Psychology

The heart is dramatic. Many of your other crucial organs – your liver, your kidneys- do their work in bureaucratic silence. Your heart is dramatic and reacts to how you feel. Your heart moves with your emotions, it quiets down when you're about to sleep, or when you're relaxed.

Cardiologist and author specializing in heart disease and public health

I grew up with a fear of the heart as an executioner of men in the prime of their lives. We're extraordinarily vulnerable to the functions of our heart, no other organ can cause sudden death.

Cardiologist and author of "Intern" and "Heart: A History

If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self…humans, however, can't live very long without some sense of a continuing story.

Japanese novelist known for surrealist fiction and magical realism works

If you had to make everything up in your life, from the start, with no input whatsoever – that wouldn't be freedom – you'd be less free; you'd have to think constantly about what you should or should not do. There would be no structure for your life choices.

Philosopher, Cosmopolitanism Advocate & Princeton University Professor

High performance is- truly- a checklist. It's waking up, understanding how many things you can do that day to the best of your ability, getting those things done, allowing yourself time to exercise, eat, rest, engage in active recovery, get some social support, have some mindfulness and gratitude time.

Author & Researcher on Flow State & Human Peak Performance

Our brain is local and linear, and we live in a global and exponential world. If you want to keep pace, you have to perform and think at speed and scale – and we're not built for it. Flow is literally our leverage for keeping pace in a global, exponential world.

Author & Researcher on Flow State & Human Peak Performance

When you close your eyes and imagine the person you're going to be in 10 years, this area of your brain is totally deactivated – it's treating the person you are going to become as a stranger. This is why people have such a hard time getting prostate exams, staying on a diet, quitting smoking, because the person who is going to benefit the most from these things is literally not you.

Author & Researcher on Flow State & Human Peak Performance

Anyone worth following in peak performance will tell you that 90% of human performance is mental. The understanding of that mental aspect of the game is brand-new – perhaps 10-20 years old. The work being done around the neuroscience of performance is creating an unprecedented rate of change; it's honestly off the charts.

Author & Researcher on Flow State & Human Peak Performance

Firms like McKinsey are self-reporting that their people are 5x more productive in-flow than out of flow… 500% more productive. That means you can work Monday in-flow and take the rest of the week off – and you'd still get as much done as your peers. Work two days a week? You're now 1000% more productive than the competition.

Author & Researcher on Flow State & Human Peak Performance

One of the amazing things is how adaptable our brains our – and by day 2, I was feeling really good. NASA is pretty good at understanding how to keep you healthy in space; and so you go through sleep-shifts to help you stay rested, and to make sure you don't get a drop in performance from being tired.

Astronaut and educator who conducted spacewalks on the Hubble Space Telescope

Being at that altitude though – 100 miles higher than the space station, enables you to see even more of the planet's curvature – it's a different viewpoint, a different experience and perspective – you truly felt like you were interacting with the environment, you felt like a real spaceman – it was extraordinary.

Astronaut and educator who conducted spacewalks on the Hubble Space Telescope

I realised that what people do is, instead of figuring out the right thing to do and then doing it whether they want to or not, doing the ethical thing, what they do is they figure out what they want to do and then come up with the rationalisation for doing it, whether it's right or wrong. And we fool ourselves.

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

Our number one instinct is survival, followed by reproduction. People started to realise that if they took care of themselves, they would live longer, have better sex and have healthier children. The mission of my family, which ended up being Lululemon, was for people to be able to live healthier, longer, and more fun lives.

Founder of Lululemon Athletica, Canadian entrepreneur and philanthropist

There's an old adage that the boxer is the last one to know – it's not true, he's the first one to know, but the last to acknowledge it. You can learn from defeat – it's not the end of the world, but you have to learn from it and realise that there are times when you can come back, and times where you have to say, 'enough… enough…. You're getting too hurt… you're just not the guy you were…'

Founder of PostSecret, anonymous confessions project & book series

Anyone can have a good trainer; you can learn the moves and get fit. Any boxer or athlete can get super fit – the edge is mental ability – It's having the self-belief. If you're not right in the head? You'll never do it. I've seen guys getting beaten mentally. Mike Tyson beat a lot of fighters mentally before they even got in the ring, Tyson Fury does the same thing – they get in people's minds.

Founder of PostSecret, anonymous confessions project & book series

To be a great fighter you obviously have to have talent, but what really matters is dedication and discipline. I've seen so many guys with talent where I've thought, 'this guy's going to be a world champion…' but they've not had the dedication. They've not given what you had to give, which is everything. To succeed as a boxer, you have to dedicate your life to it… it's a very short career for a professional fighter.

Founder of PostSecret, anonymous confessions project & book series