I could have picked a better day to start this. I trained hard the past two days (physically), and had a ton of paperwork. This means my body is tired and my mind is sluggish. Usually, the quickest way out of this is to have an intense, but short, training session in the sun, first thing in the morning. But my entire body is screaming at me to rest, and I am going to listen to it. I have Tai Chi training later in the day, which will at least help me get in some movement.
To make things worse, I had to start the day with a meeting. There is nothing more mind-numbing, and I usually have an intellectual hangover after one. There is difficult work to do today, and getting the mental revolutions high enough to kick it off seems impossible.
Which means that this is actually the perfect day to start this. If you can have a good day under these conditions, you can always have a good day. How do I define that? Simple: I want to look back at my day and experience satisfaction. I want to feel that my time was well spent, not just in terms of hours of work, but that I made progress on something important. What I absolutely do not want is that feeling that the day was a waste, and that I should do better tomorrow. Instead, tomorrow should excite me. I want to be eager to get to the work again.
Perhaps I should sketch where I am right now. I am an academic that has just quit his job (of twenty years) to move to a new industry in a new country (Canada). I am stressed out and intimidated. I have to pack up or give away everything I own, I have to finish up at my job to allow my successor an easy entry, and I have to become an expert in a new field.
Enter Steve Kotler. You may already know his work, if you are interested in flow and optimizing human performance. Yesterday I bought his new book, “Gnar Country”, which I have unashamedly stolen this format from. Why? So many books tell you what is good for you, but neglect to mention the struggle the author went through to reach their conclusions. I have the same issue with most academic papers: they are presented as beautiful, polished pieces of research but, having written some myself, I know they completely neglect the ten thousand blind alleys you had to stumble into before finding the solution. “Gnar Country” explicitly documents Kotler’s journey to becoming a park skier, including the successes but also the falls, the blood and the torn rotator cuffs.
The art of impossible Gnar CountryThe dominant theme, as in “The Art of Impossible”, is the flow state, that elusive condition where humans are at their best. Psychology, neurology and physiology align to turn you into the best you can be. It is satisfying and productive, and it makes life worth living. Kotler does an amazing job of describing his search and attainment of the state, but the problem is that I don’t ski. (I have snowboarded a few times, but that was years ago, and I was horizontal for most of that.) What I am is a knowledge worker, stuck in my study for most of the day, having to come up with new science.
Of course, there are parallels. The same principles apply. All of these are well documented in “The Art of Impossible”. My mission in writing this journal is to show how to apply those principles to someone like me, stuck in an office.
Kotler is not the only influence on this blog, though. Cal Newport has written extensively on doing meaningful work well, and although flow is not his main focus, it is clearly omnipresent. His work is also very relevant to me, since he is himself an academic. Can I somehow bring all of these concepts together, in a way which will provide some guidance by exposing my day-to-day attempts? No matter how inept and painful to watch it may turn out to be.
Deep WorkI do not intend to provide a full introduction to flow and Deep Work here. First of all, because the authors mentioned do a superb job of that, and secondly because I want the finer points of these concepts to be revealed by example, as I try to implement them.
This then, is supposed to be an almost real-time account of my search for flow, in an area which many of you can relate to (as opposed to professional climbers and surfers). I will try not to disguise the blind alleys and the foolish experiments. Let’s see what actually works.
The Flow Diaries 