How To Get Into The Flow State | Steven Kotler

I watched like twelve minutes of it. The first eleven struck me as pretty fluffy BS, even if it did feature rock climbing.

But finally at minute twelve Mr. Kotler said something really useful. Tight paraphrase:

“Most of your fears, most of your anxieties, very few of them are in the right here, right now. They’re horrible things that happened in the past, or they’re scary things that might maybe could happen in the future.”

Yeah.

Whenever I sat down with an evil Dean, or a false friend who happened to be a college president, I was calm and articulate and lucid, not afraid. It was only after bad things had happened and become part of the past that I feared them and even let them wreck me.

I was in a vicious street fight once with two raging drunks and never experienced a moment of fear (not even afterwards, because I won that fight). I was in a flow state, and all I cared about was hurting those guys badly, in order to protect myself and my fiancee’ and her son. The emotion I felt at breaking the big one’s nose was pure fearless joy and it lingered.

I have done okay at fearing the future less. Death is inevitable. Poverty is likely. So it goes.

Fearing the past less is much harder for me, though I feel kind of dumb just typing those words.

I think that this realization about the almost always fearless present will help me.

Though I still won’t be watching the rest of that video.

Please let me know if I’m missing anything good.