Two to six hours, one or two times a week: highest-flow activity (skiing, dancing, singing, whatever). These are the activities that often get edited out of our lives as responsibilities pile up and schedules get crowded. But the more flow you get, the more flow you get. It’s a focusing skill. So spending extra time in an activity that is all but g

Five minutes for making a clear-goals list—also usually at the end of a workday to prepare for the next day’s uninterrupted concentration period. Remember, order tasks from the most difficult (and most rewarding) to the least. Also, don’t just put “work tasks” on your clear goals list. Write down everything you want to do in a day, including things

During struggle, the prefrontal cortex is hyperactive. It’s working feverishly to solve a problem. In release, we want to relax and let go. The goal is to take your mind off the problem. This allows us to pass information processing responsibilities from the conscious to the unconscious. Executive attention disengages and the default mode network t

Complexity shows up when we force the brain to expand its perceptual capacity, for example, when we stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplate the question of geological time, or when we gaze up at the night sky and realize that a great many of those singular points of light are actually galaxies. This is the experience of awe, where we

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.

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 mai

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

Our Sense of Self Vanishes: In flow, our sense of self disappears. Our sense of self-consciousness vanishes as well. The inner critic is quiet. The voice of doubt is silenced. And we experience this as liberation, as freedom; we are finally getting out of our own way.

Step one: Find a passion and purpose. Step two: Fortify passion with grit and goals. Step three: Amplify the results with learning and creativity. Step four: Use flow to turbo-boost the whole process.