Flow is the state of automatic concentration and complete immersion that people sometimes experience when performing activities that they have mastered.
Flow Quotes in Grit
The Grit quotes below are all either spoken by Flow or refer to Flow. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 7: Practice
Quotes
Gritty people do more deliberate practice and experience more flow. There’s no contradiction here, for two reasons. First, deliberate practice is a behavior, and flow is an experience. Anders Ericsson is talking about what experts do; Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is talking about how experts feel. Second, you don’t have to be doing deliberate practice and experiencing flow at the same time. And, in fact, I think that for most experts, they rarely go together.
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Flow Term Timeline in Grit
The timeline below shows where the term Flow appears in Grit. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 7: Practice
...psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi connects expertise to the state of automatic, spontaneous, total concentration known as flow. Ericsson believes that flow is impossible during deliberate practice, which by definition involves planning and...
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Duckworth decided to study the relationship between grit and flow on her own. After giving thousands of people both the Grit Scale and a questionnaire...
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...But her talk vastly improved, and she delivered the finished product in a state of flow.
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...practice can be enjoyable and rewarding, it’s unlikely that it can ever truly feel like flow.
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Duckworth identifies three key steps people must take to benefit from deliberate practice and achieve flow. First, people have to follow the science. They must define specific stretch goals, maximize their...
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