Whether you’ve heard of flow before or not, most of us have had the experience of being in flow. We’ve all plunged so deeply into a task — polishing a must-win proposal, perfecting a loved one’s favorite dish, or hammering cross-court winners — that the world fades, our focus sharpens, and when we finally surface, we’re startled to see how many hours have slipped away.

Flow was first formally defined in 1990 in the seminal book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (MEE-hy CHEEK-sent-mee-HAH- yee), the world-renowned researcher and cofounder with Martin Seligman of the field of positive psychology. This research describes flow as a psychological state in which an individual experiences some or all of the following:

• Total immersion in what they are doing.
• Time standing still.
• Complete concentration and focus.
• Full awareness of and responsiveness to other direct participants in the situation (most commonly observed in team sports).
• An incredible sense of satisfaction during the experience — even euphoria.

Flow shows up when the challenge at hand matches your abilities — no harder, no easier. The task can be simple or sophisticated; what matters is that your skills and their demands lock into equilibrium, pulling your full attention into the moment. Hit that sweet spot, and flow can happen anywhere. Bill goes into flow chopping onions for dinner, Dave on his sailboat with a good breeze. Flow is perhaps best known in the world of sports where it’s frequently referred to as “being in the zone.”

People often reported that being in a state of flow felt meaningful afterward. In his 1990 classic, Csikszentmihalyi wrote about flow and meaning-making, stating: “The flow experience … ​is not ‘good’ in an absolute sense. It is good only in that it has the potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful.”

It’s important to note that in this definition, flow is not a place you go, it’s a psychological state you enter when you deeply engage in some specific activity. So how do we get from Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of the flow state to our idea of a flow world?

We suggest that the reason people find the flow state meaningful is not necessarily because the activity is important or world-impacting (chopping onions does help get dinner on the table, but thinner onions are never going to save the world or imbue great meaning on an outcome). The person in flow is fully present to what they’re doing (chopping carefully and precisely), and they’re fully present to their situation, surroundings, and circumstances (the knife, the cutting board, the onion, the light on the counter). That combination focuses the energies and attention of the person on the immediate reality in which the activity is taking place, which allows magic to happen — the magic of an intense experience of being alive, of being human. It is this sense of full aliveness and full humanness in the moment that makes the state of flow inherently meaningful.

As Joseph Campbell famously said in The Power of Myth film series: “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is … ​[to] actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

Remember the distinction between impact and meaning: Impact is an outcome; meaning is how we experience our felt response to an encounter that matters to us. The flow state is inherently meaningful because of the purity of aliveness we experience in it — as Campbell puts it — the rapture of being alive.

The flow world

So, here’s the new idea — the place that the flow state comes from is the flow world.

The flow world is the process of everything happening in a particular moment. It’s the whole river of reality that is coursing underneath, around, and within us all the time. It’s always going on, everywhere, over there, and right here.

The conversation you’re in. The breeze blowing through the window. The quantum probabilities bouncing around in your lap at the subatomic level. The expanding cosmos. The physical transformation of the cookies baking in the oven. The state of flow is experienced when a person fully participates in their particular place in the flow world at the present moment. And that last part is important — the flow world is only accessible in the present moment. This is a critical distinction between the flow world and the transactional world.

In the transactional world, everything we’re doing and focused on is understood in terms of the past or the future: How did we get here? Do we have everything we need? Is everyone present? Is this going to work? When will we finish? Is it good enough? Now what do I do?

When you define impact as your primary form of meaning, then you have to get it in the transactional world, where you’re focused on that next thing you’re working toward, and it’s always in the future.

In the transactional world, the outcome is everything — but the outcome typically lives in the future, which is not where we in fact are living. We are in the present. So, the transactional world is constantly pushing us out of the present and redirecting us to an imagined future. We have developed incredibly sophisticated approaches to navigating the transactional world — from AI-optimized to-do lists, to smart ovens that know your lasagna better than you do, to team collaboration software to get more done faster — and those techniques have been undeniably successful. So successful that we use them all the time, but with the unfortunate side effect of never actually being a full participant in the present moment because we’re so focused on what’s next.

This is also a hint as to why so many people feel as though their lives just aren’t meaningful enough. When you define impact as your primary form of meaning, then you have to get it in the transactional world, where you’re focused on that next thing you’re working toward, and it’s always in the future. When you do have success and see impact, it’s over as soon as it arrives. The goal has been met, but you are no longer making that impact — it’s been made. So, you aren’t doing anything meaningful anymore and you’ve got to get back out there and make more impact. Get back on the wheel and run, run, run —  because you’re never done, it’s never enough, and you will never actually get anywhere, and certainly not to the mythical there you think you are running toward.

It’s exactly the opposite in the flow world, where the present moment is all there is, and all it offers is a chance to fully participate in it. In the flow world, there’s always enough, because each moment is its own reward, as is the one after that and the one after that.