Once a man was tasked with building a mezzanine bed – seven feet high, handmade from wood, with an angled ladder and boxed shelving beneath it – but with no pre-existing design. At first, he regretted promising his partner he could do it. After multiple hardware store trips, he groaned, “What the hell was I thinking?”
He sketched, measured, made some cuts – then, somehow, three days later, he stood before a finished bed frame: sturdy, bolted to the wall, with shelves and a ladder. “How did that happen?” he wondered. Three days felt like three hours.
He didn’t just do it. He was carried by it. Entering what psychologist, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, described as flow – when “a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
In flow, our brain cocktail – dopamine, norepinephrine, and endorphins – creates a natural high more powerful than any artificial boost. We forget ourselves entirely. We aren’t just solving a problem, we’re merging with it and growing.
Csíkszentmihályi discovered people experience this state across countless activities – from rock climbing to coding, violin playing to mathematics.
To get there, we need a task just beyond our skill level, challenging enough to demand growth, but not so hard it causes anxiety. Too easy, and boredom stretches time; too hard, and frustration wins.
The world’s most successful people get into the flow state daily. They don’t achieve greatness through ego or force. They achieve it by disappearing into their work so completely that when they emerge, they hardly recognize what they’ve created.
Find the work worth disappearing into, and watch what you build when you get out of your own way.
Seek the flow.
