The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance Hardcover Author: Visit Amazon's Steven Kotler Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1477800832 | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Review
“A thrill ride of a book, empowering in its implications of what any individual can achieve.”
—Kirkus Reviews"The Rise of Superman is a marriage of extreme sports reporting, gonzo science writing, and radical self-help lit: Kotler takes us along on many exciting ventures into the gnarliest gnar, breaks them down into their constituent parts, and puts it all back together as an inspiration to start looking for the Superman inside ourselves." —New Mexico Magazine
About the Author
Steven Kotler is a bestselling author and an award-winning journalist. His books include the non-fiction works:
Abundance, A Small, Furry Prayer, and
West of Jesus, and the novel
The Angle Quickest for Flight. His articles have appeared in over 60 publications, including:
New York Times Magazine, Wired, Discover, Popular Science, Outside, GQ, and
National Geographic. He writes “The Playing Field,” a blog about the science of sport and culture for PsychologyToday.com.
Kotler is also the co-founder and director of research at the Flow Genome Project, an international organization devoted to putting flow state research on a hard science footing, and the co-founder of the New Mexico-based Rancho de Chihuahua dog sanctuary.
He has a BA in English/Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and an MA from the John Hopkins University in Creative Writing.
Direct download links available for Download Epub The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: New Harvest (March 4, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1477800832
- ISBN-13: 978-1477800836
- Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
This was a tough book to review. One reason is that I have read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's 1990 perennial bestselling book Flow - The Psychology of Optimal Experience, his 1993 book The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, and his 1996 book Creativity, Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Flow, the psychological research behind it, the relevance to sports, business, and life, have been around for decades. Jimmy Johnson, the once coach of the Dallas Cowboys gave some credit for his superbowl wins in the 1990's to reading Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow. With this background, I opened this book on the relevance of flow to action adventure sports with trepidation.
The strengths in this book are also some of the weaknesses. You will gain a new appreciation of action sports heroes that deserve greater recognition. Discover the accomplishments of legendary surfer Laird Hamilton, skateboarding sensation Danny Way (although you will gain more from watching the documentary "waiting for lightning" which is available on Netflix), rock climbing fanatics Alex Honnold and Dean Potter, among others. I knew many of the stories but Steven Kotler is a journalist and knows how to trigger intrigue. The concept, science, and applications of entering into the deep psychological state of flow plays second to Steven's attempts to draw you into the death defying feats in sports. Let me be absolutely clear - if you are uninterested in adventure sports, you will not enjoy this book.
I'll give you a few examples of what I mean.
The Rise of Superman is ostensibly Steven Kotler's book about Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, as experienced through extreme athletes. In reality, it seems to be Kotler's attempt to break into the corporate consultancy/sponsorship world, using pseudo-scientific words (such as his organization's name: The Flow Genome Project) to try to get corporations to buy into his brand of "mindfulness extreme" as the next big competitive advantage.
The way you can tell Kotler's a poseur is that he uses terms like "source code" inappropriately through the book, as though trying to show that he has some deep insight that he is uniquely qualified to tell. No engineer or computer scientist worth his salt would use the words "source code" the way he does, and on closer inspection, it appears that Kotler did a "search-and-replace" for "source" with "source code" throughout the text.
I'm not dismissing Flow or Mindfulness in any way. Nearly every unimpoverished human has experienced flow at one point or another in his life. I've threaded harrowing descents down Italian mountains with inches to spare between my handlebars and a pick up truck coming up on a narrow winding road, and piloted boats out of ports with sidewinds where mistakes would mean disaster, but I don't claim to have any deep insight to flow that are inaccessible to others. More prosaically, nearly every video gamer that has played a perfect level of Tetris or say, Naughty Dog's sublime
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