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As an occasional runner and amateur cyclist, I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of a “runner’s high,” or what many athletes call “being in the zone.” How do elite performers achieve this state? And why is it so difficult for many to reach, or continue to maintain, that level? I eventually discovered the writing of Steven Kotler, the author and neuroscientist, whose work I first became interested in through his book “The Art of Impossible” about the science behind peak performance.
Recently, in this AI era, Kotler has been focused on what he calls the age of abundance—and the consequences of information overload on modern society. So I reached out to him, and we chatted recently about the concept of abundance, how it pertains to leaders, and our love (and the agony) of Cleveland sports teams. Here’s a condensed, edited version of our conversation.
You have a new book, “We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance,” which you wrote with Peter H. Diamandis. What’s it about?
Kotler: The book looks at the fact that there's a dark side to abundance. We have an abundance of artificial intelligence. It's led to an abundance of fears around technological unemployment. We have an abundance of energy. It's led to an abundance of carbon in the atmosphere. We have an abundance of convenience. It's led to plastic pollution everywhere, an abundance of plastics. So we have an abundance of cheap food. It's led to an abundance of obesity.
The real focus of the book, which the first half looks at, says abundance has gotten to the point that we actually have God-like technology, giving us God-like powers.
So you've got a prehistoric brain in a modern world, what does that mean? It means we overdetect threat, we underdetect opportunity, we massively prefer the familiar to the novel. We want to conserve energy at all costs, and this is neurobiologically, that has a lot of effects. We can collapse complexity into very simple narratives, and this last one you're seeing a lot around AI right now because the AI conversation is either, oh my God, the apocalypse is coming. It's either utopia or the apocalypse, and I'm just like, wow people, historically, I mean literally since the beginning of the time, it's always the middle road.
OK, so we have a prehistoric brain, trying to assess risk and make sense of all this technology and data. What does this mean for leaders trying to run businesses and large enterprises?
Kotler: Let me give you two things that matter to leaders, OK? So the first thing, the simple version is: We evolved in environments that are local and linear. Everything was nearby. Everything moved very slowly. We live in an environment that is global and exponential. So we deal with things all around the world, right?
Let's drill down more a bit. Speaking directly to leaders, we're going to talk about something that I started to observe called "exponential leadership syndrome." I named it because it first showed up in leaders. And it turns out, it's showing up in everybody, but I saw it in CEOs and founders about six months to a year before I started to see it in the general population.
We live in a world of information overload. We basically evolved in a world where we encountered about 1 gigabyte’s worth of new information a year. That's an insane amount of information. This fractures attention. We all know this. It's hard to focus on things these days. That creates decision fatigue, it's hard to make decisions. This is a problem for leaders.
Fatigue starts to lead to what's called meaning drift. Work doesn't feel the way it felt before. All these things work together to start to erode creativity, motivation and resilience. And once you have those things, you lead to burnout, which is why everybody's so burned out right now.
And in a nutshell, are there some solutions or tactics to manage burnout and information overload?
Kotler: This is happening to all leaders in the modern world, and the way I like to talk about it is there were a lot of things that we called soft skills in the 20th century. Things like focus and attention, creativity and innovation, flow, my core topic, and optimal performance. These were soft skills, and when I say soft skills, like nobody taught them in business.
So let's start with information overload. Flow is an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and we perform our best. More specifically, it's any of those moments of rapt attention when you get so focused on what you're doing that everything else just starts to disappear, right?
Flow states have triggers, preconditions that lead to more flow. The first trigger is complete concentration. How do you achieve it? When I think about leaders and really the focus you want for work, there's five or six things I always start with.
1️⃣ The first thing is you've got to make a list.
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