This Book Will Show You How to Achieve the Impossible

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”

“This is a book about what it takes to do the impossible. In a very real sense, it’s a practical playbook for impractical people. It’s designed specifically for those of us with completely irrational standards for our own performance and totally unreasonable expectations for our lives.”

“As far as I can tell, the only thing more difficult than the emotional toil of pursuing true excellence is the emotional toil of not pursuing true excellence.”

“Very little is impossible with ten years’ practice.”

“The central premise of this book is that impossible has a formula. Whenever we see the impossible become possible, we are witnessing the end result of a quartet of skills - motivation, learning, creativity, and flow - expertly applied and significantly amplified.”

“Stalking the impossible demands digging deep on a daily basis. Lao Tzu wasn’t wrong: the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. But it’s still a journey of a thousand miles. Uphill, in the dark, both ways.”

“Since impossible is always an arduous trek, elite-level performers never rely on a single source of fuel to sustain them along the way. And this is true for both physical fuel and psychological fuel.

On the physical side, even though this is not the point of this book, elite performers always try to get enough sleep and exercise and maintain proper hydration and nutrition. They ‘stack’ - that is, cultivate, amplify, and align - the foundational requirements for producing physical energy.

Equally crucial, elite performers stack psychological fuel sources. They cultivate and align drivers such as curiosity, passion, and purpose. By stacking these sources of mental energy, they ensure on-demand access to all of life’s most potent emotional fuels.”

“As high-minded as something like ‘meaning and purpose’ might seem as a driver, this is actually evolution’s way of saying: Okay, you’ve got enough resources for yourself and your family. Now it’s time to help your tribe or your species get more. 

This is also why, in the brain, there’s really not much difference between drivers. Intrinsic drivers, extrinsic drivers, it doesn't matter. In the end, like so much of life, it all comes down to neurochemistry.”

“Exercise is a non-negotiable for peak performance. You could fill a textbook with its benefits - health, energy, mood, and so on - but most critical here is nervous system regulation. Chasing any impossible can be an emotional roller coaster. If you can’t regularly calm your nervous system, you’ll crack up or burn out or both. And exercise doesn’t just reduce the level of stress hormones in our system, it replaces them with mood boosters like endorphins and anandamide. The calm optimism that results is critical for long-term peak performance.”

“The system is constantly overloaded, so much of reality is constantly invisible.”

“Psychologists have found that humans can achieve three levels of well-being on this planet, each more pleasurable than the last.

The first level is moment-to-moment ‘happiness,’ or what’s often described as a hedonic approach to life.

The next level up is ‘engagement,’ which is defined as a high-flow lifestyle, or one where happiness is achieved not by the pursuit of pleasure, but rather through seeking out challenging tasks that have a high likelihood of producing flow.

The next level up, the peak level of happiness and the best we get to feel on the planet, is known as ‘purpose,’ which blends the high-flow lifestyle of level two with the desire to impact lives beyond our own.”

“Peak performers must learn to tolerate enormous amounts of anxiety and overwhelm, which is what passion feels like much of the time.”

“I take a similar approach to training cognitive skills. When practicing a new speech, I always do one run-through from hell. I pick a time when I haven’t gotten enough sleep, have already worked for ten hours, and put in a heavy training session at the gym. After all that, I take my dogs into the backcountry, hike up a mountain, and give my speech along the way. If I can sound coherent scrambling up cliffs, I can sound coherent under any conditions.”

“What did I believe three months ago that I know is not true today? Why did I believe that? What kind of thinking error did I commit to arrive at that erroneous conclusion?

The good news is that these sorts of thinking errors tend to be categorical. We have blind spots that lend our mistakes a certain consistency. So weaknesses tend to have root causes. By training the root causes, you can erase whole categories of weaknesses at once.”

“So why is it better to read books than blogs? Condensed knowledge.

If you go on a blog bender and spend five hours reading my blogs, at three and a half minutes per blog, you’ll manage to slog through about eighty-six of them - thus you’re trading those five hours for 257 days’ worth of my effort.

Meanwhile, if you had spent those same five hours reading Rise [Kotler’s previous book], you would have gotten 5,475 days. Books are the most radically condensed form of knowledge on the planet. Every hour you spend with Rise is actually about three years of my life. You just can’t beat numbers like that.”

“Moreover, books pay performance dividends. Studies find that they improve long-term concentration, reduce stress, and stave off cognitive decline. Reading has also been shown to improve empathy, sleep, and intelligence.

If you combine these benefits with the information density books provide, we start to see why everyone from tech titans like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk to cultural icons like Oprah Winfrey, Mark Cuban, and Warren Buffett credit their success to their incredible passion for books.”

“Peak performance works like compound interest. A little bit today, a little bit tomorrow, do this for weeks and months and years and the result won’t just be a life that exceeds your expectations, it’ll be one that exceeds your imagination.”

“The bigger the dream, the less visible the path.”