- Flow is often described as a state of kind of 'effortless effort.' We feel like we're propelled
through the activity. Everything else just
seems to disappear. Time is gonna dilate,
which is a fancy of saying it's gonna pass strangely. Five hours go by in
like five minutes. Occasionally, it'll slow down, you get a freeze-frame effect, I mean, anybody who's been
in a car crash for example. Intuition tends to get
turned up a lot. This is a basketball
player in the zone, seeing the hoop and suddenly
it's as big as a hula hoop. And our frown muscles
tend to be paralyzed. And what that frowning is, is a sign that the
brain is doing work. This is a constant issue
in my marriage where my wife thinks I'm mad at her or somebody and I'm like, "No, no, I'm just thinking. This is just me thinking. I'm in robot mode." My name is Steven Kotler. I'm a writer and a
researcher, and my latest book is "The Art of Impossible." Flow itself, actually, the term is coined by Goethe, who uses the
German word "rausch," which means overflowing with joy. Nietzsche actually
wrote about flow. William James worked
on the topic, but Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
is often referred to as the Godfather of
Flow Psychology. He was very interested
in sort of well-being, meaning of life, and he
went around the world talking to people about
the times in their lives when they felt their best, and they performed their best. Everywhere he went, people
said the same thing. "I'm in this altered
state of consciousness where every action,
every decision I make, seems to flow effortlessly,
perfectly, seamlessly from the last." Flow actually feels 'flowy.' More specifically, it refers
to any of those moments of rapt attention
and total absorption. You're so focused on
the task at hand, so focused on what you're doing, everything else just
seems to disappear. But one of the things that
athletes talk about a lot is what they call "the voice." Often, when I'm skiing in
flow, I will get directions- right, left, do this, do that, and it's very quick. You either do what the
voice is telling you to do or you tend to crash. The challenge-skills
balance is often called the "golden rule to flow." And the idea here is pretty simple. We pay the most attention
to the task at hand when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skillset. So, to do this work and
to get good at it, you have to get good at being comfortable
with being uncomfortable. You wanna stretch but not snap. So there are a number of
different things you can do to sort of prepare yourself
and prepare the environment to drop into flow. The flow triggers are your toolkit. 22 of them have been discovered. There are probably way,
way more, but so far, researchers have identified 22. The most basic of flow triggers- complete concentration. You really wanna sorta start
your work session if you can in relationship to your physiology. I like to wake up at 3:30,
four o'clock in the morning. That's when I'm most
awake, most alert. I am married to a night owl. My wife doesn't wake up 'til
five, six, seven o'clock, eight o'clock at night. That's when her brain comes alive. And then you wanna try to
block out 90 to 120 minutes for uninterrupted concentration. Practice distraction
management ahead of time. So you wanna turn off your
phones, turn off email, Twitter, Facebook,
Instagram, et cetera, all your messages, all your alerts. There was a study
where they found that coders in flow, if they
get knocked out by distraction, a knock at the door, a
text alert, or whatever, it can take 'em 15 minutes
to get back into flow if they can get back in at all. Flow only shows up when
all of our attention is in the right gear, right now. One way to kind of
explore flow triggers, there's a cluster of them that are predominantly
dopamine triggers. They drive focus,
they drive attention, they drive alertness
and excitement, and there's a lot of different
ways to get dopamine. Novelty produces dopamine. We see the same thing
with unpredictability, complexity, the experience of awe. You look up at the night sky
and you see stars everywhere and you know those stars
are actually universes, and you get sorta
perceptual vastness. If you've ever done a
crossword puzzle or sudoku, you get an answer right, that little rush of pleasure
you get, that's dopamine. And then you usually get a
couple of answers right in a row, that's because the dopamine
that is now in your system is amplifying pattern recognition. We get that same dopamine
from risk-taking. And this could be physical risks, emotional risks, social
risks, intellectual risks, possibly spiritual risks. We get the dopamine not as a
reward for taking the risk, which is what some people
used to believe, but now we know it's to
kind of drive motivation. Now, there are lots of
different intrinsic motivators, but from a motivation standpoint, there are five and
they're all designed to be built into one another and work in a sort of specific order, in a specific sequence. The most basic human
motivator is curiosity. One of the things we get from
curiosity is focus for free. When we're curious
about something, we don't have to struggle. We don't have to
burn a lot of calories trying to pay attention to it. Curiosity is designed,
biologically again, to be built into passion. And think about,
we've all fallen in love, how much attention
you pay to the person you're falling in love with. You can't stop thinking about them, can't stop staring at them. That's a tremendous
amount of focus for free. Now, passion is incredibly useful, but as a motivator,
you can go one better, which is purpose. Everyone's talking about,
"Oh, I have a purpose," and it's this big altruistic thing and it's good for the world, and all those things may be true, but from a peak
performance perspective, it's very, very selfish. Once you have purpose, the system demands autonomy. I want the freedom to
pursue my purpose. And once you have that freedom, the system wants the last of
the big motivators, mastery. Mastery is the skills to
pursue that purpose well. One of the really incredible
things about being human is we're all built for
peak performance. Flow is universal in humans. It's actually universal
in most mammals and definitely all social mammals. There's a shared collective
version of a flow state, a team performing at their best, a group performing at their best. This is called 'group flow.' In fact, studies have shown that the people who
score off the charts for these characteristics, who score off the charts
for overall well-being and life satisfaction, are the people with the
most flow in their lives. We're all capable of so
much more than we know. That is a commonality
across the board. It's the largest lesson in 30 years of studying peak
performance has taught me. And the way I sorta
like to think about it, is motivation is what
gets us into the game. Learning allows us to
continue to play. Creativity is how we steer. And flow, which is
optimal performance, is how we amplify all the results beyond all reasonable expectation.
