So I wrote a book 10 years ago where I was trying to figure out as part of it how do people get better at things. And so I spent time with a professional guitar player and said, "I just wanted to see how he practiced. Like, what does this actually look like?" And what I learned from them is, like, what they do is, yeah, they have the music in front of them, but for them it's all speed.

So they take a piece—he was working on licks for—he was a new acoustic style player, and he had these kind of bluegrass-y type licks, and he probably had it memorized. And he knew how fast he could comfortably play it. For them, it's all about adding 20 percent to what they're comfortably doing, and then that push past where they're comfortable.

And the thing I remember writing about him was he was concentrating so hard to try to hit this lick 20 percent faster than he was used to it, he'd forget to breathe. So he'd be, like, going, going, going, and then just gasp, you know, because his body would force him to breathe.

So yeah, there it seemed to be all about deliberate practice. So, like, how do you—they don't waste any time—professional musicians waste no time doing things they're comfortable doing. Every time they spend practicing—and this is also incredibly difficult—but every time they spend practicing, it's almost entirely in a state of, "I'm not comfortable with this, but if I focus as hard as I can, maybe I'm going to pull this off.

Like, I'll pull off the sonata at this new speed I'm trying to do. Maybe I'll pull it off." It's, like, the maximal growth-stimulating state. And so I wrote in this chapter, "Why was he so much better at guitar than I was at the same age?" Because I played a lot of guitar when I was younger and was in rock bands, right?

And this kid was young, right? But really, really good. And I said, "Okay, now I realize it. I can recognize me when I look back at my time playing guitar at his age. I played stuff I knew how to play. Like, that's what was fun. Like, yeah, I want to, like, jam along with the songs I knew or, you know, rip some pentatonic scales, you know, to, like, a Jimi Hendrix album." It was fun.

And he spent almost no time, the pro spent no time having fun. Practicing was, your brain had to be, you know, uncomfortable. So I learned a lot from that, you know? This actually led to a bit of a battle because of my readers, there was this battle that emerged where people were trying to combine Anders Ericsson and deliberate practice with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and flow.

And really, they were trying to make flow apply everywhere. Like, it's all about flow, deliberate practice is flow, everything is flow. The whole thing is to get into a state of flow. And I remember Anders talking about this at some point and saying, like, "No, no, no. Like, the state of practice that makes you better, it's the opposite of flow, right?

In flow, you lose track of time. When you're practicing like that professional guitar player, you know every second that passes by because it's, like, incredibly difficult. Like, what you're doing, your mind is rebelling. It's not natural. You know, it's not fun. It's not the skier going down the hill and it's all instinct.

It's all you thinking about exactly what you're trying to do." And so, you know, I began to push this point out here, it's like, it's not all about flow. Like, actually getting better at things is really painful sometimes. Deliberate practice is not the same as flow. And there was a lot of fights about this for a while.

I think there was a lot of flow advocates that just wanted life to be flow all the time. But I think Anders was right because I watched these professionals practice, like, that's what it is. It's not fun. So everything we know about neuroplasticity, which of course is the nervous system's ability to change in response to experience, says that there needs to be some neurochemical or electrical condition that changes in the nervous system in order to cue up plasticity.

And to my knowledge, one of the most robust of those is the release of the so-called catecholamines, dopamine epinephrine, norepinephrine. And because it's involved in so many things, it can be a little bit of a distractor. So let's just say epinephrine, norepinephrine, adrenaline, noradrenaline, create in the body and mind to some extent a state of alertness and often a state of agitation.

But if you think about it, in the absence of some neuromodulators like those that change the conditions for wiring of neurons, you know, everyone loves fire together, wire together. A beautiful statement by Carla Schatz, not Donald Hebb, Dr. Carla Schatz said that, not Donald Hebb. But why would neurons need to change their patterns of connectivity if you can complete the operation?

The nervous system needs to, it doesn't feel discomfort, it creates discomfort, but the nervous system needs a cue to like, okay, this is different, I'm failing. And it's the failures that actually trigger the plasticity, it's the discomfort that cues that conditions are different now. Otherwise, there's simply no reason to devote energetic resources to rewiring neurons.

And I feel like we don't learn this when we're kids. And I think as kids, we can learn so much without that feeling of agitation. We get into these modes of looking for flow. And I have respect for the research on flow and the people who are involved, but I'd like to talk about flow a little bit.

The only thing I really know about flow for sure is that backwards, it spells wolf. So what of flow? It's such an attractive idea, right? It's like Star Wars. It's like you have the force and you're doing things without thinking and awesome. But I can't flow myself through a paper and extract the critical data.

I can't create a podcast in flow, but when it's done, it feels great, especially if you nail the key metrics. So what do you think about flow? I'm not trying to beat up on it, I just want to understand how you place it in the framework of learning and deep work, if it belongs there at all.

It doesn't have a big place in it, in the deep work framework, and this was what the controversy was for a while. And I knew Mahaley a little bit. We corresponded some. And I knew Anders a little bit. We corresponded some. So I sort of felt like I was-- and both of them actually tragically have died in the last three or four years, I think.

Oh, that's very sad. Yeah, I think both recently. Flow doesn't play a big role in the deep work framework, right? So when I was trying to justify deep work, so why focusing without distraction was important, I was drawing a lot more for Anders' work, right? Because why is focusing without distraction important?

Well, you have to quiet the neural circuitry so you can isolate the circuit that's actually relevant to the thing that you're doing, right? You're not going to get better at something if you have noisy circuitry. And that requires a really intense concentration. So it was one of the big advantages of deep work was if you're used to that cognitive state, you're going to learn things faster.

And I think it was all Anders to understand why. So if you're not distracted, I'm really focusing hard on what I'm doing, trying to learn this new thing, you're giving the right mental conditions. But it's not a flow state. And I always used to say, OK, when your deep work is not flow because of this.

Like a lot of deep work is you're trying to do something that is beyond your comfort zone, and that's going to be difficult. That's a state of deliberate practice. And there's a famous paper about this where Anders actually explicitly says deliberate practice and flow are very different. And I wrote an essay years ago called The Father of Deliberate Practice Disowns Flow.

And again, people are really flow partisans out there. It's interesting. I think people just like the idea because it feels good. But I mean, flow is the feeling of performance is the way I think about it. Like it's really hard to train for certain sports. But then when you're actually performing, you're in the game, you can fall in the flow, right?

Because then everything is-- and it's really hard to train guitar. But like when you're performing in front of a big crowd, you probably-- maybe you fall in the flow. I mean, you could, right? But it's the performance state, not the practicing getting better state. So to me, flow has very little role in how I think about what I do as a cognitive professional.

It's just not something that comes up that often. I agree that we learn through focused work and that flow does manifest itself during performance, and sometimes so much so that people exhibit virtuosity. They're surprising themselves even with what's in there, and that's kind of-- I always think of it as what is unskilled, skilled, mastery, virtuosity.

Virtuosity seems to incorporate some sort of random elements of maybe even the performer has not done that before and they surprise themselves or something like that. Who knows? These are words for something that isn't easily quantified in the first place. Thank you for tuning in to the Huberman Lab Clips channel.

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