What is flow-state?

Flow state is best described as the point where you feel your best, perform at your most optimal, and time both speeds up, yet slows down. Think of it as “being in the zone,” during a game of basketball, or that feeling you get when you’ve worked on a piece of art for hours, yet felt like it was a brief moment. My seven year old son can play Minecraft for A LONG TIME, yet when I ask him to stop, he will complain that he “just got started.” It’s a runners high, an adrenaline rush, or that rush of emotion as you go down a rollercoaster.“

“David Epstein, in The Sports Gene, puts his finger on this detail (which is more than a mere detail), and suggests we consider chess. Chess is different from the violin. Since players are ranked according to a system of international point - 'Elo points' (named after the system's creator) one can know the exact level of a chess player, and follow their progression precisely. In 2007, psychologists Guillermo Campitelli and Fernand Gobet conducted a study of 104 players of different levels. An average player has around1,200 Elo points. A master has between 2,200 and 2,400. A grand master has over 2,500. They saw that to reach the threshold of 2,200 points and become a professional took an average of I1,053 hours. A bit more than the 10,000 hours for musicians. Where it gets complicated is that according to individuals, the number of hours they have spent varies from 3,000 to 23,000. Twenty thousand hours' difference, or twenty years of 'purposeful practice'! Some people need to train for eight times longer than others to reach the same level. There are also players who tot up 25,000 hours without reaching master level. And there is no guarantee they will ever reach it. 

  It's the same in sport. A study of triathletes shows that within the same level there are differences of a factor of ten. Some people had to train ten times more than others to reach the same standard.”

-Ollivier Pourriol, The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard