Steven Kotler Quotes

“According to the official numbers, shelters take in somewhere between six million and eight million dogs and cats every year and euthanize about half of them.”

“Animals are often fed mechanically, so their only human contact comes, and this is only in the case of breeder dogs, in the form of artificial insemination and, nine weeks later, a pair of hands snatching babies away.”

“As it turns out, what makes a dog adoptable has very little to do with dogs, a great deal to do with humans.”

“At most puppy mills, they pack the dogs into wire cages, usually for the entirety of their lives, often in pitch-black conditions. There are waste collection trays beneath these cages, but they’re rarely emptied. Flies are a constant. With no air-conditioning in the summer and no heat in the winter, dogs freeze to death or die from heatstroke with regularity. During the hottest months, when the cage metal heats up, puppies have been known to cook on the wires. The food is poor and veterinary care infrequent. Open sores, tissue damage, blindness, deafness, ulcers, tooth decay — even rotting jaws because the tooth decay has gotten so bad — are more the rule than the exception.”

“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.”

“As children we are taught not to play with fire, not how to play with fire.”

“If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round. Unless we invert this equation, much of our capacity for intrinsic motivation starts to shut down. We lose touch with our passion and become less than what we could be and that feeling never really goes away.”

“Mindset impacts emotion, which alters biology, which increases performance. Thus, it seemed, by tinkering with mindset — using everything from physical to psychological to pharmacological interventions — one could significantly enhance performance.
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“Most people live in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.”

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

“The reasons there are so many clichés about universes inside of dewdrops is because there are universes inside of dewdrops.”

“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'.”

“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.”

“When risk is a challenge, fear becomes a compass — literally pointing people in the direction they need to go next.”