To reach the top, just go with the flow

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Youve heard it.

By Michael Moynihan

You clock it and you move on. Good for them.

But what if you could reach that level of excellence on a regular basis? Steven Kotler believes you can. He says achieving flow, operating at that maximum level, neednt be something that happens once or twice in a sporting career: it can happen all the time.

Kotler started off as a novelist, and fell into magazine journalism as a way to pay the bills in the early 90s. He could ski, snowboard and surf, and given action sports were a hot topic, there was plenty of work for him. Skiing was his forte, and at Chamonix he had the epiphany that led, ultimately, to this book.

Some of the early extreme skiers were there, and in the middle of a 50-degree slope, I was hanging on for my life, and ground to a halt, he says.

One of the worlds best extreme skiers was right behind me when that happened, and instead of smashing into me and killing us both, he jumped to my right, sailed off a 30-foot cliff, landed on a tiny patch of snow and got back onto the slope and just kept going as if nothing had happened.

It was one of the most insane things Id ever seen. It just didnt look possible. It defied the laws of physics, but over that weekend I saw more and more events like that, a step beyond anything Id seen in skiing before.

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To reach the top, just go with the flow