It was 1945 and the 10th Mountain Division had a problem. Initially activated in 1941, America’s first specially trained mountain-warfare combat troops began as a collection of the finest skiers, climbers, and general outdoorsmen the army could recruit. Mountaineering legends like Paul Petzoldt (the first American…
Let’s set the record straight right away: THE RISE OF SUPERMAN uses action-sports as a case study for flow, but flow is a much bigger force than sports. Flow reaches music, arts, science, business, and any area where intense focus and near-perfect decision making enable…
Photo: OneEyedBird | Could flow have provided an evolutionary advantage? One of the bigger questions surrounding flow research is the question of its role in evolution. How did natural selection latch onto the idea of radically altering consciousness to optimize performance? About a decade back, researchers…
In Episode 1 of the Rise of Superman video series, some of the best flow-hackers in the world talk about how flow drives both their careers and their lives. As several of the people profiled in this video say: flow is their reason to live,…
A growing body of research suggests that the state of consciousness known to researchers as “flow” is the secret to ultimate human performance. In The Rise of Superman, we argue that action sports athletes have discovered the most effective on-ramps to the flow state, but…
This weekend the HuffingtonPost dedicated its ongoing TED Weekends section to business leadership. In each installment, the site invites writers to tackle subjects that have been addressed in famous TED talks.
“Climbing inside an eight-foot eggshell.” That’s how the late rock climber Michael Reardon described the pin-point focus needed to free solo the gnar. In West of Jesus, I recount a story about a time Reardon was 110 feet off the deck in Joshua Tree, when…
Over the past 30 years, skiers, snowboarders, surfers and other action sports athletes have pushed human performance farther and faster than at any other point in the 150,000-year history of our species.Think of some of the mind-blowing milestones in the last decade: Danny Way jumps the…
Sure, this book is called THE RISE OF SUPERMAN, but I’m not talking about a guy in a cape who’s allergic to kryptonite. The idea here is much older. Throughout history, we have caught glimpses of other versions of ourselves. Better, stronger, smarter versions. And…
November 5, 2013 – An all-star cast of athletes, artists and scientists will converge in Los Angeles next week to create a seven-episode video series that explores how flow states have enabled some of their greatest accomplishments. Personalities involved in the series include climber and…
Get an exclusive sneak peak of Chapter One, The Rise of Superman updates,
and flow hacking tips from the Flow Genome Project.
