You’re engaged in a hard activity,
Maybe a complex project at work,
Maybe hard training at the gym.
It takes all your attention and focus,
No resources left to attend to anything else.
You don’t know if it’s day or night,
Morning or noon,
Time to eat or time to rest.
There’s nothing but void all around,
No worries or concerns;
Just one ball of light,
On the task at hand.
The entire world is that ball of light,
There’s noting else but oblivion;
You forget everything that’s not in the light,
You forget even yourself.
Sometimes it’s like a spiritual experience,
The ego fading in the activity,
At one with the task at hand.
One thing is for certain,
You don’t want it to end.
This is the psychological state of flow, when you’re engrossed in the task at hand to the exclusion of all other things. The whole of attention is focused on one task, with no attentional resources left to attend to anything else.
You’re at one with the process of the activity, forgetting time, place, and everything in between. Even hunger and fatigue don’t register on the canvas of consciousness.
When you’re engrossed in an activity, with all of the resources of working memory aligned to the task at hand, you operate at a level of cognitive performance that is well beyond your typical output.
You perform at maximum personal ability.
And you enjoy doing it.
It doesn’t feel like hard work at all, not like the weight of the world on your shoulders; rather, you move with power and purpose, with contentment and in control.
Bring together all of working memory, and you’ll be in the zone. Let other thoughts, worries and distractions take up one or two of those registers, and you’ll be in the grind.
How do we go from effort to effortless, from grind to flight?
Squaring that circle is the topic of the next section.