The Art of Impossible

Evolution shaped the brain to enable survival. But evolution itself is driven forward by the availability of resources. Scarcity of resources is always the largest threat to our survival, making it the largest driver of evolution. And there are only two possible responses to this threat. You can fight over dwindling resources, or you can go explori

Passion produces little wins, little wins produce dopamine, and dopamine, repeatedly, over time, cements a growth mindset into place. But because neurochemicals play a lot of different roles in the brain, this increase in dopamine also amplifies focus and drives flow. And flow over time produces grit. The reason? The ecstasy of flow redeems the ago

Intrinsic drivers are the opposite. These are psychological and emotional forces such as curiosity, passion, meaning, and purpose.

Second, dopamine tunes signal-to-noise ratios in the brain, which means the neurochemical increases signal, decreases noise, and, as a result, helps us detect more patterns. There’s a feedback loop here. We get dopamine when we first detect a link between two ideas (a pattern), and the dopamine that we get helps us detect even more links (pattern r

Making your own schedule works well for two reasons. The first is sleep. The freedom to control your schedule gives you the best chance of getting a good night’s rest. The research shows that we all need seven to eight hours of shut-eye a night.9 We’ll explore this in further detail later, but here, know that without proper sleep we experience a sm

“At the elite level,” explains high-performance psychologist Michael Gervais, “talent and ability are mostly equal. The difference is in the head. High performance is 90 percent mental. And most of that mental edge comes from being able to control your thoughts.”

Oxytocin produces trust, love, and friendship.12 It’s the “pro-social” neurochemical that underpins everything from loving, long-term marital bliss to cooperative, well-functioning companies. We feel its presence as joy and love. It promotes trust, underpins fidelity and empathy,

Walk into your neighborhood bar, start chatting with whoever sits next to you, and teach them about the stuff you’ve been teaching yourself.

If willpower degenerates over time, don’t argue. Just start your day with your hardest task and work backward—in descending order of importance and difficulty—to the easiest. The business catchphrase for this approach is “eat your ugly frog first,”

proper goal setting requires three sets of goals: massively transformative, high and hard, and clear—for three different timescales. MTPs last a lifetime; high, hard goals can take years; clear goals are accomplished one minute at a time. But it also means knowing which goal to focus on when. Across the shorter timescales of the moment, attention n