Flow Is the Opiate of the Mediocre: Advice on Getting Better | Hacker News Reader

Flow Is the Opiate of the Mediocre: Advice on Getting Better

calnewport.com

37 pointscolinprince5 comments

I'm not sure that flow and deliberate practice are mutually exclusive. The biggest example for me that comes to mind is working out. For me, deliberate practice during that activity comes in the form of focusing on getting the muscle group I'm using to contract as hard as possible. When the set starts to get really difficult and my muscles are full of blood and maximally contracted my mind is solely focused on that contraction. I deliberately practice getting a pump and when I start to achieve it, I enter a state of flow. When I go to the gym and have a good workout there is at least a portion of my workout devoted to getting a pump and forcing blood into my muscles. Empirically, my muscles have gotten larger and I've gotten stronger. Does having flow while this is happening mean I'm not doing deep work?

Completely agree with you. I play the piano and can attest from watching others more skilled than me that practicing well in sections and many of the other things mentioned here are part of a professional pianists flow.

That being said, perhaps the point that is trying to be made is that we should routinely examine our flow patterns and optimize for maximum efficiency

I interpreted flow as something that happens, and that you can make a good environment for it to happen , but can't force. However, recently I've found as you've found that I can force it to occur in certain circumstances. Maybe that's what the OP is getting at

Strategy #4: Create Beauty, Don’t Avoid Ugliness. Weak pianists make music a reactive task, not a creative task. They start, and react to their performance, fixing problems as they go along. Strong pianists, on the other hand, have an image of what a perfect performance should be like that includes all of the relevant senses. Before we sit down, we know what the piece needs to feel, sound, and even look like in excruciating detail. In performance, weak pianists try to reactively move away from mistakes, while strong pianists move towards a perfect mental image.

of all of the comments this one seems most relevant to development. instead of comparing a thing to its ideal, weak shops are just generally afraid of change because they dont really know whats going on. if you know exactly what you want to build, and something doesn't sit right, then fix it. leaving it alone out of fear just allows your project to continue to evolve into a shapeless unmanagable mass.

I like Cal Newport's work, but I'm not sure he's being fully charitable to flow here; I thought that some degree of challenge (but not so hard as to be making no progress) is generally considered a prerequisite to flow by its proponents.

A more interesting question to my mind is: what does deliberate practice look like to programmers?

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