How Creatives Can Achieve The Flow State To Transform Their Working Life

A review of Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal

This is an important book for creatives. It talks, in very clear terms, about ways to achieve the Flow State, that period when the world falls away and you’re lost to a rush of pure thought and inspiration. When you achieve Flow, you feel like you can write, or paint, or create music, forever. But it’s incredibly elusive. Getting it is hard. Holding on to it for a sustained period is even more difficult.

‘We have very little success training people to be more creative. And there’s a pretty simple explanation for this failure: we’re trying to train a skill, but what we really need to be training is a state of mind.’

As the subtitle of Stealing Fire suggests — How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionising The Way We Live and Work — authors Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal have done their homework. They provide a range of new research, thinking and practise across several disciplines.

Anything which manages to pull together how the NAVY SEALs train, elite athletes, the Burning Man festival, and tech entrepreneurs micro-dosing with LSD, is anything but ephemeral in its approach. The book is about how to hack your mind to…