In the early 1920s, a young writer was having trouble thinking up a new story. He was poor
and it was cold when he sat in front of the fireplace, squeezing the peels of little oranges
into the edge of the flame and watching the sputter of blue that they made.
From his window, he looked out over the rooftops of Paris and calmly told himself, “Do not
worry. You have always written before and you will write again.”
Often, when we talk about high-performance, we inevitably talk about flow, that elusive
state in which the muses of our imagination seem to come from nowhere with the simple
intention of guiding our hands, stoking our inspiration, and granting us the ultimate
gift: sustained, laser-like focus. It is the ability to enter and operate in that flow
state that separates the great from the elite. While athletes create pre-game rituals that
last hours in hopes of finding flow, creatives often design morning routines and repeat mantras
to propel them into highly focused and productive days. The challenge for most of us, it seems,
isn’t so much knowing what to do when we’re in a state of flow, but rather, how to get
to it in the first place. When the young writer from the story sat down
in front of his typewriter for the second time, the words came easy and without the
use of pre-game rituals or meditations. What this writer knew — who if you haven’t
guessed, was Ernest Hemingway — was that it mattered less how he started and more
how he had ended the day before. “I had learned already never to empty the
well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep
part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
Imagine being stuck at your desk for hours, uninspired and unfocused, until suddenly it
clicks. Almost out of nowhere, you find the right word, the right answer, the perfect
design. The mountain of tasks that plagued your to-do list surrender at your feet and
the stress begins to melt. You’ve done it, entered the promised land, the land of flow.
Hours pass. It’s dinner time, but the last thing you want to do is leave now. After all,
haven’t we learned that the greatest sin of high performance is to leave anything on
the table? No, no… We must squeeze out every drop of this magical state and take it for
all it’s worth. Finally, the midnight oil has been burnt to
a crisp and you walk away from your work drained yet triumphant. Or so you think…
Josh Waitzkin, chess prodigy and author of The Art Of Learning, once described a conversation
he had with skiing legend Billy Kidd, in which he asked Kidd about the three most important
turns on a ski run: … the three most important turns of the
ski run are the last three before you get on the lift. And it’s a subtle point. That’s
when the slope is leveled off, there’s less challenge. Most people are very sloppy. They’re
taking the weight off the muscles they’ve been using. They have bad form. The problem
with that is that on the lift ride up, they’re unconsciously internalizing bad body mechanics.
As Billy points out, if your last three turns are precise, you’re internalizing precision
on the lift ride up. And so it goes with flow. When we walk away
from our work drained, dazed, and confused, we internalize those feelings. That all-nighter
where you worked until you literally couldn’t anymore? It may have yielded production, but
the brain drain you felt when you walked away followed you back to your desk the next day.
The bitter gambler will always tell you the same story, “If it wasn’t for that last
hand, I’d be rich!” But the gambler who laughs all the way home after doubling her
money knows it’s because she walked away before her luck ran out.
Hemingway knew that flow wasn’t a ghost to be strangled to death on every chance encounter.
He walked away from his typewriter while he still had gas in the tank and inspiration
on his side. Many artists and entrepreneurs think of beating
their head against the wall in search of inspiration as a rite of passage. But Hemingway never
allowed those feelings to enter his workspace. He walked away long before those feelings
of brain drain could be internalized. This helped him return to his work knowing exactly
where to start again. “I always worked until I had something done,
and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be
sure of going on the next day.” There is still a strong undercurrent in our
society, particularly amongst entrepreneurs, that continues to celebrate and glamorize
the grind. Just like with conversations around how much sleep is best to have each night,
there is an unspoken competition around who can stay in the pressure cooker, working the
longest and the hardest. But anyone can learn how to outlast the others.
The real discipline comes from walking away before you’re cooked. It takes a cool, Hemingway-like
confidence to tell the muses, “We’ve worked enough today. I’m sure I’ll see you around
tomorrow.” So the question remains, for athletes, creatives,
writers, producers, and thinkers alike: When you find your flow today, will you have the
discipline to walk away before it’s all gone?