Would you continue to do the work you do if you weren’t getting paid for it?
Reading a recent article about the flow state reminded me of an argument I had with my sister a decade or so ago. We were both past retirement age, she was happily retired and volunteering her considerable skill to assist an important community organization.
She kept insisting that I should retire, and I kept questioning her logic. “Why should I retire from work that I loved to do work that didn’t especially interest me?”
When I work with clients, I need to set a timer to remind me when it’s time to stop. I don’t notice the time passing because I’m so involved with the work. When I’m writing a book, I often experience the same phenomena, but I don’t bother to set the timer.
I don’t have to do this work; I get to do this work! Working allows me to be in the flow state.
The flow state occurs only when you’re doing something that you’re highly skilled at and when you’re doing it in a way that challenges that high skill level.
Are you lucky enough to have work that engages you this way? If you’re not, try doing the Timeline Experiment in chapter 5 of Embrace Prosperity.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikkszentmihalyi was originally published in 1990 and is still very popular.
This paragraph is a comment I wrote about a passage on Page 77 of Embrace Prosperity: Resolve Blocks to Experiencing Abundance (Rapid Relief With Logosynthesis®) You can see the passage in the book. You can also see the excerpt here. This link will take you to Bublish.com, where I regularly publish comments on parts of this book. This is a site where authors share of their work. You can subscribe to my musings, there, as well as to the musings of many other authors. It’s a great place to learn about new books and I recommend that you visit.