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September 17 - October 7, 2018
Because an athlete’s canvas is nothing more than his body moving through space and time, then an act of genius must also be defined as an act of redefinition–redefining what is possible for the human body.
It’s the rough equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa with a steak knife shoved into his eye.
High achievers, he came to see, were intrinsically motivated. They were deeply committed to testing limits and stretching potential, frequently using intensely focused activity for exactly this purpose.
the happiest people on earth, the ones who felt their lives had the most meaning, were those who had the most peak experiences.
“we’re essentially paying to watch people in a flow state. Whether it’s Kobe Bryant, Roger Federer, Jay-Z, or a jazz crooner, they’ve all put in endless hours of work so that when performance time comes, they are fully present and in flow. An actor with screen presence is there, too. A great poet can deliver flow to the reader just through the power of words. We pay to watch, read, or be in the presence of a flow experience. If quantified, you’d find it’s a major chunk of the GDP.”
“Imagination,” says futurist and philosopher Jason Silva, “allows us to conceive of delightful future possibilities, pick the most amazing one, and pull the present forward to meet it.”
Clear goals: Expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities. Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.
Concentration: A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention.
A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness: The merging of action and awareness.
Distorted sense of time: One’s subjective experience of time is altered.
Direct and immediate feedback: Successes and failures are apparent, so behavior can be adjusted as needed.
Balance between ability level and challenge: The activity is neither too easy nor too difficult.
A sense of personal control over the situation.
The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so action i...
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When someone is in a deep, dreamless sleep, they’re in delta. Next up, between 4 Hz and 7.9 Hz, is “theta,” which correlates to REM sleep, meditation, insight, and (as is often necessary for insight) the processing of novel incoming stimuli.
Focus was the key to getting past the fear—and everything else as well.
Neurons that fire together wire together. The more times a particular pattern fires, the stronger the connection between neurons becomes, and the faster information flows along this route.
These five chemicals are flow’s mighty cocktail. Alone, each packs a punch, together a wallop. Consider the chain of events that takes us from pattern recognition through future prediction. Norepinephrine tightens focus (data acquisition); dopamine jacks pattern recognition (data processing); anandamide accelerates lateral thinking (widens the database searched by the pattern recognition system).
“From this experience,” he later wrote, “I…learned that the past can be psychologically remodeled to make heaven of hell. Other people learn the opposite lesson, storing and recalling only the worst of times.… The horrors and sheer ugliness of the past they have experienced become a permanent filter through which they view all their current experiences.”
extreme athletes rely on risk to drive focus, the requisite first step toward producing flow.
As risk increases, so do norepinephrine and dopamine, the feel-good chemicals the brain uses to amplify focus and enhance performance.
Once danger becomes its own reward, risk moves from a threat to be avoided to a challenge to be risen toward. An
entirely new relationship with fear begins to develop. When risk is a challenge, fear becomes a compass—literally pointing people in the direction they need to go next (i.e., the direction that produces more flow).
A “rich environment” is a combination platter of novelty, unpredictability, and complexity—three elements that catch and hold our attention much like risk.
If creating more flow is our aim, then the emphasis falls on “clear” and not “goals.”
Applying this idea in our daily life means breaking tasks into bite-size chunks and setting goals accordingly. A writer, for example, is better off trying to pen three great paragraphs at a time—the equivalent of moving through Mandy-Rae’s kick cycles—rather than attempting one great chapter. Think challenging, yet manageable—just enough stimulation to shortcut attention into the now, not enough stress to pull you back out again.
When feedback is immediate, the information we require is always close at hand. Attention doesn’t have to wander; the conscious mind need not get involved.
If the challenge is too great, fear swamps the system. If the challenge is too easy, we stop paying attention. Flow appears near the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety, in what scientists call the flow channel—the spot where the task is hard enough to make us stretch but not hard enough to make us snap.
And the zone, the flow state itself, is the third stage in this cycle. Struggle gives way to release gives way to flow—hallelujah.
Scientists who study human motivation have lately learned that after basic survival needs have been met, the combination of autonomy (the desire to direct your own life), mastery (the desire to learn, explore, and be creative), and purpose (the desire to matter, to contribute to the world) are our most powerful intrinsic drivers—the three things that motivate us most.
Fully alive and deeply committed is a risky business.
If we are hunting the highest version of ourselves, then we need to turn work into play and not the other way round.
Unless we invert this equation, much of our capacity for intrinsic motivation starts to shut down. We lose touch with our passion and become less than what we could be and that feeling never really goes away.
