Flow and the benevolent tyranny of practice

You have probably at some point in your life had the experience of 'flow' - where you are doing something that you are completely absorbed in, when time seems to stop and there is no awareness of anything except what you are doing. It's an experience that can happen when you are deeply involved in a sport, or playing a game like chess, or perhaps gardening or playing a computer game or dancing or singing or...well pretty much you name it.

Sounds like a great experience, right? Wouldn't it be good for learning to be like that?

Well, no.

According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (the foremost researcher into flow) in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience:

The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limit in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

So flow generally occurs during performance. It may be what an Olympic gymnast or figure skater experiences when they nail their routine in competition. However, it is unlikely to be what they experience in practice.

The reason is that in practice, top performers focus on the things that they find difficult, that lie beyond their current ability to do easily. And they try to do these things over and over again, regardless of the discomfort that it causes them until they master them. They fall down, they pick themselves up and they try again. And they continue to practice these things until they can reliably perform them whenever they need to.  It is repetitive and frustrating and uncomfortable...and the only path to increasing their capabilities in their chosen area.

Whereas flow works at the edge of, but within, your current capabilities, deliberate practice works at the edge of, but just outside of, your current capabilities.

In Talent is Overrated, Geoff Colvin, puts it this way:

...great performers never allow themselves to reach the automatic, arrested development stage in their chosen field. That is the effect of continual deliberate practice - avoiding automaticity. The essence of practice, which is constantly trying to do the things one cannot do comfortably, makes automatic behaviour impossible.

This doesn't mean that nothing great performers do is automatic. Rather, they are constantly assimilating new skills and it is the skills that lie at the edge of their capacities that are not automatic.

If you only focus on achieving the experience of flow then the chances are that,while you may get a lot of enjoyment from your chosen activity, you won't actually get any better at it.

But if you deliberately practice the things that you find hard, then over time they will become less hard and ultimately effortless. And in your desire to become even better you will find more hard things to practise.

That doesn't mean that it always has to be hard. If you reach a point at which you are satisfied with the level of your performance then you can stay at that level and just enjoy the experience of flow.

Like a lot of things in life you set your level of aspiration according to the price you are prepared to pay, and the higher that price, the greater your potential for excellence.