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(rules, "non-rules", and bibliography and a "tl;dr" for each section)

BIBLIOGRAPHY: (this is a start, not a complete list).

" Mastery" by Robert Greene
" Peak" by Anders Ericsson
" Moonwalking with Einstein" by Josh Foer
" Sick in the Head" by Judd Apatow
" Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell
" Tools of the Titans" by Tim Ferriss
" How to Fail At Everything and still Win Big" by Scott Adams
" Spaceman" by Mike Massimino
" On Writing" by Stephen King (and also "What We Talk about When We Talk about Running" by Haruki Murakami)
" Ego is the Enemy" by Ryan Holiday
" A Man for All Markets" by Ed Thorp
" Graceful" or " The Dip" by Seth Godin
" Big Magic" by Elizabeth Gilbert
" The War of Art" by Stephen Pressfield
" The Confidence Game" by Maria Konnikova
" Travels" by Michael Crichton
" Deep Work " by Cal Newport

Did I get better at poker?

Yes.

And then I stopped playing. I started a business. Everything went downhill from there. Until I learned to love it and I got better.

Bye.

James Altucher is the author of the bestselling book Choose Yourself, editor at The Altucher Report and host of the popular podcast, The James Altucher Show, which takes you beyond business and entrepreneurship by exploring what it means to be human and achieve well-being in a world that is increasingly complicated.

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The Ultimate Guide To Achieving Peak Performance In Life

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I wanted to get better at poker. I showed up at the local underground club and within ten minutes I was out $1000 and I went home. I went back the next day. Lost another $500. The next day. Another...

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Even the best jobs can lead to burnout. The harder you work and the more motivated you are to succeed, the easier it is to get in over your head.

The prevalence of burnout is increasing as technology further blurs the line between work and home. New research from the American Psychological Association and the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago reported the following:

48 percent of Americans experienced increased stress over the past five years

31 percent of employed adults have difficulty managing their work and family responsibilities

53 percent say work leaves them "overtired and overwhelmed"

A Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) poll found that "burnout from my current job" was one of the top reasons that people quit.

Burnout can get the better of you, even when you have great passion for your work. Arianna Huffington experienced this firsthand when she almost lost an eye from burnout. She was so tired at work that she passed out, hitting her face on her desk. She broke her cheekbone and had to get four stitches on her eye.

Burnout often results from a misalignment of input and output; you get burned out when you feel like you're putting more into your work than you're getting out of it. Sometimes this happens when a job isn't rewarding, but more often than not it's because you aren't taking care of yourself.

Before you can treat and even prevent burnout, you need to know the warning signs so you can take action. Here they are, in no particular order.

If you recognize many of these symptoms in yourself, don't worry. Fighting burnout is a simple matter of self-care. You need good ways to separate yourself from your work so you can recharge and find balance. The following will help you accomplish this.

If these strategies don't work for you, then the problem might be your job. The wrong job can cause burnout in and of itself. In that case, you'll have to decide what's more important: your work or your health.
How do you beat burnout? Please share your thoughts in the comments section, as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

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10 Signs You're Burning Out (and How to Stop It)

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Even the best jobs can lead to burnout. The harder you work and the more motivated you are to succeed, the easier it is to get in over your head. The prevalence of burnout is increasing as technology further blurs the line between work and home.

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I spoke to both Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal, coauthors of the national bestseller Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work, about why they focused on performance enhancement for their book, their four accelerating forces, what they learned from Navy SEALS and Nike about performance, our human limitations and their best advice.

Kotler is also the cofounder and Director of Research for the Flow Genome Project. His previous books include Tomorrowland, Bold, The Rise of Superman, Abundance, A Small Furry Prayer, West of Jesus, and The Angle Quickest for Flight. Wheal has advised everyone from the U.S. Naval War College and Special Operations Command, the athletes of Red Bull, and the owners of NFL, NBA, MLB and Premier League teams, to the executives of Google, Deloitte Cisco and Young Presidents' Organization.

Dan Schawbel: Why did you decide to investigate the topic of performance enhancement for this book after your last one?

Steven Kotler: My last book was Tomorrowland - which was a collection of articles written over the past 25 years about the transformation of science fiction into science fact. In it, there are a number of articles where some of the foundational research was done. For example, the collection includes an article for Discover called Extreme States. It was one of the very first articles on neurotheology anyone had published, and it was the early foundation for work we describe in the Neurobiology chapter in Stealing Fire.

Combined with research being conducted at the Flow Genome Project-when we were getting a clear picture that people were experimenting with a wide range of nonordinary states of consciousness to enhance performance.

Putting the two together gave me the real sense that hacking consciousness was the next frontier I wanted to investigate-call it the next science fiction technology suddenly becoming science fact.

Jamie Wheal: Everywhere we went speaking and presenting to leaders and their high performing organizations at events and conferences, it seemed like thousands of people were all having the same conversation at the intersection of state-changing tech and performance and innovation. From TED to Davos to Burning Man to Necker Island to the UN, these same influencers were making the rounds on a global circuit and using shared ecstatic experience to forge connections, build companies and launch social movements.

Schawbel: What are the four accelerating forces and how do we tweak them to our advantage?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2017/03/24/richard-branson-on-storytelling-that-sparks-ideas-and-build-brands/

Kotler: Right now we're in the middle of a $4 trillion dollar revolution in people hacking consciousness to accelerate performance The four forces-psychology, neurobiology, technology and pharmacology-are why this revolution is happening now. These four domains surround the exploration of nonordinary states, so we're gaining insights at an incredible pace, we're being able to tune these states with increasing precision, and we're able to share these experiences at scale. It's a big shift. Take just one force: technology. We now have EEG technology that can help people tune their brainwaves with such precision that we're able to achieve in weeks and months states of consciousness that used to take trained meditators decades to master.

Wheal: The four forces-psychology, neurobiology, technology and pharmacology-are all intersecting now to make access to high performing non-ordinary states safer, more accessible and more scalable than ever before. By expanding our sense of possible selves (psych), mapping out the mechanisms of a wide range of consciousness (bio), tuning our neurochemistry to reliably prompt specific states (pharma) and leveraging rich media and tools (tech) to prime ecstasis on demand, we are gaining more frequent and reliable access to domains that used to be rare and mythologized.

Schawbel: After studying Navy SEALs and Nike, what have you learned that can empower people to get more done in less time?

Kotler: Both of these organizations actively pursue the peak state of consciousness known as flow. As far as empowering people to get more done, McKinsey did a 10 year study and found that top executive in flow report being 500% more productive the normal. Moreover, what we've discovered at FGP is that it's remarkably easy to train. In a 6 week joint learning project we conducted with Google, after six weeks of training, their engineers reports a 35-80% increase in flow.

Wheal: Bottom line: respect your time energy and attention like you're a professional athlete. ID your top three most important tasks for tomorrow as the last thing you do each day. Define and Defend your first 90 minutes of each day to exclusively work on your most important task. Stay off phone and out of inbox for duration. Repeat. Where does innovation come from in these two examples? State-change on demand. For the teams, the ability to become extremely situationally aware and attuned to teammates movements and decisions is the key to their extreme coordination and execution. (plus tons of practice). For Nike, it was state change prompted by tech mediation-heart rate variability and respiration monitors to boost team cohesion. Same outcome (heightened group coherence and output) different mechanisms.

Schawbel: Do you think there are any limitations on human capabilities due to the 24-hour day and the brain? Explain.

Kotler: This depends if you're including periods for rest and recharge. The brain has a fixed energy budget so once that's expended, recharge is fundamental. So sleep is a non-negotiable for high performance. But if you're asking the time management question, our feeling is you have to go fast. Consider flow. Patagonia has a corporate policy called Let Me People Go Surfing. The company sits right on the pacific, so any employee who wants to can go surfing at any time. They can leave meetings to go surf. Why? Surfing is a huge flow trigger. So employee might take a 2 hour surf break but they come back 500% more productive. So, right now, the biggest impediment to time management is not taking full advantage of the performance boost altered states (properly deployed) can provide.

Wheal: If you mean "we only have so many hours in a day and so much grey matter" then I'd say we barely spend an hour a day in fully engaged awareness, and spending even 3-5 hours in that state, balanced and supported by deliberate training and recovery, you can boost output considerably. If you're saying "we're overstimulated brains and screens these days" then I'd say changing states of consciousness provided vital reset/recalibration/defibrillation that lets our nervous systems reset in a vital and healthy way (as supported by multiple studies on trauma etc.)

Schawbel: What are your top three pieces of career advice?
Kotler:
1. Put passion and flow at the very center of your career. This is what all top performers do. It's exactly how they become top performers.

2. You can never have too many arrows in your quiver - meaning surround your craft. Learn all sides of it. True mastery means being able to be creative in 360 degrees. You need a very deep and very wide skill set to do that.

3. Read books. Books are where they keep the secrets.
Wheal:
1. Build a pyramid don't climb a ladder. Start our a curious generalist and follow passions and great teachers

2. Secure certificates/public acknowledgment and portfolios of what you've learned to make it easier for others to recognize (and reward) your progress

3. Forge an ironclad physical, emotional and relational maintenance and renewal practice so that as you encounter increased career challenges, you can remain balanced and fueled along the way.

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Steven Kotler And Jamie Wheal: What You Can Learn From Top Performers

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I spoke to Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal, coauthors of the national bestseller Stealing Fire, about why they focused on performance enhancement for their book, their four accelerating forces, what they learned from Navy SEALS and Nike about performance, our human limitations and their best advice.

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Introduction

When you feel included and engaged, do you do a better job? Do you think teams in which people work well together produce much better results? Have you noticed the best ideas often come from unexpected sources? Do you want to work at the top of your intelligence and give the same opportunity to others?

If YES, we have found this is the kind of organization and community that people want to be part of. AND, Liberating Structures help make it happen.

So why is it that so many organizations of all stripes are filled with disengaged workers, dysfunctional groups and wasted ideas?

While there will always be some justification for blaming leaders (or professors and administrators in education), the more compelling and useful explanation is not that people involved are bad, stupid or incompetent, but rather that the practices they have all learned are neither adapted to today's realities nor designed to achieve the ideals listed above.

Unwittingly, the conventional structures used to organize how people routinely work together stifle inclusion and engagement.

Conventional structures are either too inhibiting (presentations, status reports and managed discussions) or too loose and disorganized (open discussions and brainstorms) to creatively engage people in shaping their own future. They frequently generate feelings of frustration and/or exclusion and fail to provide space for good ideas to emerge and germinate. This means that huge amounts of time and money are spent working the wrong way. More time and money are then spent trying to fix the unintended consequences.

Liberating Structures start with something so simple and essential as not to seem worth doing and end with something so powerful and profound that it hardly seems possible.

This website offers an alternative way to approach and design how people work together. It provides a menu of thirty-three Liberating Structures to replace or complement conventional practices.

Liberating Structures used routinely make it possible to build the kind of organization that everybody wants. They are designed to include everyone in shaping next steps.

Liberating Structures introduce tiny shifts in the way we meet, plan, decide and relate to one another. They put the innovative power once reserved for experts only in hands of everyone.

This alternative approach is both practical and feasible because Liberating Structures are quite simple and easy to learn. They can be used by everyone at every level, from the executive suite to the grassroots. No lengthy training courses or special talents are required. Mastery is simply a matter of practice. LS routinely unleash a vast reserve of contributions and latent innovations waiting to be discovered.

Every person interested in leading change-in schools, hospitals, foundations, agencies, and businesses-can use Liberating Structures to generate innovation and great results.

Liberating Structures are easy-to-learn microstructures that enhance relational coordination and trust. They quickly foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to truly include and unleash everyone. Liberating Structures are a disruptive innovation that can replace more controlling or constraining approaches.

Click on any Liberating Structure below.

Leaders know that they would greatly increase productivity and innovation if only they could get everyone fully engaged. The challenge is how. Liberating Structures are novel, practical and no-nonsense methods to help you accomplish this goal with groups of any size.

Liberating Structures spark inventiveness by minimally structuring the way we interact while liberating content or subject matter. Very simple constraints unleash creative adaptability, generating better than expected results. Individual brilliance and collective wisdom are unbridled. Such a dramatic shift cannot be THAT simple, engaging, and powerful but it is. Read Getting Started if you are ready to liberate yourself.

By design, Liberating Structures distribute control so that participants can shape direction themselves as the action unfolds.

Learning Events

Immersion workshops are a great way to get started. Like a foreign language immersion course that temporarily relocates you away from a familiar culture, a LS immersion experience is a very effective way to learn. There are no presentations, facilitated discussions, status reports, brainstorming sessions, or open discussions. Only Liberating Strucutres arepracticed. Organizing a workshop for people in your working group can accelerate "fluency."

Check out News and Events for more immersion workshops and LS User Group meetings. Subscribe to LS News & get access to archives here.

Liberating Structures are immeasurably practical. Our world is increasingly complex, interdependent, and culturally diverse. Many of our most pressing challenges cut across geographic, cultural, and technical boundaries. Simple methods that help us work together productively are central to making progress.

Helpful Analogies
Like Wikipedia, LS create simple rules to guide and liberate everyone's contributions. Wikipedia's must-dos and must-not dos specify how anyone can write articles, edit content, reach consensus about the facts, and share with attribution. This structure makes it possible for a diverse community to generate and sustain accurate content that compares favorably with professionally edited encyclopedias. Like Wikipedia, LS is a disruptive innovation in regard to how we engage people in organizations.

Like improv jazz, LS sparks freedom that arises from shared understanding of simple rules. Great jazz comes from playing creatively within the context of melodic and harmonic structure. Like water in a river, LS takes the shape of the banks that it touches: adapting a similar pattern at every scale and in each local setting.

Below: watch this inspired video by Professor Arvind Singhal talking about liberating education and the role of changemakers. UnScripTED: Liberating Structures

More from Arvind Singhal on adpating Liberating Structures to virtual online interaction via Zoom... with 60 participants from 15 countries.

Simple Ways to Engage Everyone on Zoom: Learn Several Liberating Structures in 30 minutes from Media Changemakers on Vimeo.
Unscripted #2 Liberating Structures with Dr. Arvind Singhal from Media Changemakers on Vimeo.
Lisa Gill is a fabulous writer and top drawer interviewer. Her Leadersmorphosis series dives deeply into self organizing @ work. Put your ear to this interivew she conducts with Henri and Keith.

Below, enjoy scenes from the LCJP Restorative Justice Summit. Liberating Structures were used to organize a three day event full of learning, designed to advance the Restorative Justice movement. Restorative Justice (RJ) aims to create communities in which people feel safe by carefully structuring opportunities for offenders to make amends and victims to regain their personal power. Restorative Justice practitioners found Liberating Structures to be highly structured, liberating better than expected results.

2012 CO RJ Summit Video from LCJP on Vimeo.

LS were used to design the Transformation of Nursing summit. Coalitions from all 50 states and DC came together to advance the cause.

For the United Nations ITC-ILO, Henri and Keith offered a Liberating Structures immersion workshop and follow-up consulting sessions. (The Centre is in Turin Italy.) The focus was how to organize for promoting decent work and sustainable development by not over-helping but rather facilitating networked self-organization.

Ten Principles

While the individual LS microstructures are powerful separately, they function as an interrelated set which can transform an entire organization. The LS repertoire is inspired by ten liberating principles.

When we decide we belong together, LS principles help to guide behavior and leadership actions. Detailed descriptions here.

The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures book! Preview and buy on Amazon. The color paperback ($49.95 USD), black&white ($19.95 USD) and e-book are now available on the Amazon website. Amazon offers deep discounts and free shipping to some customers.

The development team at Holisticon is happy to announce that the Liberating Structures App is now available in the Google Play and Apple App Stores. A deep bow to their creative genius. Happy downloading!

Audio: A very playful Brave New Work podcast with Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans. On Liberating Structures with Lorenz Sell of Sutra and Keith. Lorenz asks the deepest questions about collective intelligence, generativity, and complexity science. (50 minutes) Coaching Zone Podcast with Keith and Dr. Krister Lowe. The focus is on how leaders and teams can develop more productive habits with LS. [45 minutes] Radio Interview with Meisha Rouser, organizational psychologist. The focus is on groups working at the top of their intelligence and imagination. And a third podcast interview with Amiel Handelsman that dips into specific LS microstructures and their use by groups to generate innovative cultures. [60 minutes].

Check out Falling Off the Horse while faciliating & leading with Liberating Structures. This article by Keith McCandless describes a personal path forward. It includes what is possible to stop doing when LS is integrated into your practice.

LS are inspired by complexity science. Listen to this entertaining RadioLab program on Emergence to learn about some of the underlying concept of complexity science.

LS User Groups (inventing and enlivening a new way to organize) Open Letter from a Grateful Student to All Educators
Rhapsody for Strings!

Below: early LS users and co-developers in Latin America, Europe, Canada and the USA.

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When you feel included and engaged, do you do a better job? Do you think teams in which people work well together produce much better results? Have you noticed the best ideas often come from unexpected sources? Do you want to work at the top of your intelligence and give the same opportunity to others?

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Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) - Kindle edition by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Health, Fitness & Dieting Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

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Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) - Kindle edition by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Health, Fitness & Dieting Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

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flow: the psychology of optimal experience (harper perennial modern classics)

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psychology; mind; optimization; self help; advice; lifestyle; creativity; happiness; life; positivity; control; mentality; contentment; mindfulness; personal growth; self improvment; personality; mindfulness; philosophy; flow; experience; inspirational; motivational; joy; peace; self; relection

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Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

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Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) - Kindle edition by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics).

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Ozawa and Haruki: The Three Traits of Creative Excellence

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Ozawa and Haruki: The Three Traits of Creative Excellence

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In January 2010, Seiji Ozawa was on the brink of death.

Diagnosed with esophageal cancer, the famed Japanese conductor was rushed to the hospital. At 75 years of age, there was no guarantee he would survive.

The only choice the doctors had was to cut into Ozawa's body and remove his esophagus. His stomach was then stretched up to his collarbone and surgically attached to his throat. To this day, he has a scar on his neck from where they sliced him.

For an ordinary person, that would be end of a career.

But not Seiji Ozawa. In less than a year, despite warnings from doctors, friends and family, Ozawa was back on stage doing what he had done for his whole life - making music.

After surgery, the man could barely stand on the best of days. Yet, on stage, he was full of life.

Another creative master, the novelist Murakami Haruki, was there to see Ozawa's performance. Haruki describes Ozawa's performance in Absolutely on Musi c:

"I was simply awestruck by the fierce intensity with which [Ozawa] threw himself into the work. I could not help worrying about his health, however, and how it would hold up under such a strain.

[...]

"I too wanted to say to him, "You really ought to hold off a little, take some time to recover, and start performing after you've got your strength back. I understand how you feel, but you know what they say - 'Slow and steady wins the race.' " Really that was the only reasonable response, but I couldn't bring myself to say it to him when I saw him wringing every ounce of strength out of his body to stand upright on the podium. I felt that those words would become a lie once I spoke them. To put it simply, this man was living in a world that transcended reasonable ways of thinking..."

Ozawa's performance triggered a feeling in Haruki that, as a novelist, he understand with a fierce intimacy:

"As I watched him in action, however, one thing dawned on me: He can't help himself; he has to do this. [...] For Seiji Ozawa, music was the indispensable fuel that kept him moving through life. Without periodic injections of live music into his veins, he could not go on living. There was only one way in this world for him to feel truly alive, and that was for him to create music with his own hands and to thrust it as a living, throbbing thing into the faces of an audience: "Here!" Who could possibly tell him to stop?"

For Ozawa, music is life. For Haruki, writing is life. These are two men from different disciplines, but at the core, they are one and the same.

In Absolutely on Musi c, Haruki is constantly making connections between himself and Ozawa:

"In the course of our many conversations, I began to suspect that Seiji Ozawa and I might have several things in common. Questions of talent or productivity or fame aside, what I mean here is that I can feel a sense of identity in the way we live our lives."

What does Haruki mean by this way of life? How do Haruki and Ozawa differ from ordinary people?

Haruki points out three similarities between Ozawa and himself.

1. Intrinsic Reward

The first similarity Haruki is their perspective on work.

"First of all, both of us seem to take the same simple joy in our work. Whatever differences there might be between making music and writing fiction, both of us are happiest when absorbed in our work. And the very fact that we are able to become so totally engrossed in it gives us the deepest satisfaction. What we end up producing as a result of that work may well be important, but aside from that, our ability to work with utter concentration and to devote ourselves to it so completely that we forget the passage of time is its own irreplaceable reward."

It is not just the book or product or musical masterpiece that drives them, it is the intrinsic reward.

But there's something else to the above passage. Let's take a look that phrase at the end again:

"...our ability to work with utter concentration and to devote ourselves to it so completely that we forget the passage of time..."

Now compare with this excerpt from Steven Kotler's The Rise of Supermanabout the psychological state called flow:

"In flow, we are so focused on the task at hand that everything else falls away. Action and awareness merge. Time flies. Self vanishes. Performance goes through the roof."

The flow state - also known as "the zone" - is the state of being completely absorbed in what you do. It feels really, really good.

Another excerpt from Kotler's book:

"During a peak experience," Maslow explained, 'the individual experiences an expansion of self, a sense of unity, and meaningfulness in life. The experience lingers in one's consciousness and gives a sense of purpose, integration, self-determination and empathy.' "

Perhaps this is what Haruki and Ozawa experience when they are deeply absorbed in their work?

For more clues, let's look at the next similarity.

2. Stay Hungry

Closely related to Ozawa and Haruki's love of their work is their constant search for a challenge:

Secondly, we both maintain the same "hungry heart" we possessed in our youth, that persistent feeling that "this is not good enough," that we must dig deeper, forge farther ahead. This is the major motif of our work and our lives.

Observing Ozawa in action, I could feel the depth and intensity of the desire he brought to his work. He was convinced of his own rightness and proud of what he was doing, but not in the least satisfied with it. I could see he knew he should be able to make the music even better, even deeper, and he was determined to make it happen even as he struggled with the constraints of time and his own physical strength.

Even when Ozawa earns the respect of everyone around him, even when he has enough money in his bank account to live for 200 years, he does stop challenging himself. He cannot stop challenging himself.

Could this mindset be related to the flow state too?

Let's look at a passage from a seminal book on the subject, Csikszentmihalyi's :

"...the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times - although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."

Aha.

To enter the flow state, we need to be challenged. And in order to be challenged, we must never be satisfied...

Now, on to the third similarity.

3. Stubborn Independence

The third of our shared traits is stubbornness. We're patient, tough, and, finally, just plain stubborn. Once we've decided to do something in a certain way, it doesn't matter what anybody else says, that's how we're going to do it. And even if, as a result, we find ourselves in dire straits, possibly even hated, we will take responsibility for our actions without making excuses.

Hmm. Does stubbornness have anything to do with the flow state?

To enter flow, activities must be done for their own, intrinsic reward. Think about a child building her sandcastle at the beach. She's not doing it for money or fame; she's doing it for fun.

The flow state and play are close cousins. Sadly, society doesn't want its adults playing around.

Here's Kotler again in The Rise of Superman:

...we have decided that play - an activity fundamental to survival, tied to the greatest neurochemical rewards the brain can produce, and flat out necessary for achieving peak performance, creative brilliance, and overall life satisfaction - is a waste of time for adults. If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round.

When you have an idea that nobody has thought of before, family and friends are going to doubt you. They might tell you to "grow up" or "be realistic."

If you aren't stubborn, you might even listen to them.

So there you have it. Three traits that Murakami Haruki shares with Seiji Ozawa.

But maybe it's not three traits. Perhaps it's just one trait that the two of them share - a deep, irresistible love for the experience of flow.

They only look crazy to us.

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Ozawa and Haruki: The Three Traits of Creative Excellence

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In January 2010, Seiji Ozawa was on the brink of death. Diagnosed with esophageal cancer, the famed Japanese conductor was rushed to the hospital. At 75 years of age, there was no guarantee he would survive. The only choice the doctors had was to cut into Ozawa's body and remove his esophagus.

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What Do You Want to Be When you Grow up? Maybe it's not too late | Srinivas Rao | TEDxMtHoodSalon

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Many of us abandon our childhood dreams. And it's not because we forget about them. We develop a fear of being wrong that impacts the choices we make throughout our lives. But in letting go of our fear that we'll be wrong we expand our sense of what we believe is possible.

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Unmistakable Creative | Curated Conversations with Creative Entrepreneurs

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Unmistakable Creative | Curated Conversations with Creative Entrepreneurs

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The Unmistakable Creative Podcast: In-Depth Interviews with Experts

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The Unmistakable Creative Podcast features candid conversations with experts in business, technology, creativity, personal development, and neuroscience.

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Great Ideas Require a Willingness to Be Wrong – The Mission – Medium

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Great Ideas Require a Willingness to Be Wrong – The Mission – Medium

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Creative risks and great ideas often require a willingness to be wrong. Unfortunately, throughout our lives, we're conditioned to be afraid of being wrong. As Ken Robinson pointed out in his TEDTalk, school stigmatizes mistakes. As a result, we do everything we can to avoid making them.

But the most interesting creative work rarely results from copying what worked for someone else and doing what's already been proven to work. It occurs when we take risks and do something that in the words of Seth Godin "might not work."

Over the last several months I've been doing quite a bit of keynote speaking. One of the things I wanted to experiment with was using music in an interesting way. In movies and TV shows, music amplifies the emotion of dialogue. I wondered whether or not I could incorporate this into one of my talks. So I set the closing of one of my talks to an instrumental track and started practicing. There's nothing in any guide on public speaking that would suggest this.

The possibility of being wrong is what results in the possibility of doing something in a new and interesting way.

The fear of being wrong is one of the greatest inhibitors of possibility in our lives, and yet it drives so much of what we're willing to try. But it's only in our willingness to be wrong that our sense of possibility expands, and the potential for innovation, creativity and interesting work occurs.

There's a relationship between risk and fear that nobody tells us about or we seem to unlearn as we get older. Risk when it works in our favor has the power to transform fear into fuel, and anxiety into joy. If you're unwilling to be wrong, it's almost impossible to be original.

Judgment/Criticism

Fear of having our work judged or criticized often keeps us from starting or building what we want to build. After years of being a writer/creator, I've learned that if you're going to put your work out into the world you're going to have people who it doesn't resonate with. You can put your energy into making more art for the people who love what you do or watering down your work to cater to your critics. The latter is a fool's errand.

In school, we got penalized for our mistakes. In life our mistakes are often our greatest teachers. We just have to be willing to look at them and ask "what can I learn from this?"

Discerning Feedback

There are two types of feedback you'll get as a creative: constructive and useless. Part of doing great creative work is learning how to discern between the two.

Early this morning I was toasting a bagel at Starbucks and someone who had been in my keynote told me he enjoyed the talk. He told me it was a bit dry at the beginning, but that I knocked it out the park at the end. That was useful feedback. I came back to my room and wrote down a list of things that I could do to make sure my future talks started with a higher energy level.

Years ago when I started one of my first creative projects, a classmate of mine at Pepperdine sent me an email to tell me how stupid it was and even called me "brohim." It's probably a good rule of thumb never to take creative writing advice from a person who uses the word brohim in an email.

Needless to say, this was completely useless feedback from a guy who had never spoken to me. If I had taken his feedback seriously, you might not be reading my writing at the moment. As Scott Stratten likes to say about these kinds of critics "you're not the jackass whisperer." If the feedback can improve your work, it's worth listening to. If it's criticism for the sake of it, it should be completely ignored.

There was a time in our lives when we had no fear of being wrong. The possibilities of what we could become were limitless. If we're willing to be wrong will we can recapture somewhat naivety of our youth. As I said in my TEDx Talk (linked below), "Maybe you'll be wrong, or maybe you'll catch a perfect wave and end up on the ride of your life

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Great Ideas Require a Willingness to Be Wrong - The Mission - Medium

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Creative risks and great ideas often require a willingness to be wrong. Unfortunately, throughout our lives, we're conditioned to be afraid of being wrong. As Ken Robinson pointed out in his TEDTalk, school stigmatizes mistakes. As a result, we do everything we can to avoid making them.

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3 Surprising Ways to Unlock Your Creativity

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3 Surprising Ways to Unlock Your Creativity

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7 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Creativity tops the heap. It's the apex of " 21st-century skills," or those skills considered essential for children to thrive today. It's the same ability that IBM -- after surveying over 1,500 CEOs -- found most critical to being a successful CEO. And, as mental health and successful aging have become national concerns, a bevy of research finds creative expression crucial to both short term happiness and long term satisfaction. Yet, despite being bedrock fundamental to so much that we want from our lives, creativity remains elusive: tricky to understand, nearly impossible to train.

In 2015, for example, the energy drink company Red Bull completed the first phase of Hacking Creativity, the largest meta-analysis of the subject ever undertaken. After combing through more than 30,000 scientific studies and conducting hundreds of interviews with experts, researchers concluded that creativity is, indeed, the most important skill for success in our fast-paced world. Unfortunately, they also found we have very little success teaching people how to be more creative.
Related: The Science of Innovation: How to Imagine the Unimaginable
But there's a startling reason for this failure. We keep trying to train up a skill, but what we really need to be training is a state of mind.

A growing pile of evidence shows that non-ordinary states of consciousness -- a term defined by John Hopkins psychiatrist Stanislav Grof as dramatic shifts in perception, emotion and thought -- are the real key to unlocking our creativity. Consider three of today's most familiar non-ordinary states: meditation, flow and psychedelics.

Meditation

Research done in the 1990s on Tibetan Buddhists found that longtime meditation produces brainwaves in the gamma range. These unusual waves arise primarily during "binding," the moment novel ideas snap together for the first time -- the telltale signature of "a-ha insight." This means meditation amplifies creativity, but -- as those monks had put in 34,000 hours of cross-legged cushion time -- it was a finding with limited practical application.

Then researchers began to consider the impact of short-term meditation on mental performance. Was it possible to cut some monastic corners and get similar results? Turns out, you can cut quite a few corners.

In 2009, psychologists at the University of North Carolina found that even four days of meditation significantly improved both creativity and cognitive flexibility. "Simply stated," lead researcher Fadel Zeidan explained to Science Daily, "the profound improvements we found after just four days of meditation training are really surprising. . . . [They're] comparable to results that have been documented after far more extensive training." So rather than pulling a caffeinated all-nighter to force a eureka insight (or devoting decades to becoming a monk), we now know that even a few days' training in mindfulness can up the odds of a breakthrough considerably.
Related: The Secret to Coming Up with New Ideas
Flow

Similar boosts are showing up in the study of those "in the zone" moments of total absorption known as flow. A recent University of Sydney experiment used transcranial magnetic stimulation to induce the state, then gave subjects the nine-dot problem, that classic test of creative puzzle solving: Connect nine dots with four lines without lifting pencil from paper in 10 minutes. Normally, fewer than 5 percent pull it off. In their control group, no one did. But 40 percent of the flow group connected the dots in record time, or eight times better than the norm. This is also why, when McKinsey did a 10-year study of companies, top executives -- meaning those most frequently called upon to solve complex creative problems -- reported being up to 500 percent more productive in flow.
Related: 10 Tips to Turn Your Brain into an Idea Factory
Psychedelics

And comparable results are appearing in psychedelic research. In a national study of microdosing among professionals, psychologist James Fadiman found sub-perceptual doses of substances like LSD consistently enhanced pattern recognition and creative problem-solving. This also explains how the headline "Why Men Are Dropping Acid At Work" came to grace this month's cover of GQ.

But the key takeaway here isn't that mindfulness, micro-dosing or flow are the next "killer app." It's that tuning our states of mind -- regardless of mechanism -- makes us far more creative and effective.

And for anyone interested in this approach, but unsure where to begin, consider the protocols we developed at Google while beta-testing this research. Over a six week stretch, with 60 minutes a day of required practice, the subjects in our study averaged a 71 percent increase in both flow and heightened performance.

1. Enforce rigorous sleep hygiene: Dark, cold and quiet. Want to go further? Learn your "chronotype" by taking Dr. Michael Breuss's The Power of When quiz and tune your circadian rhythm.

2. Own the hour after waking: How we start our day has a massive impact on whether we stride or stumble through the rest of it -- so take time to hydrate, reflect, move and fuel.

3. Defend your first 90 minutes of work: To heighten flow, eliminate distraction, use Brain.fm to block out noise and enhance concentration, push calls and meetings to afternoon and focus only on your most important tasks -- not your inbox. And if you're curious about your unique way to get into the zone, there's a free quiz.

4. Periodize recovery: Just because you could sit at your desk for 5 hours without budging doesn't mean you should. Use a Pomodoro timer to get up and move for 5-10 minutes for every hour spent working. This will keep you from getting overtaxed, allowing you to stay in peak productivity longer.

5. Practice active recovery: Passive recovery is when we're too fried to take the steps needed to rebound. Think Netflix and veg vs. workout and meditate. Instead, build time into your calendar to shift states and recover quicker. Download a heart-rate variability (HRV) app and spend 5 minutes calibrating your cardiac rhythm. Soak in an Epsom salt bath or take a sauna before bed. Get outside and move: Recent studies have shown that hiking in nature decreases "excess rumination" and boosts creativity and memory.

6. Plan state shifting experiences and adventures: Book a float tank session. Do a weekend silent meditation retreat. Train for and compete in an adventure race. Ask your doctor if transcranial magnetic stimulation is right for you. Learn to hyperventilate with Wim Hof, or go to a raging dance party.

Anything that gets you out of ruts and routines, defrags your mental hard drive and resets your nervous system, pays big dividends over time.

Consider the gains: a 200 percent boost in creativity, a 490 percent boost in learning, a 500 percent boost in productivity. These are essential skills and those are big percentage gains. If they were merely the result of a few studies done by a couple of labs, they would be easier to dismiss. But there are now seven decades of research, conducted by hundreds of scientists on thousands of participants, showing that changing the channel of consciousness, no matter the method used, can unlock the creativity we've been searching for.

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3 Surprising Ways to Unlock Your Creativity

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7 min read Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Creativity tops the heap. It's the apex of " 21st-century skills," or those skills considered essential for children to thrive today. It's the same ability that IBM -- after surveying over 1,500 CEOs -- found most critical to being a successful CEO.

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"Mindfulness of the breath is a great place to start as we don't need any props - we always have our breath with us," says writer, counsellor and yoga teacher Eve Menezes Cunningham, author of 365 Ways to Feel Better: Self-care Ideas for Embodied Wellbeing.

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A Simple Method to Take Control of Your Productivity

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A Simple Method to Take Control of Your Productivity

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Take a look at how Beethoven spent his day:

"Beethoven rose at dawn and wasted little time getting down to work. His breakfast was coffee, which he prepared himself with great care - he determined that there should be sixty beans per cup, and he often counted them out one by one for a precise dose. Then he sat at his desk and worked until 2:00 or 3:00, taking the occasional break to walk outdoors, which aided his creativity." (FromDaily Rituals: How Artists Work)

Beethoven spent eight hours a day composing, plus a few hours walking in the afternoons.

Rock solid productivity.

Compare that to your average person's day:

2-3 hours of work (Yes, it's sad. That's what you get after factoring in social media, weekends, inbox cleaning, etc.)

20 minutes of reading (Compared to Warren Buffet, who reads 6+ hours)

2 hours on social media

5 hours watching television

You have to give the man credit - he worked hard.

Sometimes, the right answers are the obvious ones. If you aren't getting the results you want in work or life, maybe you simply aren't working hard enough.

Over the years, I've developed a simple method for (1) identifying my productivity "blind spots" and (2) replacing them with something better.

1. Track Your Time

Our memories are flawed. We tend to put a positive spin on everything. That's a great way to stay optimistic, but a terrible way to get results.

The only way to stay honest is to track your time.

For a week, track everything that you do. I like to do it in 15-minute blocks.

Some options you can use for tracking:

2. Analyze

After you track your time for week, review your records.

Ask yourself:

What activities had the worst outcomes?

What did I spend the most time on?

You might notice a pattern.

The time you waste in a week will be spent on the same few activities. Usually, this is entertainment - TV, social media, YouTube, etc.

We can't tackle everything at once. Instead, we'll pick the 1-2 most damaging activities and tackle those.

3. Rewire Habits

Like heroin, bad habits are addictive. Instead of quitting cold, try to rewire your bad habits into good ones.

Find a trigger. Habits have triggers. Seeing the TV will make you watch it. Driving home might trigger you to order junk food. Examine your habits and see what's causing them. Then...

Build a replacement trigger. We want to "rewire" our trigger to a good habit instead of a bad one. Read a book instead of watching TV. Eat healthy instead of junk. You get the idea.

It helps to write down your replacement triggers or say them out loud.

What helps even more is removing bad options from the environment. Throw away your TV and put books in the house. Don't bring your wallet to work. Carry a bag of beef jerky and munch on that instead.

Keep it up for a few weeks - rewiring habits takes time.

("Keep it up" is easier said than done. Luckily, self-control is a learnable skill. Two good reads on this are Progression and Superhuman by Habit.)

4. Reflect and Repeat

This is the step most people miss. That's too bad, because it's the most important one.

After your rewiring phase, pause and reflect.

Did you succeed in replacing your bad habits? If not, why? Did you lack self control? Were there too many distractions? Did you choose the wrong trigger?

Ask a lot of questions - that's how learning happens.

If all went well, you're a better version of you than before. Repeat this process several times a year for some impressive results.

Cheers.

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A Simple Method to Take Control of Your Productivity

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Take a look at how Beethoven spent his day: "Beethoven rose at dawn and wasted little time getting down to work. His breakfast was coffee, which he prepared himself with great care - he determined that there should be sixty beans per cup, and he often counted them out one by one for a precise dose.

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How to Make Yourself Work When You’re Not Feeling It Infographic - e-Learning Infographics

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How to Make Yourself Work When You’re Not Feeling It Infographic - e-Learning Infographics

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How to Make Yourself Work When You're Not Feeling It Infographic

How To Be Productive at Work When You Don't Feel Like It

The hardest part of work is getting started. It's never been easy - there's something about human nature that makes many of us wait and wait for the 'perfect moment' to open that Word doc or switch on the phones. However, science has shown that today's plugged-in workforce genuinely has a tougher challenge than our ancestors.

Researchers at the University of London discovered that the barrage of emails, instant messages and phone calls we receive each day can effectively reduce our IQ as much as a sleepless night and twice as much as cannabis use. And that's just the external pressure. Inside, feelings of boredom and frustration can hold us back from taking the first step each working day, even if we know it'll becomes much easier once we find our flow.

So rather than beginning what feels like yet another day's work, splitting your work into separate tasks and defining today's workload as a discrete project can create a feeling of purpose. This is just the dawn of your new start the How to Make Yourself Work When You're Not Feeling It Infographic provides a raft of further scientifically-tested methods to get you working when procrastination keeps on getting the best of you. Find the solution that works for you, and your productivity should rise as fast as your morale.

Via: www.netcredit.com

Embed This Education Infographic on your Site or Blog! Copy and Paste the following code!

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How to Make Yourself Work When You're Not Feeling It Infographic - e-Learning Infographics

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The hardest part of work is getting started. It's never been easy - there's something about human nature that makes many of us wait and wait for the 'perfect moment' to open that Word doc or switch on the phones. However, science has shown that today's plugged-in workforce genuinely has a tougher challenge than our ancestors.

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Positivity : Just some words to put you in the right frame of mind before you take on the world.

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Positivity : Just some words to put you in the right frame of mind before you take on the world.

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Positivity : Just some words to put you in the right frame of mind before you take on the world.

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Adapted from the book "The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance" by Steven Kotler. Order now: amzn.to/1bRx99k Learn more in our...

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Flow Genome Project « The Official Source For Flow Science And Training

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Flow Genome Project « The Official Source For Flow Science And Training

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Flow Genome Project " The Official Source For Flow Science And Training

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Flow is the peak performance state where you feel your best and you perform your best. The good news is it's hackable. To find out how, click the button on the right...