The Art of Impossible

“Big goals work best when there’s an alignment between an individual’s values and the desired outcome of the goal. When everything lines up, we’re totally committed—meaning we’re paying even more attention, are even more resilient, and are way more productive as a result.”

“No pressure, no diamonds.”

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

Talk to a different stranger, tell a few friends about your ideas, or join a meetup devoted to the subject. An online community. A book club. And if one doesn’t exist, start your own. Finally, it’s important to do these steps in order. You want to spend a bit of time playing around at the intersections of curiosities before taking this public.

Now, I’m automatically walking the path toward mastery—which is also the only path that can lead us to the impossible.

Yet, as Latham once told me, not every goal is the same. “We found that if you want the largest increase in motivation and productivity, then big goals lead to the best outcomes. Big goals significantly outperform small goals, medium-sized goals, and vague goals.”10 Big goals. That’s the secret. But what, exactly, is a big goal?

“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.”

So what does this look like in the real world? Daily “to-do” lists. A proper to-do list is just a set of clear goals for your day. At a very basic level, this is exactly what the road to impossible looks like—a well-crafted to-do list, executed daily.

When multiple curiosity streams intersect, you not only amp up engagement—you create the necessary conditions for pattern recognition, or the linking of new ideas together.2 Pattern recognition is what the brain does at a very basic level. It’s essentially the fundamental job of most neurons. As a result, whenever we recognize a pattern, the brain