Your life will never look like a fairy tale because fairy tales aren't real. – It can look like an inspirational story. In the last four months, except for burnout in June, my mind has been on a level I never foresaw to exist.
This text goes far beyond discipline, not eating noodles, getting enough sleep, and other shallow matters. It’s about the flow.
As you read this, you probably have some distractive thoughts, and that's normal if you are starting and haven’t sunk your mind into the task. Flow occurs when you focus intensely on the task without interruptions or distractions. You morph into the task. While I write, I don’t think about anything. I don't have any thoughts. My mind starts to use the keyboard as a canvas, without a mental voice. Letter by letter, word by word … I notice nothing and feel at peace.
When I write with ambient music in the background, I don’t hear the music. Only as my focus or exhausts do I become aware thereof. While I write, there’s nothing but the keyboard, my fingers, and the infinite combinations of words. I like to think of a white and void universe. In that universe, there’s nothing to do and to see outside of a typewriter. That’s what I would call focus.
Whenever I record videos, something strange occurs; I turn blind. As I sit at my desk and talk, I see everything clearly, but then everything slowly morphs into a shiny black indifference, and my words become the only reality. Nothing matters, only the camera and my words.
The focus attained in a flow is unparalleled. I can write a thousand words as if they were nothing, and I won’t feel time pass. It’s like falling asleep in a car and then arriving at your destination instantly. I view the flow as a weapon, my competitive edge. The focus makes me productive and fulfilled while yielding presence and profound tranquility. One can get ten times as much done in a flow as someone without. - Things take as long as you want them to. The state of flow, combined with extreme dedication, ambition, and skill, leads to monumental results.
In the tech industry, there is the concept of a 10x developer. These are people with incomprehensive problem-solving skills and an unmatched work ethic. They can replace a whole team or an entire company. Some doubt these people are real, but they are. Yet, it goes even further than that. At the apex of human ingenuity lies the 1000x developer, able to do the work of an entire nation, replacing a thousand programmers. The inventor of cryptocurrency, a method to store value online, bitcoin, was such a developer. It’s said millionaires don’t believe in astrology, but billionaires do. Ordinary people cannot comprehend what goes on in the mind of someone this advanced.
Before I trained myself to enter the flow while writing, programming, or doing sports, I used to measure times. Every time I programmed, I listened to specific music, a three-hour playlist. My work days were 14 hours long at that time. Every time I took a break, I would pause. After the day passed, how much actual work got done? Four hours. The rest was shallow work without a flow and tangible results. How much deep work is in an eight-hour shift? Two… After years of practice, I could push my deep work to the limit. Eight hours of deep work a day – and I burned out in June 2023. With my current lifestyle, I can sustain five hours of deep work daily, from waking up to breakfast. I don't know how relatable this is, but most of the time, people do nothing while ‘working.’ - Try to fill a bucket with apples. You can still fit some grapes in your bowl, but if you filled it with grapes first, you would have no space left for the apples. Don’t focus on the grapes; do what is meaningful first.
How do you achieve a flow? Keep your surroundings constant to trigger the flow process. This environment must be free of distractions. There’s you and the task. Then, attain mastery over a domain. What task you can enter a flow with depends on your unique circumstances.
Having meditated for up to one hundred hours and fixed my life after years of dedicated personal growth, I almost eliminated all negative thoughts. That’s an absolute blessing since you suffer more in imagination than reality. Most negative scenarios never occur; a worst-case scenario is even rarer. If you lay in bed and have dark thoughts, you have big problems—you either fix them or continue to suffer. There’s no space for negative thoughts in a flow; that’s the beauty.
Earlier in life, as a child, as I was unconscious most of the time, I still had some moments of total presence. These bursts of consciousness would come seemingly at random. It isn't easy to describe the sensation, but it feels like you have just woken up from a dream you never entered. Suddenly, you feel completely alive, and everything seems indifferent; only your life and experiences matter. You start to find your name strange, and when you view yourself in the mirror, you question where the ‘I’ is. You can achieve this feeling almost permanently - and it goes hand in hand with the other aspects of an elevated state of mind.
You will soon realize how pointless it is to be stuck in one’s thoughts. Presence is the key to happiness and the perfect life—like anything desirable, it is hard to achieve and a long process.
The flow is the only true pleasure. The flow does not drain; it energizes. Its potency never and yields presence, coupled with fulfillment. A present mind is always at peace. Because a flow makes you lose a sense of self and time, a deep flow makes you touch the sublime; you feel one with the universe. This is the highest existence possible, enabled by an elevated mind.
Live by the deepest realization.