“I’ll tell you…golf is the greatest game in the world,” said Kelly Slater. “You can literally break down any barriers with the people you play with.” Photo: PGA
I don’t know if you have noticed, but something really cool has happened in the last ten years. Sure, there has been a financial crisis, people’s lives have changed dramatically because of it, we have been at war, and Kelly has won five more world titles, but something more subtle.
People are changing.
There has been a dramatic increase in the popularity of endurance events, and even more so in the area of adventure sports and so-called “spartan” events: think Tough Mudder. Experience is fast becoming the new luxury good.
Why? Because the way people view life is changing. People are opting to live life now, as opposed to delaying it until retirement. I think Tim Ferris and his game changing book “The Four Hour Work Week” has had a lot to do with shaping this.
Security is also very different. No longer are people looking exclusively to high pay, high stress, mind numbing jobs, and staying with the same firm for 30 years. More people will now have a handful of jobs on their CV by the time they are 40. This is my fifth major career change and I am 35. What were once perceived as “secure” jobs are fading away, as major business either rapidly adapt with the times or go under.
Business practices are changing, and the way human resources are used is radically different. If a computer can outsource you, then your days in that job are numbered. Look at Silicon Valley as the perfect example, where new age business is seen as a cool, fun, playful place to work.
All of this culminates into one really cool thing. People are being forced to accept greater risk, be more productive, and more creative.
Enter Steven Kotler…
In March, I wrote a blog about the two brains, called Train Your Intuition, where I explained why dry land training can only take you so far, and the importance of training your intuition for surfing, basically through experience-based pattern recognition, citing the work primarily of Kahneman and his work titled Thinking Fast and Slow.
A couple of weeks later, I came across Steven Kotler and his new book The Rise of the Superman which is the result of ten years of his life, studying this idea. His work is an updated, medical-based case-study of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on “Flow,” and how the misfits of society (Danny Way, Dean Potter, Shane Dorian, Laird Hamilton) have tapped into risk as a way of unlocking ultimate human potential.
