Just Flow With It

Author: David Perell URL: https://www.perell.com/blog/flow One-line: Learning is innate but blocked by judgment, fear, and ego; flow — relaxed concentration where the self-critical mind goes quiet — accelerates learning and performance, and you can enter it faster than you think.

Key claims

• Learning is an innate capacity that judgment, fear, and ego get in the way of; pace and quality accelerate with relaxed concentration. #Learning
• Three requirements for flow: clear goals, immediate feedback, and the right challenge-to-skill ratio (difficult but not too difficult). With these present, flow can come surprisingly fast.
• In flow, the rational mind goes dim — awareness and uninhibited perception take over; energized focus, full involvement, deep enjoyment.
• Tiago Forte calls flow “the holy grail of productivity.” The prefrontal cortex shuts down and self-criticism disappears; flow improves pattern recognition and lateral thinking.
• The brain turns off self-censoring. Charles Limb’s scans of improvising musicians showed the self-expression network light up while the focused-attention/self-censoring network quieted — “as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself.”
• Create your own earthquakes. Josh Waitzkin (The Art of Learning): first flow with whatever comes, then use it to your advantage, then become self-sufficient — generating explosive inspiration without outside stimulus.

Notable quotes

“Flow with whatever comes. Move with — not against — randomness and unexpectedness. Flow itself can become more rewarding than what we achieve with it.”

“It’s almost as if the brain turned off its own ability to criticize itself.” — Charles Limb

“We learn to be completely self-sufficient and create our own earthquakes, so our mental process feeds itself explosive inspirations without the need for outside stimulus.” — Josh Waitzkin, The Art of Learning

How it connects

• Flow — the central subject; the conditions and neuroscience of the flow state.
• Learning — flow as the accelerant once judgment and ego are removed.
• Tiago Forte — flow as the “holy grail of productivity.”
• Josh Waitzkin / The Art of Learning — performance training as progressive mastery of flow.