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Thursday, April 17th, 2025
- Complete Concentration in the Present Moment
- Immediate Feedback
- Clear Goals
- The Challenge-Skills Ratio (ie: the challenge should seem slightly out of reach
- High consequences
- Deep Embodiment
- Rich Environment
- Creativity (specifically, pattern recognition, or the linking together of new ideas)
- Shared Goals
- Close Listening
- “Yes And” (additive, rather than combative conversations)
- Complete Concentration (total focus in the right here, right now)
- A sense of control (each member of the group feels in control, but still)
- Blending Egos (each person can submerge their ego needs into the group’s)
- Equal Participation (skills levels are roughly and equal everyone is involved)
- Familiarity (people know one another and understand their tics and tendencies)
- Constant Communication (a group version of immediate feedback)
- Shared, Group Risk
| Time | Event |
| 8:00a | How to Enter a ‘Flow State’ on Command: Peak Performance Mind Hack Explained in 7 Minutes
You can be forgiven for thinking the concept of “flow” was cooked up and popularized by yoga teachers. That word gets a lot of play when one is moving from Downward-Facing Dog on through Warrior One and Two. Actually, flow — the state of “effortless effort” — was coined by Goethe, from the German “rausch”, a dizzying sort of ecstasy. Friedrich Nietzsche and psychologist William James both considered the flow state in depth, but social theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, is the true giant in the field. Here’s one of his definitions of flow: Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost. Author Steven Kotler, Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective, not only seems to spend a lot of time thinking about flow, as a leading expert on human performance, he inhabits the state on a fairly regular basis, too. Chalk it up to good luck? Good genes? (Some researchers, including retired NIH geneticist Dean Hamer and psychologist C. Robert Cloninger, think genetics play a part…) As Kotler points out above, anyone can hedge their bets by clearing away distractions — all the usual baddies that interfere with sleep, performance, or productivity. It’s also important to know thyself. Kotler’s an early bird, who gets crackin’ well before sunrise: I don’t just open my eyes at 4:00 AM, I try to go from bed to desk before my brain even kicks out of its Alpha wave state. I don’t check any emails. I turn everything off at the end of the day including unplugging my phones and all that stuff so that the next morning there’s nobody jumping into my inbox or assaulting me emotionally with something, you know what I mean?… I really protect that early morning time. By contrast, his night owl wife doesn’t start clearing the cobwebs ’til early evening.
In the above video for Big Think, Kotler notes that 22 flow triggers have been discovered, pre-conditions that keep attention focused in the present moment. His website lists many of those triggers: Kotler also shares University of North Carolina psychologist Keith Sawyer’s trigger list for groups hoping to flow like a well-oiled machine: One might think people in the flow state would be floating around with an expression of ecstatic bliss on their faces. Not so, according to Kotler. Rather, they tend to frown slightly. Good news for anyone with resting bitch face!
(We’ll thank you to refer to it as resting flow state face from here on out.) Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2022. Related Content How to Get into a Creative “Flow State”: A Short Masterclass David Lynch Explains How Simple Daily Habits Enhance His Creativity “The Philosophy of “Flow”: A Brief Introduction to Taoism - Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday. |
| 9:00a | How to Evade Taxes in Ancient Rome: A 1,900-Year-Old Papyrus Reveals an Ancient Tax Evasion Scheme
It was surely not a coincidence that the New York Times published its story on the trial of a certain Gadalias and Saulos this past Monday, April 14th. The defendants, as their names suggest, did not live in modernity: the papyrus documenting their legal troubles dates to the reign of Hadrian, around 130 AD. These men were charged, writes the Times’ Franz Lidz, with “the falsification of documents and the illicit sale and manumission, or freeing, of slaves — all to avoid paying duties in the far-flung Roman provinces of Judea and Arabia, a region roughly corresponding to present-day Israel and Jordan.” In other words, Gadalias and Saulos were accused of tax evasion, a subject always on the mind of Americans under the shadow of their tax-return due date, April 15th. While the prospect of an IRS audit keeps more than a few of them awake at night, ancient Roman law went, predictably, quite a bit harsher. “Penalties ranged from heavy fines and permanent exile to hard labor in the salt mines and, in the worst case, damnatio ad bestias, a public execution in which the condemned were devoured by wild animals,” writes Lidz. Such a fate presumably wouldn’t have been out of the question for those convicted of a crime of these proportions. The long-misclassified document of this case was only properly deciphered, and even understood to have been written in ancient Greek, after its rediscovery in 2014. “A team of scholars was assembled to conduct a detailed physical examination and cross-reference names and locations with other historical sources,” which resulted in this paper published this past January. For any scholar of Roman law, such an opportunity to get into the minds of both that civilization’s judges and its criminals could hardly be passed up. Even out on the edge of the empire, prosecutors turn out to have employed “deft rhetorical strategies worthy of Cicero and Quintilian and displayed an excellent command of Roman legal terms and concepts in Greek.” This will no doubt get today’s law students speculating: specifically, about the existence of an ancient ChatGPT. via NYTimes Related content: Read David Foster Wallace’s Notes From a Tax Accounting Class, Taken to Help Him Write The Pale King Donald Duck Wants You to Pay Your Taxes (1943) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. |
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