States of mind drastically influence the amount of energy it takes to complete a given task, which gives them leverage. When you’re in Errand Mode, running an additional errand not only doesn’t take much extra energy, it actually increases your energy as you feel the delicious alignment of necessity with inertia. Similarly, we often forget that the first stage in reaching that “state of flow” we all crave is actually struggle. You cannot reach the state of “optimal experience” — what Daniel Goleman describes as “a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task” — without
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