The Art of Impossible

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. Each item on that list originated with your massively transformative purpose, was chunked down into a high, hard goal, then further reduced to what you can do today

A public success is nothing more than positive feedback from others. Any kind of social reinforcement increases feel-good neurochemistry, which increases motivation.12 Positive attention from others causes the brain to release more dopamine than we get from passion alone. It also adds oxytocin to the equation. The combination of dopamine and oxytoc

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.

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, 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.

From a neurobiological perspective, these triggers drive attention in one of three ways.18 Either they push dopamine and/or norepinephrine, two of the brain’s main focusing chemicals, into our system, or they lower cognitive load, which is the psychological weight of all the stuff we’re thinking about at any one time. By lowering cognitive load, we

Every second, millions of bits of information flood into our senses. Yet the human brain can only handle about 7 bits of information at once, and the shortest time it takes to discriminate one set of bits from another is one-eighteenth of a second.7 “By using these figures,” as Csikszentmihalyi explained in Flow, “one concludes that it is possible

Serotonin is a calming, peaceful chemical that provides a gentle lift in mood.13 It’s that satiated feeling that comes after a good meal or a great orgasm, and it’s partially responsible for that post-meal/post-coital urge to take a nap.

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