The Art of Leadership

Chapter 22. Anti-Flow

Being in the Zone is an essential practice for me. The Zone is a place, and Flow is an activity that occurs within this precious mental space. Flow is the ability to consider a project or a problem deeply. In Flow, you can keep a superhuman amount of context in your head and can traverse that context with ease. With Flow, you can produce extraordinary value. Flow is writing this chapter right now, but this chapter eventually needs another section, and, oddly, it’s yet another activity within the Zone. I’ve started to call this activity Anti-Flow.

Anti-Flow is shower thoughts. They are the random connections your brain makes about a problem, a thought, or an opportunity when you aren’t thinking about that problem, thought, or opportunity. The unexpected magical quality of these discoveries might give you the impression that the summoning exercise is equally magical, but I’ve discovered a simple process to create hours of fertile Anti-Flow.

Applied Anti-Flow

This chapter is currently 924 words. Six paragraphs. I think I’ve got the title and I can see in my head the arc of the piece. I don’t have an ending yet, but it’s likely going to repeat a mid-article point about the importance of Anti-Flow to your daily working life. Something about how the nonobvious work is as important as the obvious work. Yeah, that’s good. Gosh, I love Flow.

In about a half-hour, I’m going to stop writing this piece, and I’m going to jump on my bike Isabelle, and we’re going to go ...