flow – Doug Belshaw's Thought Shrapnel

🎺 What Time Feels Like When You’re Improvising — “A great example of flow state is found in many improvised art forms, from music to acting to comedy to poetry, also known as “spontaneous creativity.” Improvisation is a highly complex form of creative behavior that justly inspires our awe and admiration. The ability to improvise requires cognitive flexibility, divergent thinking and discipline-specific skills, and it improves with training.”

💼 SEC proposes rules for giving gig workers equity — “The five-year pilot program would allow gig companies to issue equity as long as it’s no more than 15% of a worker’s compensation during a 12-month period, and no more than $75,000 in value during a 36-month period (based on the share price when it’s issued).”

🧠 Your Brain Is Not for Thinking — “Your brain’s most important job isn’t thinking; it’s running the systems of your body to keep you alive and well. According to recent findings in neuroscience, even when your brain does produce conscious thoughts and feelings, they are more in service to the needs of managing your body than you realize.”

✊ Social Unrest Is the Inevitable Legacy of the Covid Pandemic — “Like turpentine on flames, Covid-19 has rekindled older divisions, resentments and inequities across the world. In the U.S., Black Americans suffer disproportionately from police brutality, but also from the coronavirus — now these traumas merge. And everywhere, the poor fare worse than the rich.”

👣 A new love for medieval-style travel — “We might today think of pilgrimage as a specifically religious form of travel. But even in the past, the sightseeing was as important as the spirituality. Dr Marion Turner, a scholar at Oxford University who studies Geoffrey Chaucer, points out that “it was a time away from ordinary society, and allowed for a time of play.”

Quotation-as-title by Dr Johnson. Image via xkcd.

In this article from 2016, James Clear investigates motivation:

Why do we stay motivated to reach some goals, but not others? Why do we say we want something, but give up on it after a few days? What is the difference between the areas where we naturally stay motivated and those where we give up?

The answer, which is obvious when we think about it, is that we need appropriate challenges in our lives:

Tasks that are significantly below your current abilities are boring. Tasks that are significantly beyond your current abilities are discouraging. But tasks that are right on the border of success and failure are incredibly motivating to our human brains. We want nothing more than to master a skill just beyond our current horizon.

We can call this phenomenonThe Goldilocks Rule. The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.

But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to talk about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of peak performance, or ‘flow’ states:

In order to reach this state of peak performance… you not only need to work on challenges at the right degree of difficulty, but also measure your immediate progress. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains, one of the keys to reaching a flow state is that “you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step.”

Video games are great at inducing flow states; traditional classroom-based learning experiences, not so much. The key is to create these experiences yourself by finding optimum challenge and immediate feedback.

Source: Lifehacker

Tag: flow

He that overvalues himself will undervalue others, and he that undervalues others will oppress them

The Goldilocks Rule