Flow is overrated: why I stopped chasing the zone
Is your pursuit of 'flow' actually holding you back?
Contrarian take: the concept of “flow” has recently become actively deleterious for my progress.
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described and coined the term "flow" in 1975 and published a best-selling book of the same title. Flow is the feeling of being "in the zone," when all your senses are on fire and you're operating at peak performance, when the passage of time seems to melt away.
It's an alluring state, made even more so because most people seem to have experienced being in flow. I've certainly done so, and I've never felt so omnipotent and powerful, like everything I touched turned to gold and problems melted away. It's an addicting state, and that's the fundamental problem (for me).
I've been continually seeking flow since I first discovered the formalized concept of flow in Czikszentmihalyi's book. The existence of flow implied the existence of non-flow, and I worked to purge all aspects of non-flow from my life. I had tasted the golden fruit of flow and wanted more. Everything had to be easy, and my pain tolerance for struggle decreased.1
Cal Newport has described an interesting analogy to this problem, applied to the space of writing: writer's block. From his perspective, writer's block doesn't exist, and the presence of this concept is a damaging ideal that novice writers will pursue. He provides an analogy to weightlifting. Weightlifting is hard, and you have to struggle during a training session. Sure, sometimes you'll have good days, and you'll be able to move the weight better than most days. But obviously, you don't expect that to happen every single day. If someone told you that they had "weightlifting block" because they didn't feel good, you'd probably laugh and tell them to push through it.2
For me, seeking flow was my "writer's block" crutch. I've spent countless hours reading books and articles, designing rituals, and re-organizing physical spaces — all dedicated to optimizing my environment to achieve more flow. The more pernicious thing is that I convinced myself that I needed to invest time into crafting the perfect conditions for myself to experience flow. I try not to think about all the hours I wasted over trivial optimizations that I could have spent on just doing the work.
I had always been critical of the fact that most people do not focus on the essential, but would rather work on what is easier and seems productive (or look for a magical fix). Most people do not confront the reality of what matters in their field, and the human brain will invent metrics that you want to matter but don't. It's productivity for productivity's sake: efficient but not effective.
I am that same person, and my magical fix was flow. I thought I could be clever and evade The Resistance, but it has always been that the very act of struggling is what makes me stronger. As Steven Pressfield points out, both the professional and the amateur feel the same fear. The difference, however, is how they act in the face of fear.
Yet, willpower is finite, I know that much — it's not sustainable to rely purely on willpower to push through everything. Of course, my process is still to identify and relentlessly attack the most important things. I've long posited that learning is driven by the number of iterations, and I want to get as many iterations on the board as possible.
The white whale I'm hunting is no longer flow but is something else. It's the dedication to an ideal of being relentlessly focused on the most important questions and not shying away from the struggle.
My objective function has changed. Or rather, my openness to lack of flow and non-perfect practice has expanded. It's an orientation away from ego, seeking discomfort and finding peace with it to maximize growth. It's what Josh Waitzkin calls "investment in loss."3
And if I'm honest with myself, I'm sure this will have the second-order effects of deepening my connection with flow.
You won't find flow by hunting for it. But instead, flow finds you.
Sprezzatura is an Italian phrase meaning "a studied carelessness" or "nonchalant carelessness." It originated within the context of fashion, where you're not supposed to look like you spent a lot of time on your outfit because it's not cool to care, since such deliberate behavior shows a "strength left in reserve." Sprezzatura is a cousin of the idea of "effortless perfection," albeit a concept localized within 16th-century Italian fashion discourse.
My friend Cameron Armstrong wrote an excellent piece called Why clever people should lift: you can't outsmart the weight, and there is no substitute for simple hard work.
The best representation of this philosophy (if not taken to the extreme) comes from Kojiro Sasaki, who is referred to as "History's Strongest Loser" in the Record of Ragnarok anime. He has never won in a duel because he constantly goes and attempts to find the most unbeatable foe to fight, and then surrenders mid-way through the fight. Kojiro then proceeds to train and refine his craft until he can (mentally through simulation) crush the other person. It’s worth a watch.