Steven Kotler, New York Times best-selling author and Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective, has spent over a decade studying Flow as experienced by dozens of unconventional action-adventure athletes. Unconventional in their live-in-the-moment, who-needs-10,000-hours attitudes, these athletes, including snowboarders, surfers and rock climbers, test the limits of their abilities with laser focus. Anything less and their lives may be in danger.

Released last week, Kotler's new book, "The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance", breaks down the science of Flow and how each of us can learn to use it in our everyday life.

During a recent conversation, Steven and I discussed what all of this means for the future of athlete development.

Steven, congratulations on the release of your new book, The Rise of Superman. Can you tell us a little about it and how you chose the title?

Steven Kotler: Thanks Dan, much appreciated. The book is about how action and adventure sports athletes have harnessed the peak performance state known as “flow” (being in the zone, runner’s high, etc.) to drive athletic progression faster and farther than at any other point in history. It’s truly remarkable. In the past 25 years, these athletes have achieved nearly exponential growth in ultimate human performance—that’s performance when life or limb is on the line. Thus, part of the “Superman” in the title refers to this astounding level of progression.

More importantly, flow science has advanced leaps and bounds in the past few decades. So we can use these athletes as case studies— we can figure out what they’re doing to harness this state so successfully and apply this knowledge across all domains in society. In that sense, The Rise of Superman could also be called The Rise of Everyone—meaning it’s a book about what might be possible for all of us.

Many athletes and coaches have heard something about Flow and “being in the zone”, but what is the most misunderstood component of it?

SK: There are a lot of misconceptions. One of the biggest is that flow can only be harnessed by top athletes. Not true at all. Flow is ubiquitous. It shows up anywhere, in anyone, provided certain initial conditions are met. So while researchers have found that flow underpins most gold medals and world championships, they also know it accounts for significant progress in the arts, science and business. In a ten year study by McKinsey, for example, top executives reported being 5 times more productive in flow.

Equally important is the fact that flow is no longer a black box of subjective experience. The science of flow stretches back a long time—almost 150 years—but most people have only heard about the first 130 years, where we were working out the psychology of the state. A lot has happened since then. Advances in brain imaging technologies like fMRI and EEG have allowed us to peak under the hood—we have begun to decode the neurobiology of flow.