Flow Is a Trainable Skill Built by Focus and the Right Challenge

Steven Kotler defines flow as an optimal state of consciousness: a period of intense absorption in which attention is fixed on the task and other concerns recede. In his account, flow can improve mental, physical and emotional performance. It is not limited to athletes or artists. Kotler describes it as a way human biology can support performance when the conditions are right.

He identifies six characteristics that help distinguish flow from ordinary concentration: complete focus on the task; a merger of action and awareness; a diminished sense of self; altered time perception; a feeling of control; and an experience that is enjoyable in itself. The feeling of control is not necessarily a sense of consciously directing every move. Kotler’s example is Michael Jordan in a windmill dunk: from the outside, an extraordinary feat; from the inside, the sense that the basket looks enormous and the shot cannot be missed.

Kotler calls flow “the most addictive state on earth,” using addictive to describe how rewarding it feels and how much people will seek it out again. He argues that it is not just an occasional peak experience. Flow is a focusing skill that can be cultivated, and it is built into human biology. His organization, the Flow Research Collective, trained 35,000 people through an eight-week program called Zero to Dangerous. Kotler says participants saw a 73% increase in flow. He attributes that result less to the program’s content than to the fact that the underlying capacities are trainable.

That trainability begins with a simple principle: flow follows focus. Kotler says the triggers associated with flow—he counts between 26 and 28 identified so far—bring attention into the present moment. Some do so by increasing dopamine or norepinephrine, some by increasing both, and others by reducing cognitive load. By cognitive load, he means the mental burden of keeping too many things in mind. Clearing and organizing a desk, for example, may help not because tidiness is intrinsically productive, but because it reduces competing demands on attention.

Flow is also morally neutral. Kotler points out that people can enter it in activities with harmful consequences. He offers delinquency by bored teenagers as an example: graffiti, vandalism and fighting can provide escalating challenges that draw attention and create flow. The state itself does not determine whether the activity is good. At the same time, Kotler says flow is associated with well-being, life satisfaction, meaning, purpose and empathy.

Before trying to make work more absorbing, Kotler asks people to identify what he calls a primary flow activity: something they have done since childhood and can lose themselves in. His is skiing. He says that about 90% of the time he skis, he enters flow. His wife’s is walking her dogs in the backcountry; a close friend’s is playing guitar.

Adults often abandon these activities as they take on work and family responsibilities. Kotler argues that this is a mistake, in part because flow in one activity can make flow easier to reach elsewhere. A weekend spent skiing, for instance, may make it easier to enter flow at work a few days later. He calls flow a focusing skill, related to but distinct from meditation, and says it can be practiced through an activity where a person is naturally inclined to become absorbed.

A primary flow activity may also help regulate anxiety. Kotler says too much anxiety blocks flow, though a small amount can support alertness, focus and learning. Returning to a familiar activity can calm the nervous system and lower the threshold of anxiety a person brings to a later challenge. For people dealing with burnout, Kotler says his lab and research by Karina Pfeiffer’s lab suggest that flow can help. He recommends returning to the primary flow activity, estimating that two to four hours a week may be enough. He also says flow is being studied in connection with PTSD, addiction and depression.

The practical lesson is not to assume that the route to better work is to eliminate recreation. If an activity reliably draws a person into focused engagement, preserving time for it may support the same capacity they need elsewhere.

Among the triggers Kotler emphasizes, the challenge–skills balance is central. People pay the most attention, he says, when a task slightly exceeds what they can already do. The task should stretch them, but not snap them. Too little challenge produces boredom; too much produces anxiety. The desirable range between those extremes is what flow researchers call the flow channel.

Kotler describes a figure of 4% as a useful estimate of how much the challenge should exceed a person’s current skill. He is careful to say this was a back-of-the-envelope calculation, not a precise scientific law. Still, he says he and his team saw the same pattern while working with downhill mountain bikers, where they could measure the features riders attempted. In their observations, people who stayed near that margin kept improving and experienced more flow over a season than those who did not.

The figure is best treated as a guide to calibration, not a formula. Kotler says people who are cautious or less skilled may need to push themselves a little harder. Highly driven people, by contrast, may rush into challenges far beyond their abilities and need to break large goals into smaller steps. A difficult long-term goal can be motivating, he says, but the task in front of someone still needs to be appropriately sized. He cites research suggesting that a properly set hard goal can increase motivation by 11–22%.

That calibration has to account for daily conditions. Kotler uses writing as an example: when starting a book, he may aim for 500 words in a day. But after a night of poor sleep, the same target could be too demanding. On such a day he might aim for 300. The point is not to use a fixed quota, but to adjust the task to the person’s current energy and skill so it remains a manageable stretch.

Kotler treats complete concentration as both a flow trigger and something people can deliberately support. His first step is to remove distractions before starting. He turns off his smartphone, notifications and email. He says the number of ways to interrupt a professional has multiplied: where an executive once might have had three incoming channels, he now sees 17 or 18, including messaging apps and workplace platforms.

His advice is to limit those channels, keep one open for emergencies, and batch ordinary communications—for example, checking them in the morning and at the end of the day. This is not a call to respond faster through better discipline. It is an attempt to stop incoming messages from repeatedly pulling attention away from the task.

Kotler also describes focus as something that can be built up gradually. He says the brain’s awake-and-alert cycle lasts roughly 90 to 110 minutes, comparable in length to a sleep cycle. That does not mean someone should force a 90-minute work block immediately. If a person can focus for only 10 or 15 minutes, he advises starting there and extending the interval over time. In his experience, people may gradually increase their focus period until they realize they have worked for about 90 minutes.

He combines a protected environment with a well-calibrated task: make the space suitable for concentration, then adjust the work to the challenge–skills balance. Both matter. A quiet room will not make an impossible task manageable; a well-sized task can still be derailed by constant interruption.

Kotler says he is not an ADHD expert, but describes a perspective he shares with psychiatrist Ned Hallowell: ADHD can involve hyperfocus, and the difficulty may be less “I can’t focus” than “I can’t focus on things I don’t care about.” He says autonomy and attention are closely coupled: people are less likely to focus when someone else is “driving the bus.”

His practical response is to reframe a task until it connects to something the person values or wants to learn. A disliked work assignment might contain a smaller element that could make someone a better salesperson, or teach them how a publication structures a story. Kotler says that point of personal relevance can act as a gateway into the task. The work has not changed, but the person’s reason for doing it has.

He adds two further considerations. First, the environment needs to be managed because someone who is easily distracted is more vulnerable to interruptions. Second, flow can make thoughts themselves more distracting. Kotler says increased dopamine and norepinephrine amplify pattern recognition; an idea can lead to another idea, and then to an absorbing tangent. For someone with ADHD, he says, that can mean becoming intensely focused on a side path and losing the original task.

His suggestion is to note tangents for later rather than follow each one immediately. Taken together, his three starting points are to find a personal reason to engage with the task, reduce environmental distractions and keep emerging ideas from taking over.

Kotler distinguishes deliberate practice from deliberate play. He describes deliberate practice as repetition with incremental improvement, and deliberate play as repetition that allows improvisation. The distinction matters, he says, because the best method depends on the field.

For tightly bounded disciplines such as mathematics or playing a violin, Kotler says deliberate practice can be effective. But in less bounded domains—“pretty much almost everything else,” as he puts it—he argues that deliberate play can outperform deliberate practice. Play brings more neurochemicals into the experience, he says, increasing the chances that it will be stored in long-term memory. Flow, with its substantial neurochemical activity, can support learning for the same reason.

Kotler connects this argument to the familiar claim that mastery requires 10,000 hours. He says learning in flow may be much faster, citing DARPA research that he says found people learned shooting skills 230% faster in flow than through conventional training. A document shown during this discussion, titled “The Flow State,” states that DARPA research with military marksmen found soldiers learned shooting skills 230% faster in flow than in conventional training. That is what the document says; Kotler separately makes the same claim in speech. He cautions against treating 10,000 hours as a universal rule: learning time depends on the domain, and the familiar figure came from Malcolm Gladwell’s framing rather than being a fixed threshold established by Anders Ericsson.

The actionable point Kotler draws is simpler: when learning is not confined to a highly structured discipline, leave room to experiment. His advice to people seeking better learning and performance is to be more playful.

That does not mean learning should feel easy throughout. Shane Parrish raises a tension between flow and learning: Cal Newport argues that deep work requires discomfort, while flow is often described as pleasurable. Kotler’s answer is that the two are not opposites. He argues that what Newport calls deep work overlaps with flow, but that flow has a cycle, and its front end is struggle.

A person cannot perform a task unconsciously before first learning it consciously. Kotler calls the early effort a loading phase: it involves deliberate thought and can feel difficult. He cites research by Colleen Seifert suggesting that frustration may indicate that working memory is overloaded. That discomfort, he says, can improve the chance of later solving the problem and entering flow once the solution arrives.

Frustration is therefore not proof that a learner is doing something wrong. Kotler describes it as a kind of feedback: it signals that the task has exceeded the capacity of working memory. He says some norepinephrine is necessary for learning; at low levels it is associated with curiosity, while at high levels it is associated with anxiety. The learner needs enough activation to engage without becoming so anxious that learning is blocked.

Kotler’s account of learning also makes room for privacy and low-stakes practice. Parrish suggests that learning improves when people get rapid feedback, repeat an activity in a relatively stable environment and are willing to look foolish. Kotler agrees that visible consequences can help people notice errors in their thinking. Chess and competitive Tai Chi gave Josh Waitzkin clear feedback: a poor decision could cost a game or get him pushed out of the ring. Kotler also points to journalism, where errors could mean not being hired again.

But Kotler says he does not like being bad in public. When learning to ski, he tries to practice away from the chairlift, where fewer people will see him struggle. He wonders whether Waitzkin’s move from New York to Costa Rica, as he took up surfing and paddleboarding, also gave him room to be a beginner away from people who knew him.

Parrish calls this private practice the “dark hours”: time without a boss or an audience, when someone can experiment and fail without immediate consequences. Kotler describes a similar arrangement as “non-time.” He starts writing around 3:30 or 4 a.m., partly because nobody is likely to interrupt. Earlier in his career, working from the West Coast for East Coast publications, he learned to write before editors began calling. The schedule persisted because he found that the early hours gave him room to work through a sentence, experiment with language and play with a problem—things that are harder to do during a day filled with other demands.

Kotler describes curiosity as the foundation of motivation. He suggests making a list of 25 things a person is curious about, then looking for intersections among them. When several curiosities converge, he says, they can become the seed of passion. Attaching that passion to a cause beyond oneself can create purpose.

His explanation is biological: curiosity involves dopamine; passion, he says, brings dopamine and norepinephrine; purpose adds social neurochemistry associated with other people, including serotonin, endorphins and oxytocin. He calls purpose “better drugs”—a shorthand for the additional motivational and rewarding elements he believes it brings.

Kotler is also willing to use spite as a motivator, but only in a small dose. He says that proving someone wrong has propelled much of his own work, and he points to athletes such as Tom Brady as examples of people driven by a chip on the shoulder. But he warns that spite can become consuming. Michael Jordan is his example of a competitor whose drive, in Kotler’s view, appeared to outlast the context that first made it useful.

Kotler’s own boundary is not to spend his time arguing with critics. When people object to research, he says, the response should be to do more research, not to answer every commenter. A small measure of anger may prompt someone to act; allowing that anger to dictate what they attend to can waste the time and energy needed for the work itself.

Kotler describes the brain as a prediction engine: it tries to anticipate what will happen, reduce uncertainty and estimate how much energy a situation will require. Pattern recognition is one way the brain does that, and Kotler also describes it as a flow trigger.

The system needs material to work with. Kotler recommends reading at least 25 pages a day, preferably in books, because he sees books as a dense source of information. Reading, in this account, stocks the pattern-recognition system with ideas it can later connect. He also says that linking ideas can produce a small rush of pleasure, which he associates with dopamine.

For writing, his practical example is to know the starting point and the ending. When a writer knows where a piece begins and where it needs to go, he says, the brain can work on connecting the two. The structure gives pattern recognition something to solve; not knowing either end can leave the writer blocked.

His argument for reading extends to the difference between a summary and the experience behind it. A short article may take minutes to read but reflect hours of work. A book may take six or seven hours to read and represent years of research. Kotler sees that as a strong return on time, while cautioning against reading only what everyone else is reading. He is often more interested in what an author read to produce a book than in the book’s popularity itself.

Parrish describes the value of long-form conversation as a way to get closer to experience and reflection, rather than receiving only another person’s compressed conclusions. Kotler agrees that the format can preserve stories and the human side of an idea, while arguing that reading is still better suited to teaching some kinds of knowledge. As an interviewer, he says, the key is to ask the follow-up rather than hurry through a checklist. He prepares by learning a subject’s history and work, then makes clear that he is willing to ask for an explanation when he does not understand. That combination, he says, can create interpersonal flow: a conversation in which both people become absorbed and the expert feels able to speak freely.

Kotler traces his deeper interest in flow to a severe illness. He says he contracted Lyme disease after a tick bite at a wedding on Long Island, spent three years largely confined to bed and was treated with doxycycline for a year and a half. During the worst period, he says, his memory and mobility deteriorated, and he was suicidal.

A friend eventually insisted on taking him surfing. Kotler says he expected only to sit in the sun, but caught a wave and experienced a powerful state in which time slowed, his thinking cleared and his pain disappeared. He caught four more waves, then spent 14 days unable to move. He says that over the following six months, surfing took him from roughly 10% to 80% functionality, though it took six more years to feel normal again.

Kotler uses that experience to explain why he began investigating flow. He argues that flow may affect the nervous system and immune response, and describes a proposed mechanism: a release of nitric oxide during the transition into flow that pushes stress hormones out of the system, followed by neurochemistry he says can support immune function. He believes this could be relevant to autoimmune conditions, where he says the body struggles to return to a stable baseline.