The key ideas

Stealing Fire

Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal, 2017

Sometimes the best solutions come when we forget about ourselves. Kotler and Wheal traveled from the Navy SEALs and Google to science labs and a festival in the desert, and saw how the world's best teams make serious use of altered states of consciousness. The book explains what happens to the brain in those moments, why people kept quiet about them for so long, and how to seek them out without losing your head.

Who it is for

For anyone who has noticed that the best ideas come in moments of total absorption and wants to understand where they come from. And for anyone ready to ask themselves honestly where their evenings, money and energy go in the effort to switch off their head.

By periodically losing our minds, we stand a better chance of finding ourselves.

The night no one fired a shot

In September 2004, in northeastern Afghanistan, a team of Navy SEALs from the elite DEVGRU unit had to take alive a dangerous militant whom the authors call Al-Wazu. In the dark room the soldiers burst into that night, armed guards were mixed in with unarmed women and children. One twitching finger could cost an innocent person their life.

Al-Wazu was sitting in a chair with an assault rifle on his shoulder. In a split second, every man who entered noticed the key thing: his eyes were closed; he was asleep. He was taken without a single shot. The team's commander, Rich Davis, explains it this way: on nights like that the soldiers stop being separate people and act as one. He calls this moment “the switch.”

Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal study such states at their organization, the Flow Genome Project. The ancient Greeks called them ecstasis, stepping beyond oneself. The authors visited the SEALs, Google, a festival in the desert and labs, and everywhere they saw the same thing: the world's best teams seek out the moments when the familiar “self” disappears.

Ahead: what these moments give the brain, why people kept quiet about them for so long, and what traps lie along the way. And at the end, a formula and a calendar that help you avoid losing your head for good.

Four trillion dollars a year to get out of our heads

In 2001 Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, spent almost a year searching for a CEO who would bring order to the company without smothering its spirit.

In the end the choice fell on Eric Schmidt. Of all the finalists, only he had already been to Burning Man, a weeklong festival in the Nevada desert, and Brin later called this an important criterion. Sleepless days of heat, dust and chaos show whether a person will withdraw into themselves or merge with the team. Coincidence or not, under Schmidt, according to the authors, Google's revenue grew from about 100 million dollars to almost 40 billion.

Then the authors recalled an idea of Peter Drucker's: the truth about a person's values is told not by their words but by their calendar and their bank statement. They estimated how much people spend in a year to get out of their own heads. The count included substances, from coffee to drugs, entertainment like video games and social media, plus extreme sports and workshops. It came to about four trillion dollars a year.

The authors themselves call this a rough estimate and stress that much on the list is destructive. But the number shows the main point: the desire to switch off the inner voice, even briefly, is enormous, and we already pay for it, most often blindly.

If you found some items from this list in your own life, that's no reason to blame yourself. Few people dare to look honestly at where their evenings and money go.

Read in Livria

About the author

Steven Kotler is a journalist and New York Times bestselling author, and the cofounder and director of research of the Flow Genome Project. Jamie Wheal is an expert on peak performance and leadership who has advised U.S. Special Operations Command, Red Bull athletes and Google executives.

All books by this author: Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

Terms from the book

  • Prefrontal cortex
  • Davis
  • Page
  • Brin
  • Schmidt
  • Drucker
  • Flow
  • Psychedelics
  • DEVGRU: The official name of the elite U.S. Navy SEAL unit known as SEAL Team Six. Its special task is rescuing hostages.
  • Al-Wazu: The name the authors, at the military's request, give to a captured al-Qaeda militant; his real name is not disclosed.
  • Flow Genome Project: The organization founded by the book's authors. It studies the link between altered states of consciousness, above all flow, and peak achievement.
  • Ecstasis: A Greek word for “stepping beyond oneself.” For the authors it is the common name for three kinds of states: flow, meditative and mystical experiences, and psychedelic states.
  • Burning Man: A weeklong annual festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada: a temporary city with huge art installations, music and dancing at night; at the end of the festival a wooden figure of a man is burned.
  • Silva: Jason Silva is a Venezuelan creator of popular videos about consciousness and philosophy, and the host of Brain Games on National Geographic.
  • Transient hypofrontality: A temporary slowdown in the activity of the prefrontal cortex. The authors consider it one of the main explanations for why the sense of self disappears in altered states, but they themselves caution that it's only one hypothesis.
  • Kegan: Robert Kegan is a Harvard psychologist who studies how adults keep developing throughout their lives.
  • Fadiman: James Fadiman is an American psychologist who studied, back in the 1960s, how psychedelics affect creative problem solving.
  • Wicked problems: Problems with no single right solution, where every attempt to fix one thing creates other troubles. Poverty or traffic jams, for example.
  • Nutt: David Nutt is a British psychiatrist and psychopharmacologist, a former chair of the government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs.
  • MDMA: A synthetic drug known on the street as ecstasy. Illegal in many countries.
  • The Lancet: A British medical journal, one of the most respected in the world.
  • Freediver: An athlete who dives to depth on a single breath hold, without scuba gear.
  • Mevoli: Nick Mevoli was an American record-setting freediver who died in 2013 after a dive in Dean's Blue Hole in the Bahamas.
  • Dean's Blue Hole: A deep underwater sinkhole off Long Island in the Bahamas, about two hundred meters deep. One of the main venues for freediving competitions.
  • Molchanova: Natalia Molchanova was a Russian freediver, a many-time world champion and world record holder. She disappeared during a dive off the coast of Spain in 2015.
  • Jerusalem syndrome: A temporary fit of madness in some pilgrims and tourists in Jerusalem: a person suddenly starts believing they are a biblical figure.
  • Pike: Zebulon Pike was an American officer and explorer of the early 19th century. Pikes Peak in Colorado is named after him.
  • Ulmer: Kristen Ulmer is an American extreme skier who later became a meditation coach and now runs Zen ski camps.
  • Aiguille-du-Midi: A peak about 3,800 meters high above Chamonix in the French Alps. A descent of its North Face is considered one of the most dangerous in skiing.
  • Post-traumatic stress disorder: A condition after living through a disaster, war or violence: nightmares, intrusive memories, constant anxiety and detachment.
  • Hedonic calendar: A technique from the book, not a scientific term: sorting all your ways of “getting out of your head” by frequency, from daily to yearly, so they don't turn into an addiction.
  • Shulgin: Alexander Shulgin was an American chemist who synthesized and described hundreds of psychoactive substances.

All terms

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