Stealing Fire by Kotler

Ref: Kotler & Wheal (2018). Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. Dey Street Books.

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Summary­

  • The quest for flow is hidden openly all around us; athletics, mind-altering drugs, meditation, group- chats, medications, and much more. Although the concept seems relegated to the few of us brave enough, or stupid enough, to chase extreme risk, flow is, in fact, a multi-billionaire dollar worldwide industry to ‘get us out of our own heads.’ Stealing Fire explores the various organizations hacking flow to induce positive change, empowering teams, and improving everything from lifestyle, to teammanship, to sales, to happiness.

  • One in three Americans are obese or morbidly obese, even though we have access to better nutrition at lower cost than at any time in history. Eight out of ten of us are disengaged or actively disengaged at work, despite the HR circus of incentive plans, team-building off-sites, and casual Fridays. Big-box health clubs oversell memberships by 400% in the certain knowledge that, other than the first two weeks in January and a brief blip before spring break, fewer than one in ten members will ever show up. And when a Harvard Medical School study confronted patients with lifestyle-related diseases that would kill them if they didn’t alter their behavior (type 2 diabetes, smoking, atherosclerosis, etc.), 87% couldn’t avoid this sentence. Turns out, we’d rather die than change.

  • Under normal conditions, with an active prefrontal cortex constantly scanning scenarios in the past and the future, we spend very little time living completely in the present.

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Misc Quotes

  • “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten.”-Bill Gates.

  • “Impediment to action advances action.”-Marcus Aurelius.

  • “What one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits.”-Lilly.

  • “I care not a whit for a man’s religion unless his dog is the better for it.”-Abraham Lincoln.

  • Wabi Sabi: the ability to find beauty in imperfection.

  • “Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, political parties, nations and eras, it’s the rule.”-Nietzche.

  • The past is less an archived library of what really happened, and more a fluid director’s commentary we’re constantly updating.

  • The “magic of maybe.” When we check our email or Facebook or Twitter, and sometimes we find a response and sometimes we don’t, the next time a friend connects, Sapolsky discovered that we enjoy a 400% spike in dopamine. This can become distracting to the point of addicting.-Robert Sapolsky (Stanford Neuroscientist).

  • Wicked problems: those without easy answers, where our rational, binary logic breaks down and our normal tools fail us.

  • Moses fathered three of the world’s largest traditions—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—when he came down from Mount Sinai with two stone tablets written by “the finger of God.”

  • Breakthroughs (“Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore)

    • When breakthroughs happen, only those people willing to tolerate the risk and uncertainty of a novel technology get on board, a trade they’ll make for the benefits of being “early adopters.”

    • Then there’s a gap (what Moore calls “the chasm,”) that any idea has to cross to attract a growing audience. It’s attracting that “early majority” on the far side of the chasm that he feels is the true mark of disruptive innovation.

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Flow

  • Flow: an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best,” flow refers to those “in the zone” moments where focus gets so intense that everything else disappears. Action and awareness start to merge. Our sense of self vanishes. Our sense of time as well. And all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof.

    • Flow Signature: Selflessness, Timelessness, Effortlessness, and Richness (STER).

  • Flow Checklist

    • List everything you love to do (or that you’d like to do) that gets you out of your head.

    • Use the Ecstasis Equation (Value= Time X Reward/Risk) to rank this list for value.

    • Sort your activities into one of five buckets: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Seasonally, and Annually.

    • Connect practices to your own preexisting traditions can make them easier to stick to.

    • Remember you’re playing with addictive neurochemistry and deeply rooted evolutionary drivers. So, as your practices start building momentum, how do you know if you’re pursuing a deliberate path or becoming a bliss junkie? Short answer? You don’t.

  • The conscious mind is a potent tool, but it’s slow, and can manage only a small amount of information at once. The subconscious, meanwhile, is far more efficient. It can process more data in much shorter time frames. In ecstasis, the conscious mind takes a break, and the subconscious takes over. As this occurs, a number of performance-enhancing neurochemicals flood the system, including norepinephrine and dopamine. Both of these chemicals amplify focus, muscle reaction times, and pattern recognition.

  • Our sense of time isn’t localized in the brain. Instead, time is a distributed perception, calculated all over the brain, more specifically, all over the prefrontal cortex. During Transient Hypofrontality, when the prefrontal cortex goes offline, we can no longer properly perform time calculations. Without the ability to separate past from present from future, we’re plunged into an elongated present, what researchers describe as “the deep now.” Energy normally used for temporal processing gets reallocated for focus and attention. We take in more data per second, and process it more quickly. When we’re processing more information faster, the moment seems to last longer—which explains why the “now” often elongates in altered states.

 

Flow Techniques

  • Mindfulness training, technological stimulation or pharmacological priming, the end results are substantial. Consider the gains: a 200 percent boost in creativity, a 490 percent boost in learning, a 500 percent boost in productivity.

  • Ecstasis only arises when attention is fully focused in the present moment.

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The Brain

  • Prefrontal Cortex: our most sophisticated piece of neuronal hardware. With this relatively recent evolutionary adaptation came a heightened degree of self-awareness, an ability to delay gratification, plan for the long term, reason through complex logic, and think about our thinking.

  • Occipital Lobe: Solely responsibility for processing vision.

  • Norepinephrine and Dopamine typically underpin “romantic love,” endorphins and oxytocin link mother to child and friend to friend, anandamide and serotonin deepen feelings of trust, openness, and intimacy.

  • Conscious processing can only handle about 120 bits of information at once. This isn’t much. Listening to another person speak can take almost 60 bits. If two people are talking, that’s it. We’ve maxed out our bandwidth. But if we remember that our unconscious processing can handle billions of bits at once, we don’t need to search outside ourselves to find a credible source for all that miraculous insight. We have terabytes of information available to us; we just can’t tap into it in our normal state.

  • Umwelt: Technical term for the sliver of the data stream that we normally apprehend; the reality our senses can perceive.

  • Six powerful neurotransmitters:

    • Norepinephrine

    • Dopamine

    • Endorphins

    • Serotonin

    • Anandamide

    • Oxytocin

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Flow & Altered States

  • Altered states can silence the ‘nag’. They act as an off switch. In these states, we’re no longer trapped by our neurotic selves because the prefrontal cortex, the very part of the brain generating that self, is no longer open for business.

  • When we can move from being subject to our identity to having some objective distance from it, we gain flexibility in how we respond to life and its challenges.

  • Ecstatic experiences begin when the brain releases norepinephrine and dopamine into our system. These neurochemicals raise heart rates, tighten focus, and help us sit up and pay attention. We notice more of what’s going on around us, so information normally tuned out or ignored becomes more readily available. And besides simply increasing focus, these chemicals amp up the brain’s pattern recognition abilities, helping us find new links between all this incoming information. As these changes are taking place, our brainwaves slow from agitated beta to calmer alpha, shifting us into daydreaming mode: relaxed, alert, and able to flit from idea to idea without as much internal resistance. Then parts of the prefrontal cortex begin shutting down. We experience the selflessness, timelessness, and effortlessness of transient hypofrontality. This quiets the “already know that, move along” voice of our inner critic and dampens the distractions of the past and future. All these changes knock out filters we normally apply to incoming data, giving us access to a fresh perspectives and more potential combinations of ideas.

  • Taken together, all this work—from the NDE studies to the cancer and trauma research to the flow and meditation programs—demonstrates that even brief moments spent outside ourselves produce positive impact, regardless of the mechanisms used to get there.

  • If you spend all of your time blissed out, zenned out, drunk, stoned, sexed up, or anything else, then you’ve lost all the contrast that initially made those experiences so rich—what made them “altered” in the first place.

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Sleep

  • Normal people go into REM at about 90 minutes; depressed people enter sooner, usually at 60 minutes. Generally happy people head in the opposite direction, dropping into REM at around 100 minutes. Britton discovered that NDEers delayed entry until 110 minutes—which meant that they were off the charts for happiness and life satisfaction.

Meditation

  • Even four days of meditation produced significant improvement in attention, memory, vigilance, creativity, and cognitive flexibility.

  • In meditation, the reason you follow your breath is to ride its rhythm right into the now.

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PTSD

  • ~25 million Americans suffer from PTSD, yet the only two drugs approved for treatment are Prozac and Zoloft. Both require weeks or even months to get into our system, while their effects last only as long as we continue taking them. Stop the pills and you return, more or less, to where you started.

  • The benefits provided by only one to three rounds of MDMA therapy lasts for years.-Mithoefer.  

  • So while ecstatic states (which are brief and transitory) aren’t the same as developmental stages (which are stable and long-lasting), it appears that having more of the former can, under the right conditions, help accelerate the latter. In short, altered states can lead to altered traits.

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Psychedelics

  • Psychedelics: Create highly synchronized connections between far-flung areas of the brain, the kinds of linkages we don’t normally make. So when researchers like James Fadiman discovered that psychedelics could enhance creative problem solving—these far-flung connections were the reason why.

  • Psychedelics overwhelm the senses with data, throwing so much information at us per second that paying attention to anything else becomes impossible. And for action and adventure athletes seeking flow, risk serves this same function. “When

  • During psychedelic states, our ego defenses are so diminished that we gain nearly direct access to the unconscious. The ego is really just a network, and things like psychedelics, flow, and meditation compromise those connections. They literally dis-integrate the network.”-Grof.

  • Psychonauts: Inner Space Explorer.  

  • Hyperspace: DMT landscape.  

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Chronology

  • 2013: A Dutch study found that kinky sex practitioners “were less neurotic, more extraverted, more open to new experiences, more conscientious, less rejection sensitive, and had higher subjective well-being.”-Stealing Fire by Kotler.

  • 2012: A study conducted by the American Pediatric Association found that 1 out of 5 Ivy League college students was taking “smart drugs” to help improve academic performance. By 2015, that number had jumped to 1 in 3 (in all college students).

  • 2012: Psychologist Michael Mithoefer discovered that even a single dose of MDMA can reduce or cure post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in survivors of child abuse, sexual abuse, and combat.

  • 2009: Swiss neurologist Peter Brugger discovers that people with more dopamine in their systems are more likely to believe in secret conspiracies and alien abductions. They’re suffering from apophenia, “the tendency to be overwhelmed by meaningful coincidence,” and detecting patterns where others see none.-Stealing Fire by Kotler.

  • 29 Aug, 2005: Gulf Coast Hurricane Katrina makes landfall costing $108 billion in damages.

  • 16 Nov, 1938: Swiss Chemist Hoffman first synthesizes LSD at Sandoz pharmaceutical lab while attempting to obtain a respiratory and circulatory stimulant with no effects on the uterus. 

  • 15 Nov, 1926: AT&T and RCA team up to create the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC).

  • 1912: MDA is first synthesized by German pharmaceutical company Merk.

  • 22 Sep, 1823: Joseph Smith, a 17yr old farm boy from Manchester, New York had a strange dream about an angel named Moroni. The angel told him of a treasure buried on a hilltop behind his house. Upon awakening, Smith climbed that hill and, just shy of the peak, unearthed a gold-leafed book. Bound together with three D-shaped rings and written in strange hieroglyphics he later described as “reformed Egyptian,” it contained a prophecy that would alter the course of U.S. history. The book told of a lost tribe of Israelites who had sailed to North America in 600 BCE. It recounted the story of a prophet named Mormon and the second coming of Jesus Christ.-Stealing Fire by Kotler.  

  • 1172: The English invade Ireland.

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