post about flow (again)

_posts/2018-08-20-flow-again.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Flow (again)
+date: '2018-08-20T13:51:31-07:00'
+categories: book
+tags: book good nonfiction philosophy
+pagecount: 336
+---
+
+I had this book [*Flow (again)*][book-amaz] on my Kindle and couldn't remember whether I had read it
+yet or not, so I decided to read it. Just now as I sat down to write this I realized I coud have
+checked this blog to find out if I had read it before and lo and behold [I read it in
+2015](/book/2015/06/06/flow.html). This is somewhat disheartening as while reading it this time I
+had a lot of profound thoughts about it being meaningful and how I want to change some things, but
+clearly I had some of these thoughts before and here I am.
+
+I was just about at the end of my time at Flexport and living in San Francisco when I read this book
+the first time. In the past three years I have moved four times including to France, I learned to
+skydive, paraglide, base jump, how to ride a motorcycle. I met and married my wife, we now have a
+child. I have worked at a few different places. The point of this short recollection is to remind
+myself that yes I have clearly done some things, but I have not succeeding in implementing the
+underlying message of this book throughout all aspects of my life.
+
+You can read my previous entry on this book for more details about this book, it all still holds.
+The book was good, I agree with the ideas, and I fully believe that flow states are basically
+synonomous with happiness. I am instead going to dive into where I have and have not found flow and
+why, and what I think I can do about it going forward.
+
+I have experienced the described flow state during many different activities of varying degrees. The
+short list of activities that come to mind are: BASE jumping, skydiving, running, cycling, reading,
+rowing, writing, programming, mathematical research, studying/solving homework, spending time with people,
+playing games, cooking, shooting. You could combine these based on some broad categories which is
+done in the book, so we could get away with sports and games, intellectual, and interpersonal. There
+are overlaps especially in that sports and games involve intellectual as well as often
+interpersonal actions, but this is good enough for now. My best flow moments have been in sports,
+especially when there is some mental aspect as well. For example I can get into a flow state by
+doing steady state running, but the real good times are racing or doing a workout that requires
+mental strength to push myself and to coordinate pacing. Flow occurs when your skills are balanced
+against the challenge you face towards a goal. You either veer into boredom by not having a hard
+enough challenge or you enter an "anxiety" state if the challenge is beyond your skills. In sports
+this isn't really anxiety in so much as it usually manifests in physical failure or loss. That is a
+type of anxiety in that it feels bad and is uncomfortable, but I think of as different than the
+anxiety one would experience in a more mental arena such as taking a test in a subject you know
+nothing about. There are some sports where the other side is very dangerous, namely BASE jumping and
+skydiving. It is worth taking a detour at this point a bit more into the concepts to help clarify my
+thoughts. Flow can be explained with two diagrams, the first is the simple one:
+
+![Flow Diagram]({{ "/images/flow_simple.jpg" | absolute_url }})
+
+We achieve flow when the challenges we face are balanced against our skills. Naturally by partaking
+in an activity we either increase our skill or increase the challenge we take on. Depending on the
+activity one can stay in flow at the same skill/challenge point for a certain amount of time before
+we start to move along one of the two axes. To get back into flow we have to move back along the
+other axis. Take running as an example. I can estimate pretty well the pace I can race a 5k at today
+where I would not have much left over at the end, but for which I could run even splits meaning that
+I didn't save too much for the end (boredom) or blow up and have to slow down to finish (anxiety).
+However, if I keep training, the next time I race I have to pick a new pace to run, too slow and my
+new skill level was too high (I moved along the x-axis) so that I am not in flow but just bored. If
+I go too fast then I took on a challenge beyond my skill level (I moved along the y-axis too much)
+so that I blow up and end up in an anxious state.
+
+The second diagram expands on this graph to give names to other regions:
+
+![Expanded Flow Diagram]({{ "/images/flow_expanded.gif" | absolute_url }})
+
+This diagram is a bit misleading as it seems like anxiety only occurs when your skill level somehow
+declines. The actual meaning of the axes is a bit ambigious as time is clearly somehow involved here
+but is not made explicit. I don't actually like this diagram as much as I do the original, but it
+helps to give some terminology for some other states. Some people are a bit more risk averse so they
+might constantly find themselves in the control or relaxation regions, only sometimes breaking into
+flow. This can mean always building up skills to a sufficient level before deciding to up the
+challenge. Other people are more risk seeking in that they prefer to spend their time in the arousal
+or anxiety states, again only occasionally breaking into flow. This means taking on challenges you
+are not ready for and building up the skill necessary while working on the challenge. Neither one of
+these is objectively wrong, you have to move along one axis or the other and some activities lend
+themselves to one approach or the other. It is very difficult to move along the diagonal because
+perfectly balancing the challenge with your skills requires a very nuanced challenge set as well as
+a deep understanding of one's own skill level which is harder to know than it may seem.
+
+The downside of taking the risk adverse approach is that one may never know where flow actually lies
+because you could constantly be taking on challenges below your skill level. You can find yourself
+in situations doing less than your are capable because you are trying to avoid going too far over
+the edge into anxiety.
+
+The downside of the risk seeking approach is that you might not be able to actually build up your
+skill in certain disciplines if you are constantly operating over your skill level. If every time
+you run a race you flame out then it can be very difficult to improve over time as you are not
+getting adequate feedback to modify your training. You are constantly putting yourself in situations
+you can't handle. In some activites, say chess or tennis, your opponents will probably stop playing
+you because you are just putting them into boredom because your skills are not up to snuff. In other
+activities, say BASE jumping or skydiving, this approach will eventually kill you.
+
+Where am I? Well for some activities I take the risk seeking approach usually because I don't know
+my limits. I prefer to lose spectacularly to help bound my upper limit rather than win and not
+really know where I stand. That is, I prefer to go over the edge so I at least have a bound on where
+the edge is. I have done this with rowing, running, cycling, research, programming, cooking, and
+with social interactions. I have also done this a little bit in skydiving, but pulled back once I
+really saw what the underlying siutation was.
+
+In rowing I raced in a national team selection regatta during my first year rowing a single. Clearly
+this was beyond my level, but I didn't really know how far outside the realm of possibility it was,
+and I saw the downside as some temporary pain. I was way under experienced and outmatched, but I got
+a good sense for where I stood. In running, when I was first starting to run longer distances I
+raced a 5k where my race plan was go out in second place and hold on for as long as I can. My splits
+were something like 4:35, 6:15, 8:05. I imploded, but I didn't have a good sense for what my
+potential pace could be. I knew I was going to blow up, but I figured the best case was that I could
+hold on without dying too bad and worst case I could take the overall pace and that was my benchmark
+to try to beat with training. In cycling I had done a little bit of climbing in New Jersey and a few
+rides in the 30-40 mile range when I moved to Pasadena. There is a ride out and back there up to the
+top of Mt Wilson which involves three category 1 climbs over about 60 miles. I took two bottles of
+water, got up early, and went for it. My legs were shaking during the last climb which is on the way
+back, I could barely sit down without my hamstrings cramping, I wanted to stop so bad, I thought I
+was going to pass out from the heat and exhaustion and just die on the side of the road. But I made
+it home, and subsequently passed out face down in full kit on my living room floor. After a couple
+weeks of better nutrition planning and training, I started doing that ride every week, but I didn't
+know if it was really going to be hard or not without giving it a go.
+
+I can go on with examples where I have taken the risk seeking approach in my life within these
+activies and more. I know the consequences of the anxiety state in most of these activities is just
+a lot of temporary pain, so I am willing to take that risk for the purpose of getting a baseline. I
+don't want to be in that red zone, but I think the benefits outweight the temporary risk for
+gathering information. In almost all circumstances where I went out over the edge, it set me up really
+well for understanding where I was and how to train. If I went over the edge again it was because of
+a miscalculation and it was almost certainly not very far over, rather just a little bit of pushing
+myself into the arousal state.
+
+In some contexts it can be hard to accurately assess your skill level and therefore you can operate
+in the anxiety zone without knowing it. In fact, you can experience something like flow which is the
+result of a positive outcome to an outlier situation where you overcame your lack of skill. This is
+possible if you play a game against a superior opponent and they have an off day. If you play them
+a few times, the skill should win out (ignoring games of pure chance) and you will realize that you
+were not actually ready for that challenge. However after the first game it can be easy to delude
+oneself into believing their skill level is higher than it actually is. In pure physical contests
+against a clock like running, if you hit the time then you were up for the challenge in some sense.
+I had one 2k on the erg where I chose a goal pace that was too aggressive for my skill level,
+however I held on and hit the time. I paid for this by blacking out for a little bit, throwing up
+intermittanly for a couple hours, and being sick for a couple days afterwards. So was I up to the
+challenge just because I pulled it off? On one hand yes because I did it, but realistically no
+because it was certainly not a flow experience. I did a different 2k on the erg where I was in flow
+the whole time and it was an amazing experience. The goals were similar and the end times were
+similar, but the experience was worlds apart. This focus on the actual experience is the key to
+understanding the positive nature of flow as a guiding principle.
+
+What happens when you take on a challenge that is well beyond your skill level in skydiving or BASE? You
+might have a lot of fun and misassess your skill level to be on par with the challenge. Or you might
+be seriously injured or die. Or you might just not have fun as you end up away from the group or
+overly nervous the whole time where you fail to really accomplish the goal. The most likely event is
+that it is kinda fun because it is still a jump, you partially accomplish the goal and you set
+your expectations for your skill level accordingly. Besides injury or death, the worst case scenario
+is the first one where you think you are better than you are.
+
+The two most dangerous situations in skydiving and BASE jumping are overestimating your skill level
+most likely due to getting away with things that are beyond you without having the mental clarity to
+tell the difference, and being complacent which manifests itself in the relaxation zone on the above
+graph where your skills are very high so you take challenges less seriously. Newer jumpers are
+killed by overestimating their abilities whereas complacency kills the experienced.
+
+BASE jumping, in my limited experience, is the apogee of the flow experience as it pertains to
+sports. Moreover, I find sports to be the most natural avenue for flow. The concept is strongly
+connected to games and can be introduced into other areas via gamification so this makes sense.
+
+I want to put interpersonal relationships and love/sex into a different category as I don't really
+compare talking to my wife with going for a run. The experience of loving and being loved lives on
+its own plane. One can call this flow as in there is work required to continue to stay engaged and
+enjoy the experience, but it is different than say sports or reading.
+
+Looking back on some of the things I have done in my life where I would say I was happiest or would
+love to do again, it is easy to see they were times where I was in flow. I had set goals, the goals
+were not too easy but they are achievable, I worked on my skills to take on challenges which gave me
+feedback and I progressed this way until hitting my goal. I then made new goals and repeated the
+process.
+
+Or the dark side hit. I met my goal, but I assumed that it was the activity itself that I really
+enjoyed regardless of the goal so I tried to keep going without a concrete structure. This works for
+a little bit as unstructured play within something I enjoy is fun for a while. But eventually I
+start to get bored and I don't know why. Rather than setting new goals I will often start to do the
+thing less and less. This is a sad state of affairs when I look back on it becaue it is obvious in
+hindsight.
+
+I am going to start setting some more concrete goals for the things I enjoy doing and be more
+cognizant of the anxiety/flow/boredom states. Rather than feeling bored with something I am doing, I
+need to take a step back and think about what my goals are including if I even have any. The second
+time around with this book has really been much more useful. I believe that my attempts to live a
+life more like what I want than just going through the motions over the past three years is a large
+part of why I am ready to internalize this now.
+
+[book-amaz]:      http://a.co/6jTXKkr

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