The Art of Impossible

and today I’ll try to ski it in four turns. By doing either, I’ve upped the challenge level a little bit, and my brain rewards that risk-taking effort with even more dopamine.

Yet, when we talk about drive—the psychological energy that pushes us forward—we’re really talking about the two final systems: play/social engagement and seeking/desire.

pressured into doing something—that’s controlled motivation. It’s a job you have to do. Autonomous motivation is the opposite. It means you’re doing what you’re doing by choice. Deci and Ryan discovered that in every situation autonomous motivation throttles controlled motivation. Autonomy is always the more powerful driver.

we learned that whenever we accomplish a hard task, dopamine is our reward. In this chapter we want to build on this idea, seeing that if we accomplish hard tasks over and over again, the brain starts to connect the feeling of persistence with the dopamine reward to come. We’re making the act of tapping into our emotional reservoirs a habit.

Yet negative thinking leads to heightened stress. This crushes optimism and squelches creativity. When tuned toward the negative, we miss the novel. Novelty is the foundation for pattern recognition and, by extension, the basis of creativity.24 No creativity, no innovation; no innovation, no impossible. Positive self-talk is one solution to this pr

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?

For these reasons and more, we’re going to spend the rest of this book exploring a quartet of cognitive abilities—motivation, learning, creativity, and flow.

we know that play is mostly designed to teach us about social rules and social interaction. When you’re playing with your little brother and Mom screams, “Don’t pick on someone smaller than you,” she’s exactly on message. The point of play is to teach us lessons like: might doesn’t make right. It’s nature’s way of instructing us in morality.

the results beyond all rational standards and reasonable expectations.