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Creativity … Eat, Move, Sleep … To Be Superman

For Impact Ideas | | Tom Suddes

I’m reading 3 great books that I wanted to share with the For Impact community. Choose one, two or all three. I promise they’re well worth the time and energy.

creativity

    I first saw this in an article in Fast Company in April, which highlights my favorite takeaway from the book: THE BRAINTRUST! My guarantee: If you read what Pixar/Disney does at these BRAINTRUSTS … you will never have another ‘regular meeting‘ again!
    2. Eat Move Sleep: How Small Choices Lead to Big Changes. Recommendation from my great friend and business partner Nick Fellers. Tom Rath is best-selling author (How Full Is Your Bucket?, Strengths Finder 2.0, etc.) and senior scientist and advisor to Gallop. He has been managing a serious illness for more than 20 years. That alone gives his writing huge credibility. EAT MOVE SLEEP leaps into the circle of my favorite books that capture the entire message in the title and on the cover! The book is filled with nuggets that will help anybody make much better decisions in these 3 interconnected areas.This book can be skimmed, opened up to any page and nugget, and has a terrific table of contents with 30 themes that will allow you to pick and choose where you want to go.
    Note: If you have any interest in your own health and well being … this is a great place to start this summer.
    3. The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance. Nick Fellers and I recommend and give each other books 2 or 3 times a week. This is another one of his discoveries that will blow your mind. Just the tagline alone should get your attention! ‘Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance’. Kotler does this by drawing on a decade of research and reporting with dozens of the top action and adventure sports athletes like Big Wave Legend Laird Hamilton, Big Mountain Snowboarder Jeremy Jones and many others.The bottom line for me is the book represents the amazing possibilities of finding FLOW.
    Kotler starts with the Godfather of Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, former Chairman of the University of Chicago Department of Psychology and author of a number of great books on FLOW. Here is a great TED Talk on FLOW by M.C.
    (I bought both the book FLOW and the book CREATIVITY: THE FLOW OF PSYCHOLOGY OF DISCOVERY AND INVENTION by Csikszentmihalyi in August of 1996 in Portland at the iconic bookstore Powells. I’ve been trying to find ‘FLOW‘ ever since. Mostly hard to do, but when it happens … WOW!)
    Kotler’s stories about big wave surfers, free climbers, wing suits diving off of buildings in New York City are absolutely fascinating. Almost every story is about amazing athletes who must find FLOW … or DIE.
    This massive acceleration in performance have occurred within the world of action and adventure sports … and Kotler highlights the characteristics necessary for this kind of peak performance. Again, if you are interested at all in maxing out your potential and changing the world … this is a ‘super‘ read.
    Short Course:

    High achievers are intrinsically motivated. Studying and asking people about the times in their life when they felt their best and performed their best. The happiest people on earth are the ones who felt their lives had the most meaning or the ones who had the most peak experiences. Flow becomes effortless. Flow is when the activity or work becomes effortless, fluid and automatic. Flow state is a balance between the challenge of the task and skill of the performer. Define flow, the skill level and the challenge level must be matched and high.Note: Mihaly goes deep into the autotelic personality, one in which a person performs acts because they are intrinsically rewarding rather than to achieve external goals.