Thinking about Flow
One crisp December day, I hit a flow state skiing down Pluto’s Plunge at Crotched Mountain. The run was effortless: my turns cutting smoothly, my speed fast but under control. It was a lot of fun! On the lift back up the mountain, I thought about how elusive flow states were: I did about 30 runs that day and had that experience only once.
What is flow? Why is it important? And what’s the secret for achieving it?
Flow, as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihályi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, is an optimized state of being - distinguished by absorption and joy in the present moment. In other words, flow is a joyful immersion in being present, often leading to less anxiety and more productivity. Sounds awesome to me.
Csikszentmihályi says that to enter flow you need three things:
A clear goal.
Immediate feedback.
Balanced opportunity and capacity.
These three things mean that you don’t need to think about why you’re doing the activity (you already have a goal), and that you’re fully enabled to focus on how you’re doing it: you can quickly optimize actions based on the feedback, and your capacity for action matches the opportunity for taking action.
The only thing I would add is a baseline of fitness for your activity. For physical activities this seems obvious: for skiing you need to have strong legs and enough cardiovascular fitness to be able to make it down the mountain without too much difficulty. More simply, if you’re not in shape, you’ll be working too hard for it to seem effortless.
For other activities you need to be mentally or skillfully fit. For example, Cal Newport’s Deep Work presents principles for entering into a flow state at work, one of which is to get rid of all social media (social media kills the attention span and focus you’ll need to enter flow). Again - makes sense, but the challenge for me is that Mile 20 needs a social media presence, and once you get on social media it’s hard to get off. The “fitness” here is to build up the mental muscle to use your social media platforms only for what you need them for - and then disengage. Newport provides examples for what this would look like: catching yourself when you want to go on and denying yourself the satisfaction for a short period of time, eventually building up to large chunks of time where you’re not on social media and instead focused on the work you want to accomplish (his “deep work”).
So I strive for building enough mental fitness to achieve flow while I’m working - and skiing. After all, if flow means optimizing and finding joy in the moment - sign me up!
What kind of fitness do you need to achieve flow in your life?