How to Practice, Build Skills & the Role of Flow State | Dr. Cal Newport & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | So I wrote a book 10 years ago where I was trying to figure out as part of it how do

00:00:06.440 | people get better at things.

00:00:07.720 | And so I spent time with a professional guitar player and said, "I just wanted to see how

00:00:11.720 | he practiced.

00:00:12.720 | Like, what does this actually look like?"

00:00:13.720 | And what I learned from them is, like, what they do is, yeah, they have the music in front

00:00:17.160 | of them, but for them it's all speed.

00:00:19.520 | So they take a piece—he was working on licks for—he was a new acoustic style player,

00:00:23.640 | and he had these kind of bluegrass-y type licks, and he probably had it memorized.

00:00:28.200 | And he knew how fast he could comfortably play it.

00:00:30.040 | For them, it's all about adding 20 percent to what they're comfortably doing, and then

00:00:35.360 | that push past where they're comfortable.

00:00:37.920 | And the thing I remember writing about him was he was concentrating so hard to try to

00:00:41.960 | hit this lick 20 percent faster than he was used to it, he'd forget to breathe.

00:00:46.340 | So he'd be, like, going, going, going, and then just gasp, you know, because his body

00:00:49.600 | would force him to breathe.

00:00:51.920 | So yeah, there it seemed to be all about deliberate practice.

00:00:54.840 | So, like, how do you—they don't waste any time—professional musicians waste no time

00:00:58.720 | doing things they're comfortable doing.

00:01:00.940 | Every time they spend practicing—and this is also incredibly difficult—but every time

00:01:05.400 | they spend practicing, it's almost entirely in a state of, "I'm not comfortable with

00:01:09.680 | this, but if I focus as hard as I can, maybe I'm going to pull this off.

00:01:14.280 | Like, I'll pull off the sonata at this new speed I'm trying to do.

00:01:18.040 | Maybe I'll pull it off."

00:01:19.040 | It's, like, the maximal growth-stimulating state.

00:01:23.240 | And so I wrote in this chapter, "Why was he so much better at guitar than I was at

00:01:29.160 | the same age?"

00:01:30.160 | Because I played a lot of guitar when I was younger and was in rock bands, right?

00:01:33.200 | And this kid was young, right?

00:01:34.480 | But really, really good.

00:01:35.480 | And I said, "Okay, now I realize it.

00:01:37.360 | I can recognize me when I look back at my time playing guitar at his age.

00:01:41.000 | I played stuff I knew how to play.

00:01:42.560 | Like, that's what was fun.

00:01:43.720 | Like, yeah, I want to, like, jam along with the songs I knew or, you know, rip some pentatonic

00:01:47.600 | scales, you know, to, like, a Jimi Hendrix album."

00:01:50.760 | It was fun.

00:01:52.200 | And he spent almost no time, the pro spent no time having fun.

00:01:55.440 | Practicing was, your brain had to be, you know, uncomfortable.

00:01:59.080 | So I learned a lot from that, you know?

00:02:01.440 | This actually led to a bit of a battle because of my readers, there was this battle that

00:02:07.720 | emerged where people were trying to combine Anders Ericsson and deliberate practice with

00:02:14.200 | Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and flow.

00:02:17.160 | And really, they were trying to make flow apply everywhere.

00:02:19.880 | Like, it's all about flow, deliberate practice is flow, everything is flow.

00:02:23.680 | The whole thing is to get into a state of flow.

00:02:25.760 | And I remember Anders talking about this at some point and saying, like, "No, no, no.

00:02:28.720 | Like, the state of practice that makes you better, it's the opposite of flow, right?

00:02:33.320 | In flow, you lose track of time.

00:02:35.320 | When you're practicing like that professional guitar player, you know every second that

00:02:39.320 | passes by because it's, like, incredibly difficult.

00:02:41.720 | Like, what you're doing, your mind is rebelling.

00:02:44.400 | It's not natural.

00:02:45.400 | You know, it's not fun.

00:02:46.860 | It's not the skier going down the hill and it's all instinct.

00:02:50.320 | It's all you thinking about exactly what you're trying to do."

00:02:53.600 | And so, you know, I began to push this point out here, it's like, it's not all about flow.

00:02:57.480 | Like, actually getting better at things is really painful sometimes.

00:03:00.560 | Deliberate practice is not the same as flow.

00:03:02.920 | And there was a lot of fights about this for a while.

00:03:04.560 | I think there was a lot of flow advocates that just wanted life to be flow all the time.

00:03:08.960 | But I think Anders was right because I watched these professionals practice, like, that's

00:03:13.080 | what it is.

00:03:14.080 | It's not fun.

00:03:15.080 | So everything we know about neuroplasticity, which of course is the nervous system's ability

00:03:18.720 | to change in response to experience, says that there needs to be some neurochemical

00:03:24.860 | or electrical condition that changes in the nervous system in order to cue up plasticity.

00:03:31.880 | And to my knowledge, one of the most robust of those is the release of the so-called catecholamines,

00:03:38.920 | dopamine epinephrine, norepinephrine.

00:03:41.240 | And because it's involved in so many things, it can be a little bit of a distractor.

00:03:45.320 | So let's just say epinephrine, norepinephrine, adrenaline, noradrenaline, create in the body

00:03:49.880 | and mind to some extent a state of alertness and often a state of agitation.

00:03:54.200 | But if you think about it, in the absence of some neuromodulators like those that change

00:04:00.320 | the conditions for wiring of neurons, you know, everyone loves fire together, wire together.

00:04:05.160 | A beautiful statement by Carla Schatz, not Donald Hebb, Dr. Carla Schatz said that, not

00:04:09.080 | Donald Hebb.

00:04:11.840 | But why would neurons need to change their patterns of connectivity if you can complete

00:04:17.240 | the operation?

00:04:18.240 | The nervous system needs to, it doesn't feel discomfort, it creates discomfort, but the

00:04:23.800 | nervous system needs a cue to like, okay, this is different, I'm failing.

00:04:28.200 | And it's the failures that actually trigger the plasticity, it's the discomfort that cues

00:04:32.280 | that conditions are different now.

00:04:34.680 | Otherwise, there's simply no reason to devote energetic resources to rewiring neurons.

00:04:39.440 | And I feel like we don't learn this when we're kids.

00:04:42.640 | And I think as kids, we can learn so much without that feeling of agitation.

00:04:46.600 | We get into these modes of looking for flow.

00:04:49.760 | And I have respect for the research on flow and the people who are involved, but I'd like

00:04:54.220 | to talk about flow a little bit.

00:04:55.460 | The only thing I really know about flow for sure is that backwards, it spells wolf.

00:04:59.240 | So what of flow?

00:05:01.360 | It's such an attractive idea, right?

00:05:02.680 | It's like Star Wars.

00:05:03.760 | It's like you have the force and you're doing things without thinking and awesome.

00:05:10.400 | But I can't flow myself through a paper and extract the critical data.

00:05:14.680 | I can't create a podcast in flow, but when it's done, it feels great, especially if you

00:05:21.120 | nail the key metrics.

00:05:22.600 | So what do you think about flow?

00:05:24.120 | I'm not trying to beat up on it, I just want to understand how you place it in the framework

00:05:27.480 | of learning and deep work, if it belongs there at all.

00:05:32.180 | It doesn't have a big place in it, in the deep work framework, and this was what the

00:05:35.920 | controversy was for a while.

00:05:37.480 | And I knew Mahaley a little bit.

00:05:39.820 | We corresponded some.

00:05:40.820 | And I knew Anders a little bit.

00:05:41.820 | We corresponded some.

00:05:42.820 | So I sort of felt like I was-- and both of them actually tragically have died in the

00:05:47.360 | last three or four years, I think.

00:05:49.820 | Oh, that's very sad.

00:05:51.320 | Yeah, I think both recently.

00:05:54.820 | Flow doesn't play a big role in the deep work framework, right?

00:05:57.420 | So when I was trying to justify deep work, so why focusing without distraction was important,

00:06:03.120 | I was drawing a lot more for Anders' work, right?

00:06:05.640 | Because why is focusing without distraction important?

00:06:09.040 | Well, you have to quiet the neural circuitry so you can isolate the circuit that's actually

00:06:12.640 | relevant to the thing that you're doing, right?

00:06:15.080 | You're not going to get better at something if you have noisy circuitry.

00:06:18.680 | And that requires a really intense concentration.

00:06:21.280 | So it was one of the big advantages of deep work was if you're used to that cognitive

00:06:25.640 | state, you're going to learn things faster.

00:06:26.640 | And I think it was all Anders to understand why.

00:06:29.200 | So if you're not distracted, I'm really focusing hard on what I'm doing, trying to learn this

00:06:33.220 | new thing, you're giving the right mental conditions.

00:06:36.360 | But it's not a flow state.

00:06:37.360 | And I always used to say, OK, when your deep work is not flow because of this.

00:06:41.420 | Like a lot of deep work is you're trying to do something that is beyond your comfort zone,

00:06:45.280 | and that's going to be difficult.

00:06:46.400 | That's a state of deliberate practice.

00:06:48.240 | And there's a famous paper about this where Anders actually explicitly says deliberate

00:06:53.920 | practice and flow are very different.

00:06:56.240 | And I wrote an essay years ago called The Father of Deliberate Practice Disowns Flow.

00:07:01.480 | And again, people are really flow partisans out there.

00:07:04.240 | It's interesting.

00:07:05.240 | I think people just like the idea because it feels good.

00:07:08.040 | But I mean, flow is the feeling of performance is the way I think about it.

00:07:11.960 | Like it's really hard to train for certain sports.

00:07:15.840 | But then when you're actually performing, you're in the game, you can fall in the flow,

00:07:18.840 | right?

00:07:19.840 | Because then everything is-- and it's really hard to train guitar.

00:07:21.840 | But like when you're performing in front of a big crowd, you probably-- maybe you fall

00:07:24.640 | in the flow.

00:07:25.640 | I mean, you could, right?

00:07:26.640 | But it's the performance state, not the practicing getting better state.

00:07:30.000 | So to me, flow has very little role in how I think about what I do as a cognitive professional.

00:07:37.720 | It's just not something that comes up that often.

00:07:40.560 | I agree that we learn through focused work and that flow does manifest itself during

00:07:49.240 | performance, and sometimes so much so that people exhibit virtuosity.

00:07:54.920 | They're surprising themselves even with what's in there, and that's kind of-- I always think

00:07:59.280 | of it as what is unskilled, skilled, mastery, virtuosity.

00:08:03.240 | Virtuosity seems to incorporate some sort of random elements of maybe even the performer

00:08:07.320 | has not done that before and they surprise themselves or something like that.

00:08:11.000 | Who knows?

00:08:12.000 | These are words for something that isn't easily quantified in the first place.

00:08:17.000 | Thank you for tuning in to the Huberman Lab Clips channel.

00:08:19.960 | If you enjoyed the clip that you just viewed, please check out the full-length episode by

00:08:23.840 | clicking here.

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How to Practice, Build Skills & the Role of Flow State | Dr. Cal Newport & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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