In this video Jeb Corliss is grinding the crack. I’ve watched this video at least 50 times. I find the idea of flying that fast and that close to the ground exhilarating. The risk that wingsuit pilots take amazes me. I always wonder how people end up with where they are in life, doing what they do.
Jeb Corliss didn’t wake up one day, go out, buy himself a wingsuit and jump off a mountain to enjoy some proximity wingsuit flying. It took time. Skydiving became BASE jumping which evolved to wingsuit flying and wingsuit flying became proximity flying.
People who do things that are extraordinarily dangerous all started out small and then worked their way up, gradually. By the time they get to the point where the consequences of a mistake are fatal, to us the feat looks extraordinary, while, for them it’s marginally more difficult than anything they’ve done before.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a Hungarian-American psychologist has spent much of his career exploring the flow state. Being in flow is a mental state where a person is completely immersed in an activity while experiencing a feeling of full involvement and energising focus. Many sports people call this experience, being in the zone.
Steven Kotler says; ‘Flow describes these moments of total absorption, when we become so focused on the task at hand that everything else falls away. Action and awareness merge. Time flies. Self vanishes. All aspects of performance — mental and physical — go through the roof.’
Most of us have experienced being in a flow state. We get caught up in our work, time flies and when its all over we’re amazed at how much we’ve achieved. And yet, many of us rarely attempt to intentionally get into a flow state. For this reason we don’t know how to. Instead, we’re amazed when it happens. The rest of the time we don’t give it much thought.
Flow state is best understood as the mental state where the activity we’re attempting exceeds our abilities by a small amount. The task must be hard enough to push us, but not so hard that it makes us anxious or afraid to continue. Kotler states that an activity needs to be 4% harder than our current skill level for conditions to be optimum to trigger the flow state.
Back to Jeb. To do what he does, each jump and challenge needs to be great enough to hold his interest, but not exceed his skill level to the extent where he can’t concentrate. What seems insane to us is likely to only be 4% above what Jeb feels comfortable with.