I read this while studying the topic of Flow. I wanted to like it but something just kept rubbing me the wrong way, which is why it took me over a year to finish it--I could only stomach it in chunks. Then late in the book, the author said something that made me undertand why I was struggling. I didn't highlight the passage and am not going to go waste the time to find it but it was essentially this: he was making an example that one of the things he was working on was to come across less arrogant. The second I read that I exclaimed, that's it! He's a bit of a pedantic ass and we all know how fun they are.
Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of good information in here and this guy has had plenty of impressive experiences we can learn from. It was just effortful to get at given how much this guy is feeling himself.
Flow is to extreme innovation what oxygen is to breathing—simply the biology of how it gets done.
By stacking motivations, that is, layering curiosity atop curiosity atop curiosity, we’re increasing drive but not effort. This is what happens when our own internal biology does the heavy lifting for us. You’ll work harder, but you won’t notice the work. Also, because dopamine provides a host of additional cognitive benefits—amplified focus, better learning, faster pattern recognition—you’ll also work smarter. These are two more reasons why stalking the impossible might be a little easier than you suspected.
consciousness is an extremely limited resource.
Every second, millions of bits of information flood into our senses. Yet the human brain can only handle about 7 bits of information at once, and the shortest time it takes to discriminate one set of bits from another is one-eighteenth of a second. “By using these figures,” as Csikszentmihalyi explained in Flow, “one concludes that it is possible to process at most 126 bits of information per second.”
That’s not a lot of information.
To understand what another person is saying takes about 40 bits. If three people are talking at once, we’re maxed out. All other incoming information is invisible to us. But it’s not just other people talking that we miss noticing. The vast majority of everything happening in the world falls into this category. The system is constantly overloaded, so much of reality is constantly invisible.
Yet, lost in this tough talk is a soft underbelly. Psychologists have found that humans can achieve three levels of well-being on this planet, each more pleasurable than the last.9 The first level is moment-to-moment “happiness” or what’s often described as a hedonic approach to life. The next level up is “engagement,” which is defined as a high-flow lifestyle, or one where happiness is achieved not by the pursuit of pleasure but rather through seeking out challenging tasks that have a high likelihood of producing flow. The next level up, the peak level of happiness and the best we get to feel on the planet, is known as “purpose,” which blends the high-flow lifestyle of level two with the desire to impact lives beyond our own.
My favorite big-picture thinking on this subject comes from author David Foster Wallace’s amazing speech “This Is Water.” Originally given as a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, “This Is Water” is ostensibly about the value of a liberal arts education but is actually about the dire necessity of thought control. Here’s Wallace:
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. . . . And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous,respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. . . . There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.
Excellence requires repetition. Even if you’ve got passion and purpose perfectly aligned and completely love what you do, what you do is often reduced to a daily checklist. This means a portion of peak performance is always sculpted out of Wallace’s hallmarks of adult life: boredom, routine, and petty frustration.
This is why thought control matters.
In decades of studies in dozens of domains, EQ remains one of the highest indicators of high achievement. High EQ correlates to everything from good moods to good relationships to really good chances of success. As journalist Nancy Gibbs once quipped in Time magazine, “IQ gets you hired, but EQ gets you promoted.”
One thing’s for certain: long-haul creativity involves a slew of unusual skills, many of which conflict with our ideas about what it takes to be creative in the first place. What’s more, long-haul creativity usually requires earning a living from one’s creativity. Yet, being creative is different from the business of being creative. And many of the people who learn how to be good at the first are often really terrible at the second. Finally, emotionally, creativity takes a toll.
Speaking of momentum . . . there is something deeply exhausting about the year-in and year-out requirements of imagination. Every morning, the writer faces a blank page, the painter an empty canvas, the innovator a dozen directions to go at once.
The advice that has helped me solve this slog came from Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. In an interview he gave years ago in Playboy (of all places), Márquez said that the key to sustaining momentum was to quit working at the point you’re most excited. In other words, once Márquez really starts to cook, he shuts down the stove.
This seems counterintuitive. Creativity is an emergent property. Quitting when most excited—when ideas are really emerging—seems like the exact opposite of what you should do.
Yet Márquez has it exactly right.
Creativity isn’t a single battle; it’s an ongoing war. By quitting when you’re excited, you’re carrying momentum into the next day’s work session. Momentum is the real key. When you realize that you left off someplace both exciting and familiar—someplace where you know the idea that comes next—you dive right back in, no time wasted, no time to let fear creep back into the equation, and far less time to get up to speed.
And it’s not just Márquez who feels this way. Ernest Hemingway advocated for the exact same idea. Hemingway, in fact, would take it to an even greater extreme, often finishing the day’s writing session midsentence, leaving a string of words just dangling off the . . .
To paraphrase neuroscientist Liane Gabora: “Creativity is paradoxically about pulling something out of the brain that was never put into it.” In this process, we are noticing options where before there were none. Yet a great many of those options only become visible in the middle of the activity. I always set out to write great sentences, but I never set out to write a great sentence. The artistry emerges from the work. It’s the nature of the beast. Remote associations mean that one thing leads to the next and the next and the next. Thus, you can’t force the issue ahead of time. All you can really do is prepare, work hard,
