Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy Seals, and Maverick Scientists are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

National Bestseller

CNBC and Strategy + Business Best Business Book of the Year

It’s the biggest revolution you’ve never heard of, and it’s hiding in plain sight. Over the past decade, Silicon Valley executives like Eric Schmidt and Elon Musk, Special Operators like the Navy SEALs and the Green Berets, and maverick scientists like Sasha Shulgin and Amy Cuddy have turned everything we thought we knew about peak performance upside down. Instead of grit, better habits, or 10,000 hours, these trailblazers have found a surprising shortcut to peak performance. They're harnessing rare and controversial altered states of consciousness to solve critical challenges and outperform the competition.

New York Times bestselling author Steven Kotler and high performance expert Jamie Wheal spent four years investigating the leading edges of this revolution―from the home of SEAL Team Six to the Googleplex, the Burning Man festival, Richard Branson’s Necker Island, Red Bull’s training center, Nike’s innovation team, and the United Nations’ Headquarters. And what they learned was stunning: In their own ways, with differing languages, techniques, and applications, every one of these groups has been quietly seeking the same thing: the boost in information and inspiration that ecstatic states provide.

Today, this revolution is spreading to the mainstream, fueling a trillion dollar underground economy and forcing us to rethink how we can all lead richer, more productive, more satisfying lives. Driven by four accelerating forces―psychology, neurobiology, technology and pharmacology―we are gaining access to and insights about some of the most contested and misunderstood terrain in history. Stealing Fire is a provocative examination of the human potential movement and what’s actually possible; a guidebook for anyone who wants to radically upgrade their life.

This provocative examination provides a guidebook for radically upgrading your life by exploring:

• The Science of High Performance: Discover how four accelerating forces―psychology, neurobiology, technology, and pharmacology―are unlocking rare states of consciousness.
• Insights from Elite Operators: Go inside SEAL Team Six, the Googleplex, and Richard Branson’s Necker Island to see how the world’s top performers are using these states to outperform the competition.
• The Trillion-Dollar Revolution: Learn about the underground economy fueling this movement and what it means for the future of our lives, work, and culture.
• A Practical Guide to Flow States: Move beyond grit and 10,000 hours with a surprising shortcut to feeling and performing your best.

Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist, and the executive director of the Flow Research Collective. He is one of the world’s leading experts on human performance. He is the author of eleven bestsellers (out of fourteen books total), including The Art of Impossible, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, Stealing Fire, and The Rise of Superman. His work has been nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes, has been translated into more than fifty languages, and has appeared in more than one hundred publications, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, the Atlantic, Time, and the Harvard Business Review. Steven is also the cohost of Flow Research Collective Radio, a top ten iTunes science podcast. Whenever possible, he can be found hurling himself down mountains at high speeds.

Jamie Wheal is the author of the global bestseller Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work. Wheal is an expert in peak performance and leadership, specializing in neuroanthropology––the intersection of culture, biology and psychology and the founder of the Flow Genome Project, an international organization dedicated to the research and training of ultimate human performance. Wheal is a mountaineer who’s guided the North Face of Mount Everest, trained Navy Seals, Olympians and RedBull extreme athletes and advised everyone from the U.S. Naval War College and Special Operations Command to the executives of major corporations including Google, Goldman Sachs and Cisco, among others. His work and ideas have been covered in The New York Times, Financial Times, Wired, Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, INC, and TEDx. Wheal lives in Austin, TX.