RT shared this book with me saying that this was something I may like. I read it and found that it had many ideas already explained very well by earlier writers - ideas such as the Mindset, Flow, 10000 hour rule to expertise and so on. Mainly however the author tries to differentiate between extreme and mainstreams states of flow. He seems to have researched extreme sports such as skate boarding, surf boarding, freehold climbing, BASE work, gymnastics etc and comes up with many examples of people jumping the Great Wall, performing stunts with great danger and grave injuries and pulling them off (or in some cases dying).
The flow state he describes as one that Csikzentmihalyi says has the following components - clear goals, concentration, a loss of feeling of self-consciousness, a distorted sense of time, direct and immediate feedback, balance between ability and challenge, a sense of personal control over the situation, a lack of awareness of bodily needs and complete absorption into the activity where awareness narrows to the activity itself. So there's Danny Way, Dean Potter, Mike Swanson, Shane McConkey, Alex Honnold. But what caught my eye was the story of Kerry Strug, Olympic gymnast who, despite an injury, scored enough to take her team to gold!
The way to achieve group flow is discussed as well. They are - serious concentration, clear goals, good communication, equal participation, element of risk, familiarity, blending egos, a sense of control, close listening and always say yes.
"Creativity is just connecting things,'- Steve Jobs. 'Find patterns you haven't seen before.'
It's a book that to me had many examples of extreme sports but not enough material to say how and why its different and how any of the concepts discussed above could help us understand them. Overall a disappointment for me because it left me no wiser about the process though I did learn of a few sporting incidents which I did not know of earlier.
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