1. What's the best way to motivate people to learn?Generally, we are motivated by two different reasons. We either do some things for what we call extrinsic reasons. Namely, you work for forty hours a week so you can get a paycheck at the end. And you don't really like the job much but you want the paycheck to do things with that you will enjoy. So that's extrinsic because the reward comes after the activity from the outside.Now, flow is a type of intrinsic motivation, that is, there you do what you're doing primarily because you like what you're doing. If you learn only for external, extrinsic reasons, you will probably forget it as soon as you are no longer forced to remember what you want to do. Nor will you be motivated to learn for its own sake. Whereas if you are intrinsically motivated, you're going to keep learning as you move up and so you are in this lifelong learning mode, which would be the ideal.BACK TO TOP2. What is "the flow experience" and what does it have to do with motivation?The flow experience is when a person is completely involved in what he or she is doing, when the concentration is very high, when the person knows moment by moment what the next steps should be, like if you are playing tennis, you know where you want the ball to go, if you are playing a musical instrument you know what notes you want to play, every millisecond, almost. And you get feedback to what you're doing. That is, if you're playing music, you can hear whether what you are trying to do is coming out right or in tennis you see where the ball goes and so on. So there's concentration, clear goals, feedback, there is the feeling that what you can do is more or less in balance with what needs to be done, that is, challenges and skills are pretty much in balance.When these characteristics are present a person wants to do whatever made him or her feel like this, it becomes almost addictive and you're trying to repeat that feeling and that seems to explain why people are willing to do things for no good reason -- there is no money, no recognition -- just because this experience is so rewarding and that's the flow experience.BACK TO TOP3. What kinds of school activities are most (or least) likely to promote flow?If you think of where kids have most flow in school, it's mostly in extracurricular activities like band, music, athletics, newspaper. In addition, if you look at academic classes, they would report flow especially when they work on team projects. That's the most enjoyable part of school. Next comes working on your own on a project and you can go down and the lowest one [in promoting flow] is listening to a lecture and audio/visual. Anything that involves them, that has goals where they can try to achieve, solve a problem, or do something it's going to be much more likely to produce flow.BACK TO TOP4. Can you describe a school that has succeeded in promoting flow?The Key Learning Communityin Indianapolis that you probably are also studying, they have tried very self-consciously also to include flow into their teaching methods and, I think, very successfully. Essentially, they do it in two different ways. One is that they have a space that is called the "Flow Room" where students can spend at least an hour a week to explore new materials and they don't have to do anything except get involved with whatever they are interested in doing. And this is one of the favorite spaces in the school for kids.But more importantly, every teacher, whether they teach German or music or mathematics, is aware of how important it is for the kid to experience flow while learning because that would make them want to learn more. Teachers are trying to translate their own subject matter into ways the kid can become really involved immediately and they get clear goals and feedback and they get the challenge matched to their ability. That makes everyday learning hopefully much more motivating to the child so that they will look forward to the lesson rather than be afraid or bored by it.BACK TO TOP5. Have you observed any especially innovative practices at The Key Learning Community?One thing that the Key School did from the beginning was to hire a video technician and a video camera and they interviewed and videotaped every child at the beginning of the school year, asking them why they wanted to go school, what they hoped to achieve at the end of that year. And for the rest of the year, whatever project the kid was involved in got on the same tape. At the end of the year, the child could have a documentary of what he wanted to accomplish and what actually did happen. Now, to me, -- you know, you say, well, so what? -- I think psychologically, it's a very important thing because you are putting the responsibility for learning on the child. They are responsible for what they're going to learn.BACK TO TOP6. What lessons can be learned from the success of the Key Learning Community?The neat thing is that the eight teachers who started the Key schools were not really special in any way. They were typical, good, public school teachers who just were so tired of battling against inefficiency of the regular schools that they banded together to start something new. They were able to pull something out that is very rare, namely, they created an environment where kids love to learn, where you walk into school and you see them laughing and happy in a way that you rarely see them in school and involved in their serious stuff, they're doing very, very interesting projects.So it's possible, but you need to have that kind of focus, single-minded determination that these eight people have because otherwise, it won't happen by itself. And throwing money at it is not necessarily going to help either, unless you give money to people who have that determination already.BACK TO TOP7. What can parents do to help kids engage in "flow" at home?What the parents can do is: first, support; second, challenge. Almost all kids who are in flow frequently, their parents have very high expectations of them and they trust that they can do that. And they give them the opportunities. For instance, we find that kids who are in flow often at home, have a place where they feel private, where they can be by themselves. And at first we thought, "Oh, well the rich kids have that." No. Rich kids have no more chance to have privacy than poor kids. It's not having a big place, it's just having a place where you feel, "Okay, here I can do what I want to do." It may be a basement, a corner of the basement, whatever.aHaving a TV in a kid's bedroom is one of the worst things because then they end up taking the easy way and when they're bored they turn on the TV, etcetera.BACK TO TOP8. What do you see as the major challenge for public education?[You] see in the past, you learned to become a hunter or a farmer, which is what all our ancestors for millions of years were. They learned by doing in a real setting, where they felt that, "Hey, what I do is important." I mean, you take an Inuit kid of two years old, they get a bow and arrow and they shoot birds -- sitting birds at first. But then they end up shooting seals and polar bears, but it's a kind of graduated involvement with real life and we haven't found how to do that.It's not surprising in a way because, I mean, how you get the kid to understand what a financial investment advisor does or a rocket engineer. It's really difficult to gradually introduce them. So we find abstract ways of doing it by reading about the principles of physics or finance or whatever. But that's so boring to most kids that they don't feel they are doing real stuff. And so the question of how to get kids involved in their own learning and their own development early enough instead of trying to do it this kind of abstract way. That seems to be the major challenge.Flow and Deliberate Practice are rather popular concepts these days. This shouldnt be surprising, as everyone wants to be fulfilled in their work and play, and many people want to become an expert in some domain. However, proponents of each approach appear to be in conflict a lot of the time. On top of that, some people think they are the same thing! I believe that they are separate but compatible: two aspects of the same consistent model.What do we mean by Flow?In an email thread among alumni ofCFARs rationality workshops, one member commented with a few paragraphs to this effect:What good SNS* looks like is being in aFlow state.A Flow state is a state in which you are intensely pushing yourself, to the limits of your abilities, toward a goal you are intrinsically motivated to pursue, and receiving frequent and immediate feedback on your progress.*SNS: for a relevant discussion of the Sympathetic Nervous System, see my earlierpost on Againstness Trainingfrom a few months ago.I responded withI do agree that good SNS looks like whats described here. At the very least, anything that feels intense is almost certainly SNS, and this state you describe is clearly good.However,I dont believe this is flow. I think the term youre looking for isdeliberate practice.The turbocharging class/concept [taught by CFAR] is basically a framework for turning anything into deliberate practice.

A fascinating look into a very fundamental part of the psychology of happiness and life satisfaction.What this exchange reveals, however, is the ambiguity in the word flow.When Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi did his original research, the state of balance people were finding during their work was overwhelmingly described by them as flow, implying that that is a good word to use for this experience of balance between skill and challenge. It appears, though, that there are false positives: experiences that arenotwhat Csikszentmihalyi calls flow but which other people intuitively do. This, I believe, is a key source of the confusion around deliberate practice. Thesatisfying nature of itand the sense of growth evoke a feeling of flowing in some people.And so both the canonical Flow, and Deliberate Practice arebothsometimes referred to as flow.So what is deliberate practice?Much as Csikszentmihalyi is the man behind Flow, there is a man behind Deliberate Practice: K Anders Ericsson, a professor at Florida State University, who has spent years studying how people become experts at something. If youre thinking 10,000 hours, youre right. Malcolm Gladwellpopularized that ideabut it has its origins in Ericssons research. What Ericsson discovered is that experts in a given domain have typically spent not just ten thousand hours practising relevant skills in that field, but that theyve done that practice a certain way. Essentially it boils down to performing at a level slightly beyond whats comfortable.One concept from Ericssons work that Im familiar with was exposed to me viaMoonwalking with Einstein, a book about memory (which Isummarized on actionablebooks.com). Joshua Foer, the author ofMoonwalking, called it the OK Plateau, and it occurs because your brain doesnt want to have to strain. Your brain wants to do things unconsciously, so it tries to learn them so effectively that it doesnt have to pay attention while you do them. This is great for performance or multitasking (talking while driving, for example) but totally halts learning and improvement, hence it will not get you to expertise.In the book, Foer has hit a plateau on his times for speed cards (memorizing the order of an entire deck of cards). Ericsson, who is coaching him, recommends he sets a metronome and tries to go just 10-20% faster than his current ability, memorizing a card each time the metronome ticks. This single intervention starts Foer on the path to improvement again, and he goes on to set a U.S. record in speed cards in his first competition.A unified model of challenges & skillsTo help distinguish between flow and deliberate practice, consider this image, which I created based on an chart in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyis bookFlow. Flow is described as the state that occurs when skill and challenge are perfectly balanced such that the act is neither straining nor boredom, and only occurs when youre in the flow channel (white, in the diagram). Deliberate practice, on the other hand, requires challenging yourselfbeyondyour current skill level, i.e. going into the Anxiety section (hence SNS). As this diagram illustrates (point #3) theres a tension that occurs when that happens, forcing you to level up your skills. Obviously you dont want to make it too challenging, or youll be unable to perform without mistakes, at which point yourepractisingmaking mistakes.

Based on an image in the original flow book. LicenseCC BY 2.5. Click to enlarge.I readFlowa few months ago, and many of the examples he gives areclearlynot deliberate practice / learning. In fact, theyre things like rural farmers who do their work with a deep sense of presence. Sure, theyre honing their craft, but its not the kind of rapid-skill building that turbo-charging / deliberate practice is. It seems self-evident to me that the Flow state at 4 is much more pleasurable than the flow state at 1. This is also supported by the following model from Csikszentmihalyis later book,Finding Flow(which I havent read; I retrieved the image from Wikipedia). This suggests that deliberate practice, in addition to making your performance more effective (and therefore more valuable, etc.) will also make your performance more enjoyable.

A more complex flow model than the channel.Deliberate practice is rare, because its hard work. People will naturally tend towards flow states, which are more enjoyable, but which make for substantially slower learning and growth. Essentially, you want to be performing in a flow state, but training using deliberate practice. Flow is when youre playing all the way through a piece of music thats exactly at your skill level; deliberate practice is going over bar 39 thirty-nine times to nail the complex rhythm. Ideally, youll probably do a bit of eat.Flow periods may be necessary for maintaining motivation and big-picture perspective: chess masters may have spent the majority of their time reviewing grand master games, but they typically dont give up playing games altogether during that time. The key is to find the balance that works best for you: balance between skill and challenge, and between flow and deliberate practice. The following maxim is a pretty good start though:Practice deliberately, perform in flow(Before, during, and essentially after writing this, I discovered several other relevant articles, listed below. They speak in some way to the same point Im making, but I found I wanted an even more explicit relationship between the concepts. Also, in the interests of my own self-improvement and of making effective models of concepts, I would love to hear what you think about this article! Leave a comment letting me know if this makes sense, or if you think it could be improved.) The Father of Deliberate Practice Disowns Flow:Cal Newport quoting Ericsson. Flow Doesnt Maximize Growth: an autodidact reflecting on optimal learning. Kernighans Lever: a case study of this kind of relationship in programming.