Flow is a term defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It’s a state of mind where you lose track of time. You’re doing something for the sake of the thing.
I’ve found flow in a few memorable ways:
- Early morning Mario Kart time trials
- Solving a Rubik’s cube and trying to perfect an algorithm or learn a new one
- Tinkering with this website (three hours disappeared as I made my Resume)
- Music production in high school (EDM, trap, beats)
- Python programming in my Data Structures and Algorithms class in college
- Building web scrapers with Python
- Putting words together
- Editing those words
- Getting lost in a fiction book
- Climbing trees
I’m sure there are more. I seem to enjoy working on things with tight feedback loops and a kind of this-or-that mechanism.
I think I’d enjoy rock climbing a lot. C. Thi Nguyen talks about rock climbing in his new book The Score. I’ll have to try it out and see. Feeling inspired after seeing Alex Honnold climb to the top of Taipei 101.