Finding Your “Flow”
I’ve been reading a lot of articles and books that discuss finding your “ideal” career lately.
Yesterday I came across an article called, “Effortless Success - How to turn work into play and succeed on a massive scale” by Jonathan Fields of JonathanFields.com.
Turn work into play, huh? This excerpt from Jonathan’s article talks about exactly what I’ve been looking for:
“Have you ever lost time doing anything? You know what I’m talking about. Those moments when you become so absorbed in what you’re doing that an hour becomes a minute and a day becomes and hour. You blink and it’s time to go home, but you’d kill to be able to stay just a little bit longer.
Think back. How long has it been? Now, I wonder how much more enjoyable life would be if you could recreate that magical sense of total-absorption, effortlessness even in the face of extremely hard work. Imagine how rich each day would be if you could bring this experience not only your play, but to the way earned your living.
What would it take, I wonder, to have a job where you worked harder than ever before, earned more than ever before, and succeeded bigger and faster than ever before, but felt like the whole experience was natural, so engaging, so intrinsically-rewarding, you’d have paid to do it as a hobby, had it not have been your job?”
I’ve been trying to find just that. I love to write and this is the closest I’ve come so far, but something tells me I haven’t quite found what I’m looking for yet.
Are you one of the lucky ones?
So what I’d like to know is, are you one of the lucky few who truly love their work? Do you find that it isn’t work at all, but actually fun? Do you get so into it that you forget yourself?
Or are you one of the millions of people who suffer through day after day going to jobs they hate, never even realizing that they could have something more?
In the article, Jonathan discusses a book called “Flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who spent years studying professionals, actors, artists and athletes- the people who are able to put themselves into the “flow” regularly. What he found was that those who used this kind of “deliberate practice,” excelled at their professions. Being in the flow made them work harder, but they enjoyed it more. They experienced an almost “effortless success.”
But how do you get into the flow?
“Csikszentmihalyi identifies the following fairly universal experiences while in a flow state:
- Working toward a clear goal with a well-defined process – The task, big or small, must be as defined as possible and the steps needed to get there must be laid out in detail or at least highly-delineable along the way. Getting there does not have to be easy, but you need to be able to see, even in the distance, where you are going.
- Cultivating deep-concentration – the nature of the job must require an intense sense of concentration. Examples would be a fast-moving game like ping-pong or a gymnastic routine. In a work setting, leading a high-stakes, face-to-face negotiation, drafting a document, writing a blog post (ha ha ha), creating a detailed artistic rendering or coding of a computer game, animation or program would qualify.
- Lack of a sense of self-consciousness – you become so engaged in the nature of the work that are no longer aware of yourself, but, rather feel a sense of total absorption in the task. It’s like that old sports adage, “be the ball.”
- Altered sense of time– time seems to either stand still or literally fly by in the blink of an eye.
- Ongoing, direct feedback – either through people or the testable nature of the task, you need regular enough feedback to be able to constantly adapt, correct course and make progress toward your goal. For example, when writing a computer program, you can constantly compile, test and de-bug the ensure you are on the right track.
- Task is highly-challenging, but doable – the task must be hard enough to finish that it requires a significant investment of your attention, resources and energy that lead to the sense of absorption. But, it also has to easy enough to allow you to believe that a solution is, in fact, possible, or else you’d just give in.
- Control over the means – you must have the ability to harness the resources to get the job done.
- The activity is meaningful or intrinsically rewarding, by the very nature of doing it – while the end result might entitle you to a big outside reward, like a bonus, raise or high sale-price, the essential nature of the activity is so rewarding that you would do it at the same level, even without he extra motivation of some kind of external prize. For example, most great artists don’t paint for a paycheck, they paint because the very process of painting is so woven into who they are that not painting would be akin to not breathing.
Do all of these elements need to be present? No. But, the more the better, the deeper the flow and greater the sense of effortlessness.
So, this gives great insight into the qualities we need to add to create more of a flow experience in our work. That covers the “effortless” element of effortless success. It lets us enjoy the journey and find flow. But, how does it lead to success on a bigger, better, faster scale?”
It could take 10 years
Jonathan goes on to say that even with deliberate daily practice, it generally takes 10 years to become truly great at something. That’s a little discouraging.
But after thinking about it, I decided it doesn’t have to be. I’ve been looking for the thing that gets me into the “flow” for a few months now - that thing that I love doing so much that I forget everything else.
But the author isn’t saying that it takes 10 years to find it, he’s saying it takes 10 years to be truly good at whatever it is you’re doing.
Whew! I can live with that. I’m not trying to be the next Tiger Woods or Mozart right now. I’m just trying to find what makes me happy. Getting great at it can come only after we find what it is that we love to do.
Your #1 focus
So I think trying to find what you love should be your number one focus.
The only way to really enjoy life is to get away from that life-draining job you hate and do what you love to do. Once you do that, I believe you’ll naturally get better at it.
And hopefully, in what literally seems like no time at all (but could really be 10 years), you’ll excel.
