The author of the bestselling Bold and The Rise of Superman explores altered states of consciousness and how they can ignite passion, fuel creativity, and accelerate problem solving, in this groundbreaking book in the vein of Daniel Pink’s Drive and Charles Duhigg’s Smarter Faster Better.
Why has generating ""flow"" and getting ""into the zone"" become the goal of the world’s most elite organizations? Why are business moguls attending Burning Man? Why has meditation become a billion-dollar industry? Why are technology gurus turning to psychedelic drugs to unlock creativity?
All of these people are seeking to shift their state of mind as a way of unlocking their true potential. Altered states, the authors reveal, sharpen our decision making capabilities, unleash creativity, fuel cooperation, and let us tap into levels of inspiration and innovation unavailable at all other times. Stealing Fire combines cutting-edge research and first-hand reporting to explore a revolution in human performance — a movement millions of people strong to harness and utilize some of the most misunderstood and controversial experiences in history.
Building a bridge between the extreme and the mainstream, this groundbreaking and provocative book examines how the world’s top performers—the Navy SEALS, Googlers, Fortune 100 CEOs—are using altered states to radically accelerate performance and massively improve their lives, and how we can too.
Ultimately, Stealing Fire is a book about profound possibility—about what is actually possible for ourselves and our species when we unlock the full potential of the human mind.
Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. He is the author of eleven bestsellers (out of fourteen books total), including The Art of Impossible, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, and The Rise of Superman. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, has been translated into more than fifty languages, and has appeared in more than one hundred publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, the Atlantic, Time, and the Harvard Business Review. Steven is also the cohost of Flow Research Collective Radio, a top ten iTunes science podcast. Whenever possible, he can be found hurling himself down mountains at high speeds.
Jamie Wheal is the author of the global bestseller Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. Wheal is an expert in peak performance and leadership, specializing in neuroanthropology––the intersection of culture, biology and psychology and the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of ultimate human performance. Wheal is a mountaineer who’s guided the North Face of Mount Everest, trained Navy Seals, Olympians and RedBull extreme athletes and advised everyone from the U.S. Naval War College and Special Operations Command to the executives of major corporations including Google, Goldman Sachs and Cisco, among others. His work and ideas have been covered in The New York Times, Financial Times, Wired, Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, INC, and TEDx. Wheal lives in Austin, TX.