, two of our most crucial “reward chemicals.” These are pleasure drugs that make us feel good when we accomplish, or try to accomplish, anything that fulfills a basic survival need. Grit, the subject of chapter 5, is what most people think of when they think of motivation. It’s persistence, determination, and fortitude—the ability to continue with the journey no matter the difficulty involved.Sow an action and you reap a habit, sow a habit and you reap a character, sow a character and you reap a destiny.” Guilford also realized that divergent thinking wasn't entirely free wheeling: It had four core characteristics. Fluency, the ability to produce a great number of ideas in a short time-frame; flexibility, the ability to approach a problem from multiple angles; originality, the ability to produce novel ideas; elaboration, the ability to organize those ideas and execute on them.”

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James penned those words in the late 1800s, in the very first psychological textbook ever published. The more modern version belongs to the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and the opening lines of the 2002 film Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: “When you’re young, your potential is infinite. You might do anything, really. You might be Einstein. You might be DiMaggio. Then you get to an age when what you might be gives way to what you have been. You weren’t Einstein. You weren’t anything. That’s a bad moment.”14Yet surfing isn’t only about prioritizing fitness. For reasons that we’ll explore in the last section of this chapter, the sport has a high likelihood of driving participants into flow. The added push in feel-good neurochemistry the state provides is the real turbo-boost. It’s what shifts drive into overdrive, amplifying intrinsic motivation to optimal levels. Chemical signals are similarly simple, though they can have one of two meanings: do more of what you’re doing, or do less of what you’re been doing. Along these lines, figuring out how to get paid to do what you love is another lowercase i impossible. As is rising out of poverty; overcoming deep trauma; becoming a successful entrepreneur, CEO, artist, musician, comedian, or athlete, or generally world-class at what you do. What’s the common thread among these accomplishments? There is no clear path between points and, statistically, very poor odds of success. It means you lose by not trying to play full out, by not trying to do the impossible—whatever that is for you.”