Flow is a state of heightened focus and total immersion while doing an activity. Imagine what goes on in the brain of someone taking performance enhancing drugs like Adderall or steroids. Their brains are hyper-focused and motivated on a task and they find extreme enjoyment in the activity. Here’s another analogy. Think of a chess player who studies every action and movement about their opponent before inacting their next move. Think of a painter who visualizes every stroke of their brush before they paint. The book “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses the psychology behind achieving this state. If we can understand the psychology of being in flow, then we can work backwards in figuring out how we reach it on a regular basis. This even includes reaching flow for the most menial tasks like doing laundry or groceries. I’ll explain why this is important further in. Here are some takeaways I found to be thought-provoking for being in flow, regardless of activity.
Clarity of goals
Goal setting is an important aspect to success regardless of what we do. Having high-level goals (what one might consider life goals) combined with more defined sub goals adds focus and gives us the sense of progression. Clarity of goals requires us to have purpose in everything that we do. In chess terms, it is figuring out how to take individual pieces as opposed to obsessing over how to checkmate. This is exactly why video games are designed around quests or sub-objectives. It becomes addictive to accomplish micro-goals and why we often find ourselves wondering where the time went. We should focus on smaller and defined achievable goals in line with the broader objectives - goals that span days to weeks and not months/years.
Obtaining feedback
Feedback creates a virtuous loop because it helps us measure the impact of our actions to our goals. Feedback brings us closer to a flow state because we can adjust and learn from our previous actions. Concentration without feedback doesn’t allow us to learn if what we are doing is good, useful, or meaningful. Seek constant feedback and utilize it to tweak every observation, adjustment, and reaction to bring us closer to flow.
Challenge versus skill
Adding on to the video game analogy, the last component is ensuring that the challenge meets skill. In a chess match, the game is only fun if both players are at a similar skill level to be competitive. If your opponent is too novice, it is boring. If the opponent is too skilled, it becomes frustrating. However, when there is a balance of skill and challenge, we find ourselves one step closer to flow. We think harder, feel more motivated and find the activity more enjoyable. It becomes fun, even addicting at times. Make the activity challenging enough that it requires an increase in skill to conquer, when the skill level is reached, find a harder challenge.
Flow and Happiness
Activities can be distinguished by pleasurable or enjoyable. The easiest way to know if one is pleasurable versus enjoyable is if the activity leads us to growth in our learnings. The act of eating delicious food is pleasurable whereas the art of mastering cooking a cuisine is enjoyment and fulfilling. Flow enjoyment pushes us to seek new experiences and makes us to willingly learn new things. One of my biggest takeaways from this book is that reaching a state of flow in our lives is probably the closest thing to achieving true happiness. Simply reaching flow in some activities doesn’t ensure a happy life, it is reaching flow regardless of the activity that bring us true happiness. Mihaly consistently ties every point to bringing us a step closer to flow because it gives the feeling of joy, purpose, and meaning. It will take time, effort and a shift in mindset to be able to reach flow in our day to day but it is well worth, and life-changing.