BOOK REVIEW: The Rise Of Superman, by Steven Kotler

Firstly, thanks to James for recommending this book to me. Really appreciate how much you always cared about us the students having the right mindset and how we can trigger it. This books offers plenty on that.

It touches on Flow and how top of the top athletes use it to maximise performance, and mainly, how all the research on flow can be applied to us normal human beings that are looking to step up our game, be that on parenting, relationships, professional performance, you name it.

This book might not be put together as well as others I have read recently such as Bounce by Matthew Syed or Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. The narrative seems a bit clunky at times and could benefit from steering the reader through the history in a more structured way, but apart from that, the content and the information within these pages – short and manageable read I must say – offer plenty of in-depth analysis of flow and its different applications in an easy-to-comprehend language. It was definitely refreshing after finishing my degree and all the academic papers that came with it.

The knowledge Kotler shares in this book is of great transferability to every aspect of our lives, specially to musicians, who in my opinion aspire to achieve a state of flow in their performances, composition time, rehearsal hours with bandmates…

To wrap this short review, I’d like to point out how funny is that I hated reading throughout school when I was being forced to read stuff I was not interested in, and also how even funnier it is that I am now blogging, when English is not my first language and writing was never something I ever thought of doing unless I needed to!