CURIOSITY-PASSION-PURPOSE
When John Hagel, the cofounder of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, did a global study of the world’s highest performers, he consistently found that the “individuals and teams who got farthest fastest were the ones consistently tapping into passion and finding flow.”6 Why? Because curiosity, passion, and purpose are flow triggers—a triad of intrinsic motivators that help provide focus for free.
And triad is the key word. When all three motivators are perfectly stacked—especially once purpose is included—their power increases considerably. Neurobiologically, on their own, each of these motivators has the potential to drive dopamine and norepinephrine into our system. Stacked atop one another, their combined neurochemical surge is typically powerful enough to tighten focus and start to shift consciousness toward flow.
More critically, passion is a fairly selfish experience. Purpose fixes the problem. Passion produces ego-driven focus, where issues of pride and identity often get involved. Why does this matter? When the ego is engaged, the prefrontal cortex is active. This makes it nearly impossible to achieve transient hypofrontality. But purpose shifts our lens, putting attention outside ourselves, on the task at hand. Once we’re focused on something outside ourselves, it’s a lot easier to get out of our heads and into the zone.
COMPLETE CONCENTRATION
Flow follows focus. The state only shows up when all of our attention is locked on the present moment, firmly targeted at the task at hand. This helps keep ego out of the picture and the prefrontal cortex deactivated. When locked and loaded, task-specific focus becomes the gateway to the merger of action and awareness and the activation switch for automatized processing. The brain can now pass management responsibilities from the conscious to the unconscious, while the flow-crushing self stays out of the picture.
This makes complete concentration more than just a flow trigger, it’s also a flow deal-breaker. Whenever I work with organizations, the very first thing I tell people is that if they can’t hang a sign on their doors that reads FUCK OFF I’M FLOWING, they can’t do this work. This means no distractions. No multitasking. Email and cell phones off, streaming video is not streaming, and social media is walled away.
For how long?
The research shows that 90 to 120 minutes of uninterrupted concentration is the ideal time period to maximize focus and, by extension, flow.7 And if the task at hand requires significant creativity, then Tim Ferriss’s suggested “four-hour blocks” are often necessary. Moreover, since autonomy and attention are coupled systems, make sure the task at hand, the one that’s about to claim 90 to 120 minutes of your time, is exactly what you want to be doing with your time.
If it’s not, hunt for a better why. Find something in the task that aligns with curiosity, passion, and purpose. Find something in the task that helps you advance your craft and walk that path to mastery. It’s a form of cognitive reframing that can significantly enhance flow.
Lastly, have your conversations in advance. Long blocks of uninterrupted concentration can be hard to come by in today’s world. Tell your bosses, coworkers, spouses, and children exactly what you’re doing and why. What can seem like a time suck on the front end becomes a time-saver on the back. Once the increases in performance and productivity that flow produces start showing up on a regular basis, you’ll get far more done in far less time and have more of yourself to give to your bosses, coworkers, spouses, and children.
CLEAR GOALS
Clear goals tell us where and when to put our attention. If our goals are clear, the brain doesn’t have to worry about what to do or what to do next—it already knows. Thus, focus tightens, motivation heightens, and extraneous information gets filtered out. This lowers cognitive load and frees up extra energy, which can then be repurposed for attention. Action and awareness can start to merge, and we’re pulled even deeper into the now. And in the now, there’s no past or future and a lot less room for self—which are the pesky intruders most likely to yank us to the then.
This also tells us something important about emphasis. When considering “clear goals,” most of us have a tendency to skip over the adjective clear to get to the noun goals. When told to set clear goals, we immediately visualize ourselves on the Olympic podium, the Academy Award stage, or the Fortune 500 list, saying, “I’ve been picturing this moment since I was fifteen.”
We think that’s the point.
But those podium moments can pull us out of the present. Even if success is seconds away, it’s still a future event subject to hopes, fears, and all sorts of now-crushing distraction. Think of the long list of infamous sporting chokes: the missed shot at the last second of the NBA finals; the errant putt that closes the Augusta Masters. In those moments, the gravity of the goal pulled the participants out of the now, when, ironically, the now was all they needed to win.
If creating more flow is the aim, then the emphasis falls on clear and not goals. Clarity gives us certainty. We know what to do and where to focus our attention while doing it. When goals are clear, meta-cognition is replaced by in-the-moment cognition, and the self stays out of the picture.8
If we want to apply this idea in our daily life, break tasks into bite-size chunks and set goals accordingly. Aim for the challenge-skills sweet spot. A writer, for example, is better off trying to pen three great paragraphs than attempting one great chapter. Think challenging yet manageable—just enough stimulation to shortcut attention into the now, but not enough stress to pull you back out again.
Of course, the very best clear goals are ones aligned with our massively transformative purpose, our high, hard goals, and all of our intrinsic motivators—curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy, mastery, fear, and so on. Simply put, people who get this stack right are very hard to stop.
IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK
Immediate feedback is another shortcut into the now.9 The term refers to a direct, in-the-moment coupling between cause and effect. As a focusing mechanism, immediate feedback is an extension of clear goals. Clear goals tell us what we’re doing; immediate feedback tells us how to do it better.
If we know how to improve performance in real time, the mind doesn’t go off in search of clues for betterment. We keep ourselves fully present and fully focused and much more likely to be in flow.
Implementing this trigger in our own lives is fairly straightforward: Tighten feedback loops. Put mechanisms in place so attention doesn’t have to wander. Ask for more input. How much input? Well, forget quarterly reviews. Think daily reviews. Studies have found that in professions with less direct feedback loops—stock analysis, psychiatry, medicine—even the best get worse over time. Surgeons, by contrast, are the only class of physician who improve the longer they’re out of medical school. Why? Mess up on the table and someone dies. That’s immediate feedback.10
Equally important: determine the exact kind of feedback you need. This is an individual preference. Some people like the uplift of positive reinforcement; others prefer the hard truths of negative feedback. Some folks like this written out; others want to hear it aloud. One easy way to determine what works best for you is retrospective analysis. Review your last three deep flow experiences. What kind of feedback did you receive? How frequently did you receive it? Now carry this forward. Over the next few weeks, as flow arises, interrogate its arrival.
Also, don’t overdo it.
My advice: determine your “minimal feedback for flow,” or MFF.
As a writer, I like to know three things about my work: Is it boring? Is it confusing? Or is it arrogant? These are the three most common errors I make, so if I have this feedback, I know how to steer. It’s the minimal feedback I need for flow.
And to get this information, I work with an editor, someone on my staff who reads everything I write a few days after I write it. But that’s me. If you don’t want to hire someone for this job, find a feedback buddy. The important thing here is to keep each other focused. Feedback buddies don’t tell each other everything they’
ve been doing right or wrong in life. This is a tightly directed analysis—enough to steer by, not enough to overwhelm. If you can tell your feedback buddy exactly what information you’re seeking—your MFF—then you can often keep their subjective opinions out of the process.
To be sure, determining your MFF won’t happen all at once. Neither will training up a feedback buddy. But if your interest is a high-flow lifestyle, then this is just another adventure you’re going to have to have. Unless, of course, you’re a fan of mediocrity.
THE CHALLENGE-SKILLS BALANCE
The challenge-skills balance is the most important of flow’s triggers, and it’s worth reviewing why. Flow demands task-specific focus. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. If the challenge is too great, fear swamps the system. If the challenge is too easy, we stop paying attention. Flow appears near, but not on, the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety, in what scientists call the “flow channel.” It’s the spot where the task is hard enough to make us stretch but not hard enough to make us snap.
This sweet spot keeps attention locked in the present. When the challenge is firmly within the boundaries of known skills—meaning I’ve done it before and am fairly certain I can do so again—the outcome is predetermined. We’re interested, not riveted. But when we don’t know what’s going to happen next, we pay more attention to the next. Uncertainty boosts our rocket ride into the now.
Yet there are caveats.
Actually, quite a few. There’s been a long debate over what we mean by challenge and what we mean by skills. Researchers have poked and prodded. Seven factors consistently show up, many of which will be familiar. Here’s the full list: confidence, optimism, mindset, actual skills, tolerance for anxiety, ability to delay gratification, and societal values.11
A few are worth exploring in greater detail. Confidence and optimism, for example, seem obvious. The more confident and optimistic we are in our skills, the easier the challenge should feel. However, we’re not talking about an actual measure of skills; rather, only our attitude toward those skills. One might assume, for triggering flow, attitudes matter less than actual skills, but that’s not always the case. Among elite athletes, for example, studies show that how they feel about what they’re doing is as important as the skill they bring to doing it.
Societal values are also tricky. A great many of the early high-performance thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, and Sigmund Freud, believed that family and culture weighed too much. Shrugging off societal limitations, they argued, was the requisite first step on any path toward self-actualization. Certainly, in the years since, the forces of modernization, globalization, and social progress have loosened these shackles. Yet, these barriers continue to exist, and peak performers must continue to negotiate this gauntlet.
Finally, in The Rise of Superman, for maximizing this trigger, I talked about 4 percent as a magic number. This means that we pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of that task is 4 percent greater than our skill set. I also pointed out that this number was more of a metaphor than an actual metric. Yet, in the years since that book came out, for thousands of people, this metaphor has consistently produced positive results.
Here’s why 4 percent is tricky.
If the challenge is 4 percent greater than your skills, that’s enough to push you outside your comfort zone. This is problematic for the shy, timid, and risk-averse. Four percent is on the nerve-racking side of the equation. This is why tolerance for anxiety is a critical component of the challenge-skills sweet spot. When dialed correctly, you’re outside your comfort zone, so learning to be comfortable with being uncomfortable is mandatory.
For aggressive, type A types, we find the opposite. Four percent is just too small to matter. Sensation-seeking overachievers will tackle challenges that are 20, 30, even 40 percent greater than their skills, simply for the thrill of the ride. But by setting our sights on those tall mountains, we’re depriving ourselves of the very state we need in order to climb them.
This doesn’t mean not to set high, hard goals. Just chunk them into manageable steps that can become clear goals. What’s a perfect clear goal? One where the challenge is 4 percent greater than your skills.
For example, when I’m writing a book, I attack this issue with my daily word count. At the start, before I know what I’m doing, my goal is to write 500 words a day. In the middle, when I have a better sense of direction, that increases to 750 words a day. By the time I’m finishing, 1,000 is my target. In other words, while the challenge-skills sweet spot can be a moving target, 4 percent is how I aim.
To apply this in your own life, simply think about the most important tasks you face in a day and ask yourself if you’re overextended or underextended. Is the challenge too great? Does thinking about it produce too much anxiety? If that’s the case, chunk it into smaller tasks and lighten that load. If the opposite is true, if you find the challenges ahead understimulating, make them harder. Demand more excellence from yourself. Either way, tune every task you do in a day, so each of them lands inside the challenge-skills sweet spot.
EXTERNAL TRIGGERS
External triggers are environmental triggers or qualities in the world around us that drive us deeper into flow. There are four in total, though they all tend to work the same way, pushing dopamine and norepinephrine into our system, enhancing focus, and pushing us into the zone.
HIGH CONSEQUENCES
High consequences are about threats lurking in our environment.12 This could be a CEO stepping into the boardroom, a soldier sneaking behind enemy lines, or a surfer paddling out into the ocean. In whatever case, danger is a built-in feature of the experience.
And danger aids our cause.
Risk increases the amount of norepinephrine and dopamine in our system. In fact, the entire idea of an “adrenaline rush” is a misnomer. Very few people actually like the feeling of adrenaline. But damn near all of us will line up for dopamine and norepinephrine.
It’s also worth distinguishing high consequences from the increases in risk needed to maintain the challenge-skills balance. On the challenge-skills side of this coin, risk is more of an internal approach to the task at hand rather than an external quality found in the environment. As a writer, if I’m being exceptionally vulnerable and truthful in a piece of prose, then I’m a little outside my comfort zone and correctly applying the challenge-skills balance. If I decide to carry my laptop up to a high mountain peak and write while perched on the edge of a cliff, that would be a high-consequence environment. Of course, you could put these triggers together as well—such as a skier on a really steep slope (a high-consequence environment) attempting to jump off a cliff (a way of amplifying the challenge-skills balance) or a midlevel manager who decides to pitch a new idea (a challenge-skills move) at a company-wide meeting (a high-consequence environment).
It’s important to point out that the high-consequence trigger doesn’t necessitate physical risk. You can put yourself into riskier social environments, creative environments, or intellectual environments. Ask any doctor in training: medical school is a high-consequence intellectual environment.
Social risks are a fantastic flow trigger. Your brain processes social danger with the same structures it processes physical danger, and for solid evolutionary reasons. Until recently, being part of a community is what kept us alive. Go back three hundred years, tick off your neighbors, end up banished or exiled—that was a capital punishment. No one survived on their own. So the brain treats social danger as mortal danger—because, until recently, that’s exactly what it was.
These facts also tell us something about those Silicon Valley companies with “fail forward” as their de facto motto. This motto creates a consequence-friendly environment, which makes it a high-flow environment. If employees don’t have the space to fail, then they don’t have the ability to take risks. At Facebook, there is a sign hanging in the m
ain stairwell that reads: MOVE FAST, BREAK THINGS. This kind of attitude is critical to any innovation culture. If you’re not incentivizing risk, you’re denying access to flow, which is the only way to keep driving innovation forward.
As Harvard psychiatrist Ned Hallowell explained in The Rise of Superman: “To reach flow, one must be willing to take risks. The lover must lay bare his soul and risk rejection and humiliation to enter this state. The athlete must be willing to risk physical harm, even loss of life, to enter this state. The artist must be willing to be scorned and despised by critics and the public and still push on. And the average person—you and me—must be willing to fail, look foolish, and fall flat on our faces should we wish to enter this state.”13
RICH ENVIRONMENT
Our next flow trigger is a rich environment. This a combination platter of three separate triggers: novelty, unpredictability, and complexity. All three drive dopamine into our systems and, as a result, catch and hold our attention much like risk.14 We’ll go one at a time.
Novelty is one of our brain’s favorite experiences. As we’ve already learned, there’s actually an entire network—the salience network—devoted to its detection. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes plenty of sense. Novelty could mean that there’s either danger or opportunity lurking in our environment. Since both are crucial for survival, the brain prioritizes the information.
Unpredictability means that we don’t know what happens next. Thus we pay extra attention to the next. Work done by Robert Sapolsky at Stanford shows that the dopamine spike produced by unpredictability, especially when coupled with novelty, comes very close in size to the spike produced by substances such as cocaine. It’s a nearly 700 percent boost in dopamine, which leads to a huge boost in focus, which tends to drive us right into flow.
The Art of Impossible Page 21