
Flow Is the Opiate of the Mediocre: Advice on Getting Better - colinprince
http://calnewport.com/blog/2011/12/23/flow-is-the-opiate-of-the-medicore-advice-on-getting-better-from-an-accomplished-piano-player/
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0wl3x
I'm not sure that flow and deliberate practice are mutually exclusive. The
biggest example for me that comes to mind is working out. For me, deliberate
practice during that activity comes in the form of focusing on getting the
muscle group I'm using to contract as hard as possible. When the set starts to
get really difficult and my muscles are full of blood and maximally contracted
my mind is solely focused on that contraction. I deliberately practice getting
a pump and when I start to achieve it, I enter a state of flow. When I go to
the gym and have a good workout there is at least a portion of my workout
devoted to getting a pump and forcing blood into my muscles. Empirically, my
muscles have gotten larger and I've gotten stronger. Does having flow while
this is happening mean I'm not doing deep work?

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thsowers
Completely agree with you. I play the piano and can attest from watching
others more skilled than me that practicing well in sections and many of the
other things mentioned here are part of a professional pianists flow.

That being said, perhaps the point that is trying to be made is that we should
routinely examine our flow patterns and optimize for maximum efficiency

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convolvatron
_Strategy #4: Create Beauty, Don’t Avoid Ugliness. Weak pianists make music a
reactive task, not a creative task. They start, and react to their
performance, fixing problems as they go along. Strong pianists, on the other
hand, have an image of what a perfect performance should be like that includes
all of the relevant senses. Before we sit down, we know what the piece needs
to feel, sound, and even look like in excruciating detail. In performance,
weak pianists try to reactively move away from mistakes, while strong pianists
move towards a perfect mental image._

of all of the comments this one seems most relevant to development. instead of
comparing a thing to its ideal, weak shops are just generally afraid of change
because they dont really know whats going on. if you know exactly what you
want to build, and something doesn't sit right, then fix it. leaving it alone
out of fear just allows your project to continue to evolve into a shapeless
unmanagable mass.

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ioddly
I like Cal Newport's work, but I'm not sure he's being fully charitable to
flow here; I thought that some degree of challenge (but not so hard as to be
making no progress) is generally considered a prerequisite to flow by its
proponents.

A more interesting question to my mind is: what does deliberate practice look
like to programmers?

