Top 80 Steven Kotler Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Time slows down. Self vanishes. Action and Awareness merge. Welcome to Flow.”

— Steven Kotler

2. “Neurons that fire together wire together.”

— Steven Kotler

3. “With our sense of self out of the the way we are liberated from doubt and insecurity.”

— Steven Kotler

4. “Tell me what you value and I might believe you,” management guru Peter Drucker once said, “but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you what you really value.” So.”

— Steven Kotler

5. “The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

— Steven Kotler

6. “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs most is more people who have come alive.”

— Steven Kotler

7. “Creatives fail and the really good ones fail often.”

— Steven Kotler

8. “Once danger becomes its own reward, risk moves from a threat to be avoided to a challenge to be risen toward.”

— Steven Kotler

9. “It’s not how good you are; it’s how good you want to be.”

— Steven Kotler

10. “This means flow packs a double punch: it doesn’t just increase our decision-making abilities – it increases our creative decision-making abilities. Dramatically.”

— Steven Kotler

11. “Flow is more than an optimal state of consciousness – one where we feel our best and perform our best – it also appears to be the only practical answer to the question: What is the meaning of life? Flow is what makes life worth living.”

— Steven Kotler

12. “Every good athlete can find the flow,” continues Pastrana, “but it’s what you do with it that makes you great. If you consistently use that state to do the impossible, you get confident in your ability to do the impossible. You begin to expect it. That’s why we’re seeing so much progression in action sports today. It’s the natural result of a whole lot of people starting to expect the impossible.”

— Steven Kotler

13. “If you want to trigger flow, the challenge should be 4 percent greater than the skills.”

— Steven Kotler

14. “What looks inevitable in hindsight is often invisible with foresight.”

— Steven Kotler

15. “We all see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

— Steven Kotler

16. “If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round.”

— Steven Kotler

17. “To really achieve anything, you have to be able to tolerate and enjoy risk. It has to become a challenge to look forward to. In all fields, to make exceptional discoveries you need risk – you’re just never going to have a breakthrough without it.”

— Steven Kotler

18. “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.”

— Steven Kotler

19. “Imagination,” says futurist and philosopher Jason Silva, “allows us to conceive of delightful future possibilities, pick the most amazing one, and pull the present forward to meet it.”

— Steven Kotler

20. “Creativity has a brain wave signature as well: alpha waves pulsing out of the brain’s right hemisphere.”

— Steven Kotler

21. “Fully alive and deeply committed is a risky business.”

— Steven Kotler

22. “Not only is the distracted present a miserable place to be, it’s also the worst kind of self-handicapping. Study after study shows that we’re terrible multitaskers. By trying to improve performance by being everywhere and everywhen, we end up nowhere and never. The sad truth is that our lives are pulling us in every direction save the one where we’re most effective.”

— Steven Kotler

23. “During a peak experience,” Maslow explained, “the individual experiences an expansion of self, a sense of unity, and meaningfulness in life. The experience lingers in one’s consciousness and gives a sense of purpose, integration, self-determination and empathy.”

— Steven Kotler

24. “When you’re arrogant and egotistical,” says Dr. Olds, “you’re shutting out complexity, novelty, and unpredictability to preserve a distorted self-image. Any incoming information that could lead to self-doubt is stamped out. It’s a massive data reduction. Humility moves in the other direction, it opens us up and increases incoming information. As a result, there is more opportunity for pattern recognition, more dopamine, and less need for judgmental metacognition.”

— Steven Kotler

25. “How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors – activities packed with flow triggers – because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like “career” or “children”?”

— Steven Kotler

26. “As CNN recently reported: “A decade of research in the business world proves happiness raises nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37 percent, productivity by 31 percent, and accuracy on tasks by 19 percent, as well as a myriad of health and quality-of-life improvements.”

— Steven Kotler

27. “This isn’t just your mind paying more attention – suddenly your entire body is paying attention. When this happens, it’s outside our conscious capabilities. There are no words. Our language becomes that of the river. All the features of the river speak to you and you to them through motion. There is tension, threat, there is joy and release, and overall, a deep, deep sense of flow. You are literally part of the flow of the world.”

— Steven Kotler

28. “With the prefrontal cortex down-regulated, most impulse control mechanisms go offline too. For people who aren’t used to this combination, the results can be expensive.”

— Steven Kotler

29. “We pay to watch, read, or be in the presence of a flow experience. If quantified, you’d find it’s a major chunk of the GDP.”

— Steven Kotler

30. “Words are too recent an imprinting. Animals, though, are part of our ancient grammar, prehistorically embedded in the brain.”

— Steven Kotler

31. “Norepinephrine and dopamine typically underpin “romantic love,” endorphins and oxytocin link mother to child and friend to friend, anandamide and serotonin deepen feelings of trust, openness, and intimacy. When combinations of these chemicals flow through groups at once, you get tighter bonds and heightened cooperation.”

— Steven Kotler

32. “Flow starts when we say yes to the fight.”

— Steven Kotler

33. “And for flow junkies who get their fix through action sports, this has always been the dark secret. Ecstasis only arises when attention is fully focused in the present moment.”

— Steven Kotler

34. “Buckminster Fuller said don’t try to change human behavior. It’s s a waste of time. Evolution doesn’t mess around; the patterns are too deep. Fuller said go after the tools. Better tools lead to better people. Arctic doesn’t develop products. We may cultivate them, occasionally, in our own particular way, but our business is change. Significant change.”

— Steven Kotler

35. “Abraham Maslow once famously said,22 “When all you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” What he meant was, when it comes to problem-solving, we tend to get locked into using familiar tools in expected ways.”

— Steven Kotler

36. “It was even odds that the thing I was the most afraid of didn’t actually exist at all.”

— Steven Kotler

37. “Danny Way explains: “It’s either find the zone or suffer the consequences – there’s no other choice available.”

— Steven Kotler

38. “If ever you say you can’t do something,” shouts the announcer, “remember Danny Way.”

— Steven Kotler

39. “Scientists call this shutdown7 “transient hypofrontality.” Transient means temporary. “Hypo,” the opposite of “hyper,” means “less than normal.” And frontality refers to the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that generates our sense of self. During transient hypofrontality, because large swatches of the prefrontal cortex turn off, that inner critic comes offline. Woody goes quiet.”

— Steven Kotler

40. “That’s why people who seek out group flow often join startups or work for themselves. Serial entrepreneurs keep starting new business as much for the flow experience, as for the additional success.”

— Steven Kotler

41. “In an environment of turbulent change, as de Geus famously wrote: “The ability to learn faster than your competitors is the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

— Steven Kotler

42. “When people say that animal rescuers are crazy, what they really mean is that animal rescuers share a number of fundamental beliefs that makes them easy to marginalize. Among those is the belief that Rene Descartes was a jackass.”

— Steven Kotler

43. “This is our mystery: a rare and radical state of consciousness where the impossible becomes possible.”

— Steven Kotler

44. “Nothing’s too gnarly.”

— Steven Kotler

45. “Flirting has to be the original form of guerrilla marketing, from back before markets even existed.”

— Steven Kotler

46. “This is what the self-help books don’t tell you. Fully alive and deeply committed is a risky business. Once you strip away the platitudes, a life of passion and purpose will always cost, as T. S. Eliot reminds us, “Not less than everything.”

— Steven Kotler

47. “Motivation is what gets you into this game; learning is what helps you continue to play; creativity is how you steer; and flow is how you turbo-boost the results beyond all rational standards and reasonable expectations.”

— Steven Kotler

48. “Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code. It’s wired into every stage of meaning-making, from basic emotions all the way up to abstract thought. Once you can speak a language, you can feel in that language. It’s automatic. It creates empathy.”

— Steven Kotler

49. “Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder,” wrote Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In, and she’s not wrong.”

— Steven Kotler

50. “All you can do is your inch. We grab everyone we can carry, put each other onto our backs, and crawl toward the future. Inch by inch – it’s all we can do.”

— Steven Kotler