Find Your Flow
The Moon Man’s Field Guide to Being a Happy Creative #001:
Welcome to Module #001 of the Moon Man’s Field Guide to Becoming a Happier Creative. If you’re here, you’re either a non-creative who’s experiencing a little creative curiosity, or maybe you’re a creative person who could use a little happiness boost as they work their way through their career. Regardless, thank you for engaging with the Wild Moon Man as your creative happiness sherpa.
First things first–who is the Wild Moon Man and how can he help me become a happier creative? The Wild Moon Man is a milk man who delivers frosty, frothy, creamy creative happiness tips to your doorstep every week. His attitude harkens back to simpler times, before it seemed like the world was spinning off it’s axis, adrift in a cold, dark, and uncaring universe. He arrives on your porch with a smile and a set of actionable steps you can take to fill your days with more creative goodness–thus making the world seem just a little bit brighter.
You might be asking, “Just what in tarnation does creativity have to do with my happiness?” Fair question, Jim. Let me start with the caveat that there are a million different roads on the highway to well-being. We’re all coming from different places, driving different vehicles–some in run-down jalopies that spew smoke from the exhaust; some in fancy-schmancy chryslers, with futuristic AM radios installed–but the common thread is that we’re all trying to get to the same destination: Happinessville, USA.
The problem is that we’re driving without directions, mindlessly racing towards those shiny objects up ahead–the recreational water vehicles, the record players, the 21” aluminized tube television sets–thinking if we just make it there, happiness will be just around the corner. But it never comes… and the road continues on to the next shiny thing.
In addition, most of us are low on fuel. We’re time-starved, distracted, fatigued, bored, and lack autonomy or control over where we’re going. We’re yelling at the kids in the back of the car to keep their hands to themselves, and no we can’t stop to go the bathroom.
Which is why the Wild Moon Man offers up a better route to take. And it leads through Flow Street.
Flow is a concept coined and researched by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Essentially, flow means deep, distraction-free, in-the-zone concentration while taking on a challenge you’re passionate about. The state produces a neurochemical bath that enhances well-being, and helps us work at our peak. While in flow, the world melts away and creative powers are heightened. There’s no ego, there’s no second guessing, it’s just you completely and utterly absorbed in the creative act .
For myself, I find flow through creative work like drawing, animation, or video production. For others, it might come from fly fishing, chess, or dancing the bop at the local soda shop (curse those depraved teens!).
Regardless, flow states can be reached through most any endeavor, work, sport, or hobby when the right conditions are met.
To consistently reach this state takes hard work. It involves diligent goal-setting, and mapping out the right system to reach those goals. It requires good sleep, exercise, and nutrition, as it takes your mind functioning optimally to reach peak flow. It takes discipline to not get too distracted by everything the modern world throws at you. It also involves having your base needs met, so you don’t need to worry about survival, and can just focus on the creative work.
I urge you to think on if there’s an activity that brings you flow or a sense of joy and complete absorption. This blog aims to help you find more of that. And if you don’t feel like you’re a creative, then let’s find your creative thing and shatter that illusion. We are all born creative, and you might just have a repressed creative child shouting at you from the depths of the dungeons of your own mind, “Hey, let me out of here, I need to express myself and find a sense of absorption in a creative activity.”
Take the Wild Moon Man by the hand, and let him help you hone in on your own creative passions and optimize them, therein finding a better road to happiness.
There are lots of steps to explore so let’s fire up the engine and let’s get to it.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Eight Characteristics of Flow
Complete concentration
Clear goals and immediate feedback
Time seems to speed up or slow down
The experience becomes it’s own intrinsic reward
The experience is completely effortless
The right balance between balance and skills is struck
Lose sense of self
You have a feeling of complete control over the task
Module #001 Challenge. List something you’re passionate about that you’d like to allocate more time towards.