A 4% challenge keeps you learning without snapping

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 9:38

   If you're trying to think about flow triggers, one of the easy ways to do it is like, if you look at the list, they're all, they look like psychological interventions. So novelty, complexity, unpredictability, risk are all flow triggers. Whenever we encounter any of those things, you get dopamine, right? In complex situations, the most famous flow trigger is the challenge skills balance. So we said flow follows focus. We pay the most attention to the task at hand when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. So you want to stretch, but not snap. A bunch of years ago, decades ago now, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi teamed up with a Google mathematician. They tried to put a number on it just to see if they could put a number on it. And they got 4%. And they never said this was science. They said this was a back of the envelope calculation, meaning when

2. 10:26

   that challenge is 4% greater than your skills, that seems to be the sweet spot. One of the things I will say is it's right outside your comfort zone. The more you sort of train being just outside your comfort zone, just pushing a little bit, the easier it gets. And the other side of it is that if you were to talk about the sweet spot, emotionally, you'd say it's between boredom. There's not enough stimulation here.

3. 10:51

   I don't care. I'm not paying any attention. And anxiety, whoa, way too much. Right in between is this sweet spot, what flow scientists call the flow channel. But if you're a physiologist, you call it the Erks-Dobson curve. It's one of the oldest findings in physiology that there's this sweet spot between challenge and skills. But if you're shy or meek or timid or less skilled at the thing that you're doing, you're going to be just outside your comfort zone.

4. 11:14

   If you're like a hard-charging entrepreneur, the problem is that 4% is so small that you'll blow by and you'll take on challenges that are 50%, 60% greater than your skills simply because it sort of wakes you up. And so if you're training people on flow, you either have to train them to push a little bit harder or usually with type A types, you've got to back them off and tell them to chunk it down.

5. 11:39

   Those big, huge overarching goals are great. Motivation science tells us that a good, properly set hard goal gives you an 11 to 22% boost in motivation. So that's amazing. Like just for having a well-set goal, but you want to chunk it down so the thing in front of you sits in that sort of 4% sweet spot. What this really tells you is you can only get about 4% better at a time, right? Like that, that when you're laddering up, it's like 4% gains. This is the thing that we learned when we tested it. And again, I don't know how accurate this is, but like we saw it again and again, we found if you only stay in that 4% sweet spot. And the reason like we could do it with action sport athletes is we started doing it with downhill mountain bikers and we measured every feature on the hill. And that's how we could figure out, okay, this is

6. 12:31

   what you can jump. So this would be 4%. And that's how we did it. That's how we were testing it. And what we discovered is if you stayed in that sweet spot, you never plateaued. You would get more flow and more flow and more flow. And you made way more progress over the course of a season. reason, then you did the other way. How can we mute distractions and get into a flow state? We said earlier, flow follows focus, right? All the flow triggers drive attention to the present