Flow, Mastery, Fulfillment
Wednesday Wisdom for May 29, 2024
Well I guess you know the previous email wasn’t sent by AI as it was a draft sent too early. Apologies all, here is your Wednesday Wisdom for the week!
Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I distill worldly advice for better living with 3 quotes, 3 observations, and 3 questions.
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Flow
🤨 Quote
“The keys to flow: There's a clear challenge that fully engages your attention; you have the skills to meet the challenge; and you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step (the progress principle). You get flash after flash of positive feeling with each turn negotiated, each high note correctly sung, or each brushstroke that falls into the right place.”
Jonathan Haidt
Source: The Happiness Hypothesis
Observation 🧐
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term ‘flow’ to describe those moments where practice and work come together and you are in an increasingly fluid state. Jonathan Haidt describes it as the experience of our automatic processing perfectly forming harmony with our conscious thought.
Flow is common amongst creatives but anyone can experience it. It is a focused attention that grabs hold of the task at hand, the world outside of that task fading into obscurity. It becomes just the doer and the task.
Csikszentmihalyi says flow is the “loss of the sense of a self separate from the world is sometimes accompanied by a feeling of union with the environment.”
This is how we experience the world, we become one with it, navigating, exploring, becoming one with our environment, with all that we touch.
As the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once put it:
"To understand is to experience the accord between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the realization."
To understand life then is to find our way into a flow state, to practice, and to find fulfillment in our attempts to bring our intentions into reality.
🤔 Question
Do you have a ritual that helps you access your flow state more easily? Can this transcend tasks or is it task dependent?
Mastery
🤨 Quote
“There is pleasure in those moments when we feel a growing mastery in some small domain—mastery that is exercised through our bodies, with the use of tools.”
Matthew Crawford
Source: World Beyond Your Head
Observation 🧐
One reason mastery is so pleasurable to us is it is an external sign of the progress we’ve made in a subject matter we’ve dedicated ourselves to.
Mastery is not something one just does, you don’t just wake up one moment and decide to become a master in something.
Mastery in a subject or skill takes thousands of hours of work, learning the craft, the ins-and-outs. Someone who attains mastery understands the microscopic while being able to pull out and see the entire picture from a bird’s eye view.
“People who have achieved mastery no longer just see the individual chess pieces,” David Brooks writes, “they see the whole. They perceive the fields of forces that are actually driving the match.”
It is through this pursuit of mastery that we create not just skills but also meaning for our lives. We dedicate so much time to the process of becoming a master that we inherently take solace in our time with it, becoming one, and feeling a deep connection to it.
In essence, for many, the pursuit of mastery is a stepping stone toward finding one’s vocation. It is paved in time, dedication, and a deep desire to be proficient at the task.
🤔 Question
What is one area you’d like to become a master in? Do you feel deeply drawn to it in a way that fulfills you? What could you do today that would help your progress towards it?
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