The Art of Impossible summary

When you explore your curiosities, your brain rewards you with small amounts of a feel-good chemical known as dopamine. Dopamine is the key ingredient in drive – it makes you excited, engaged, and more likely to keep doing whatever it is you’re doing.⁠ But satisfying your curiosity only gets you small amounts of dopamine – not enough for you to achieve the impossible over the long-term.

What you need is passion, which provides a much greater dopamine boost. Often, you can find your passions by looking for intersections among your curiosities. Let’s say one of your curiosities is the left-tackle football position. Another is the potential for using grasshoppers as a sustainable food source. Putting these two together, your passion might be to find a way to use grasshoppers as a fuel for athletes. 

You’ve unearthed your passions and discovered your purpose. Now, how do you find the strength to act on them consistently over time?

The answer is: by having clear goals. In the late 1960s, psychologists Gary Latham and Edwin Locke conducted a study that showed just how powerful goals can be. In it, lumberjacks were divided into two groups. One group was told to gather as much wood as possible. The other group was asked to reach specific quotas. Neither group was offered any financial incentives whatsoever. The result? The lumberjacks that had the quotas gathered far more wood than the no-quota group.

Intrinsic motivators, goals, and grit –⁠ these three things will motivate you to achieve the impossible. But motivation alone is far from the end of the story.

Recall the fifth intrinsic motivator, mastery. To attain mastery, you need expertise. And to acquire expertise, you’ll need to learn – a lot. We even have a special term for it: lifelong learning.

Once you start learning about the area you’ve chosen to pursue, you’re likely to encounter a lot of unfamiliar terms and concepts. You won’t understand or be good at everything right away –⁠ and that can be pretty frustrating. Some people might take frustration as a sign that they’re doing something wrong. In fact, the opposite is true.

How so? Well, when you get frustrated, it increases the levels of norepinephrine in your brain. That chemical’s main function is to prepare your brain for learning. So, in fact, frustration is a sign that you’re taking in information.

In 2016, the company Adobe conducted a survey of over five thousand adults in five different countries. The aim was to determine how critical creativity is to society.

The research found that creatives outperform their noncreative counterparts in several respects. For starters, creatives tend to feel significantly more fulfilled than noncreatives, reporting 34 percent higher happiness levels. Creatives also make more money than noncreatives –⁠ 13 percent more, to be precise.

“Aha!” Everyone knows that feeling you get when you finally solve a difficult puzzle or understand a joke. We might call this a moment of insight.

Insight, it turns out, is core to creativity. And you don’t just have to wait for it to suddenly appear. Instead, you can cultivate it. How? By strengthening a particular part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC, which is part of the salience network.

For three years, the author struggled with Lyme disease, an illness that can cause flu-like symptoms and severe brain fog. The disease reduced him to a shadow of his former self, leaving him barely able to walk, and with reduced concentration and failing vision.

In the midst of his illness, a friend appeared at his door. She demanded that the two go surfing together –⁠ and she wouldn’t take no for an answer. Eventually, despite how ridiculous the idea seemed, the author caved in.