Limitless,, Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life

BEFORE WE MOVE ON

None of us would be able to live without habits, of course, but consciously working to bring constructive new habits into your life and to replace bad habits with better ones will take your superpowers to a new level. Before you move on to the next chapter, here are a few things to do:


Bolster your understanding of the habit loop by thinking about the four components of some of your most common habits, like making your breakfast or taking the dog for a walk. What’s the cue, the craving, the response, and the reward for each of these?
Spend a few minutes thinking about a habit that you’d love to replace with a more constructive one. Using the Fogg Behavioral Model, what new behavior can you adopt that fits neatly into the model?
Walk yourself through the process of starting a valuable new habit using WIN.

F L OW

Why is flow so important to becoming limitless?

How do I achieve a flow state?

What are the key enemies of flow?

I’m sure there have been times when you were so completely caught up in what you were doing that everything else disappeared and it just felt like the most natural thing you’ve ever done. Time probably melted away for you during these experiences. People regularly tell me about focusing so deeply on what they were doing that they had no idea that afternoon had become night or that they’d missed multiple meals in the process.

This experience is flow.
In his groundbreaking book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” To Csikszentmihalyi, flow is an expression of “optimal experience.”¹
Dr. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as having eight characteristics:²

1. 
   Absolute concentration
   
2. 
   Total focus on goals
   
3. 
   The sense that time is either speeding up or slowing down
   
4. 
   A feeling of reward from the experience
   
5. 
   A sense of effortlessness
   
6. 
   The experience is challenging, but not overly so
   
7. 
   Your actions almost seem to be happening on their own
   
8. 
   You feel comfort with what you are doing
   

As you’ve likely experienced yourself, being in a flow state dramatically boosts your productivity. Reports have suggested that flow can make you as much as five times more productive. The people at McKinsey have even imagined a workforce where flow is commonplace:

When we ask executives during the peak-performance exercise how much more productive they were at their peak than they were on average, for example, we get a range of answers, but the most common at senior levels is an increase of five times. Most report that they and their employees are in the zone at work less than 10 percent of the time, though some claim to experience these feelings as much as 50 percent of it. If employees working in a high-IQ, high-EQ, and high- MQ environment are five times more productive at their peak than they are on average, consider what even a relatively modest 20- percentage-point increase in peak time would yield in overall workplace productivity —it would almost double.³