The Rise of Superman, Steven Kotler

A book on ‘flow’ and how important it directly correlates to happiness at work, and happiness at work directly correlates to success. It’s what all us athletes desire, but it’s elusive. The flow has helped me survive many near-death moments. This book summizes how scientists have made progress in flow through advancements with brain-imaging tech, interviews with action and adventure athletes, how they live through the impossible and perform the impossible, how they’re able to reliably reproduce this state, and then how readers can apply this knowledge across the additional domains of self and society. Once we do the hard work of identifying that first pattern, the dopamine dumped in our system primes us to pick out the next. Studies show athletes perform better than ‘normals’ because athletes already have these patterns down, thus their brains could take in a tiny bit of information and use it to make a very complicated prediction a safe path across a street. This book is from 2014, and its already outdated to an extent… this once again shows how at least the conversation and technology has expanded rapidly.