# 206 — Rapt

## Metadata
- Author: [[Focused]]
- Full Title: 206 — Rapt
- Category: #podcasts
- URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/bc0caa2c-ebff-4d67-bac4-93bd65765fcf
## Highlights
- Episode AI notes
1. Watching TV without distractions enhances enjoyment of media consumption
2. Flow is a state of being completely engrossed in an activity just beyond one's ability level
3. Balancing flow and deliberate practice is crucial for productivity
4. Deliberate practice is essential for skill development
5. Flow and deliberate practice are opposite but both important for productivity and skill mastery ([Time 0:00:00](https://share.snipd.com/episode-takeaways/ff69a787-c1e4-4fbf-8660-b889049c8510))
- Reflections on Watching TV without Distractions and the Concept of Flow
Summary:
Making a conscious decision to watch TV without distractions enhances the enjoyment of media consumption.
Flow, as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is a state of being completely engrossed in an activity just beyond one's ability level. While flow is considered a productivity gold standard, it cannot be forced but invited.
The balance between flow and deliberate practice is crucial.
Deliberate practice, though opposite to flow, is essential for skill development.
Flow is likened to performance mode where one can let go, while deliberate practice involves intentional effort. Flow should not be the sole measure of productivity as intentional practice is crucial for skill mastery despite being less frequent in producing immediate results.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
A couple of years ago, I decided that I was only going to watch TV that was worth watching without an iPad or a Mac in my lap. And if you understand what I mean, a lot of times these days, I don't know if this is in your family too, you sit in front of the TV and you're doing email at the same time or something. And the result is you do very little email and you barely pay attention to what's on TV. So I just said, that's it. If it's good enough to watch, I'm gonna make a conscious decision. You're like, my wife wants to watch Bridgerton with me. And I'm like, all right, it's important to her. I'm gonna watch it and I'm not going to have something in my lap, we're just gonna watch it. And that's kind of like a decision I make now every time I choose to consume media. And it's one of the best things I ever did in terms of, you know, enjoying entertainment. Yeah, 100%.
Speaker 1
I think back to college and I had a large collection of DVDs and basically I would always study in my room and be a movie playing in the background. And I realized now, you know, that was just me giving in to the need for dopamine -fueled stimuli instead of developing the focus muscle. I wish I would have worked on that a little bit more. She also talks about flow. Yes. Yeah. And this was interesting, because right after this, I listened to a deep life podcast episode by Cal Newport, where he sort of talked about flow. And I think that kind of gave me a better picture here for how this fits. So the section in here about flow, we've heard this before, we even have done a whole episode on the topic of flow. It's based on the research by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, that when you do something that's just outside of your ability, like you're really stretching yourself to do this thing, then You can get into this sense of flow, you get in the zone, time seems to stand still, you're so engaged with the thing, and then you look up and three hours have passed. And that is kind of held up as this gold standard in the, I don't know, is there like a subset of the productivity space like shows like ours, where we're focusing more on the intentionality. This is the thing that everybody gravitates towards, is like, oh, you gotta get into flow, you gotta get into the flow. The thing is, you can't just activate flow. You can invite it, but you can't force it. So I think there's maybe a negative ramification of that, where if you hear people talk about flow and then you have trouble getting into it, you kind of feel like, what's wrong with me? Is my brain broken? Is this something that other people can do, but I can't? And I don't think that's the case. I think that there's a balance here between flow and deliberate practice. So flow is the state where, you know, the words are just coming and you're engrossed in what you're doing. Um, and that is sort of like the performance mode. But as Kel talks about in the podcast episode, there's also the deliberate practice side, and when you're doing deliberate practice, you're trying to develop a skill and you're putting In the reps, cause it's not just the 10,000 hours that makes you a master. You have to be intentional about how you're practicing. And when you're practicing, you are in a state that is almost the exact opposite of flow. And I never thought about it that way, but as a musician, for example, David, you play the saxophone. So when you're learning a piece or you're going through a scale, you're practicing a particularly hard section of that music, you know, for the first time, that's not flow, right? And you do it over and over and over and over again. You maybe feel at that point, like, is this ever going to get easy? And then eventually it clicks. And then kind of the picture I get is you're, let's say you're a professional musician, you're performing, you know, when you're performing, that's when you can just let it go. And flow tends to come. But I just wanted to encourage people, I guess, as she's talking about flow, like don't make that the gold standard of whether you are being productive. I think it's great when you can get to that point, but all you can really control is the intentional practice. And then at some point you just have to let it go. And that's when you realize the results, but it's a very small percentage of the time that you invest in honing a craft, I would argue. ([Time 0:36:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2c72b553-4f78-4751-9582-fdbc39510839))