ELEMENTS FOR A NEW MODAL ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITION OF HAPPINESS
There is no easy way to explain this simply because there is no easy way to achieve it. There are no shortcuts. There is no hacking your way to mastery. The only way to hack it is by hacking every single day. Without finding it, I would have most likely struggled during the most difficult moments of life. But since I was never too far away from entering it, as difficulty has followed me almost everywhere I’ve been, I managed to not only get through, but used this as a tool for overcoming every obstacle. I had to find my way in to get myself back up again. And each time, it’s got me further than I would have otherwise been without the challenge. It is never easy. So this is the reason why you need to find it. Because your future survival may just depend on this one strategy:
KNOWING HOW TO BE HAPPY
Inside the first pages in one of these copies of the same book are my notes and one of them reads: what stoicism is to Ryan Holiday, that’s what flow is to you. This blog is the result of beginning that process to make my version of that as it’s been an indispensable tool for living. So this is some of the books I’d recommend to live your life by. Read it at least once a year, every year. In fact, don’t. Study it. Then, live it.
Learning how to increase happiness in one’s life is perhaps the most important fundamental principle of all. It’s the principle that makes all other things not merely endurable, but also enjoyable, even possible. I’ve still about 20 other books to read for here on this. So there’s still a lot of researching in the process and I will continue to work on and update this page with more as we go.
If learning how to learn is your biggest obstacle, then learning how to find flow is your secret weapon. As once discovered, not only will you know how to learn, but equally important: this will teach you how to live, how to endure, how to overcome anything.
There is an old expression that says the person who you become 5-years from now will depend on the people you meet and the books you read. So imagine what 10-years of reading the books could do for you? You’ll have a completely different mind. You’ll be a completely different person. The life you experience will be qualitatively different and your life will be enriched. You will be a totally different character. Reading words alone however is not going to be enough to make you improve. Nowhere near enough. In order to make sense of this you must make great use of it. And the best way to do so is to live your life by it.
I used to think that physical exercise was a form of procrastination. And I would kick myself and beat myself up at times by saying things like: the reason why you’re doing all this running is because you’re running away from the work. You’re hiding in this gym. You’re trying to escape the work by pretending to be productive in physical exercise. You’re pretending to be productive by working out. Which is a crazy line of thought to be thinking now reflecting back on that. For starters: physical exercise is productive. And also, knowing that is one of the fastest, easiest ways to enter this state to experience it, through extremely challenging physical endurance exercise. One of the best ways to get better at performing your work is by maximally working out.
We will go into depth regarding the who, why, what, where and when of flow soon. Because there is no way for you to easily get this without understanding everything. And I don’t think that simply by sharing this alone will make a difference simply reading it and therefore also make you somehow now able to achieve it. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. And rightly so. Because that wasn’t exactly the way it worked for me either. If someone had handed me this book before I started to read books and told me to read this and it will change everything, I probably would have fallen asleep, like books always did to me. And I don’t think my experience in consciousness would have ever changed. Certainly not elevated. It just couldn’t have. So while I’m not 100% sure how we get you into this state, we’ll manage much of the how, then the rest is up to you to solve the puzzle and find it too.
Whatever you desire to know, go to the places where people do. Get training and all the ideas you need to get started and ahead. That’s why such things exist. They don’t do it to benefit themselves. They do it because they want to help you receive those same benefits. Always be taking notes and pictures. All the time. Be the guy in the room who is taking the most notes, the most pictures. Even record the conversations being had in audio form. You just have to know. It’s the only way. Be the guy who wants to know more than anyone else in the room. And what you will end up finding is like nothing else and nothing like anything you went looking for, nor could have ever expected to experience anything new from. This may transform your life for the better.
I had spent much time in the past doing what I enjoy. I’d set goals, and even pursued them. But I never felt flow before while pursuing them. That experience was completely new. Knowing how to get back into this mind state again is intrinsically motivating. Because the experience each time sets you off in a new, better and always higher direction again. Look, all I can do is tell you my story and how this worked for me. It’s up to you now how you wish to navigate the rest of it and find ways to find it yourself. It wouldn’t be too much to even say that this could go as far as saving your life. For can there be a thing as too much happiness?
Also, not the mention the alternative: the possibility of following the wrong path, not being true to ones self, missing the point or doing the wrong thing, and never really knowing who you quite were. Never listening to your true self, your inner voice, your calling. Then worse, filled with regret in old age at the end of life. You could be out of here in a moment. Like right now. You really could. And be gone, forever. And that would be it. Have you lived your life the way you’d wished? Do you have any regrets?
There is no easy way through. This is a process. Yes, it will be difficult at times, and time consuming. Yet it also produces the most rewarding experiences of your life. For one, your time is going to be constrained. Therefore what you do in and around those constraints matter. And I don’t think this is for everyone. Because not everyone will have what it takes to find this. You have to be self motivated. You have to be fully engaged and always active. Those who feel the need to force it will likely give up the fastest. Those who enjoy the pressure of challenge aren’t forcing anything, as they’ve mastered how to enjoy difficulty. Many people want to try and find ways to make things easier. They want to ease up. Relax. And I’m telling you right now, if that is what your goal is, then you are exactly who this is not for. And you are never going to find it. Because that is the point: it’s about how much difficulty you can enjoy. Then deliberately seeking that experience out for its own sake. Those who continually push themselves into this endless cycle possess this force and reach this state of mind. Those who do not possess the force will find themselves more often than not frustrated and bored. They are the ones more likely to give up, not able to tolerate the difficulty that this path to mastery takes. And the process is a 10-year thing. No matter what. There is no skipping or getting around this element. There is only one way to realistically achieve mastery. You have to learn to enjoy every moment. And tolerate frustration when things aren’t going well. Only those who learn how to enjoy this will have the patience to sustain and endure it. Because life is going to be hard on you. You may feel the weight of the world on your shoulders, many times. So this isn’t about fairytales or magic. In fact, more often than not the complete opposite will be true. Which is precisely the reason why we know such things: to know how to pick ourselves up. To make us better because things challenge us. And you will find more meaning exists in these efforts. Many times you find more to explore after the challenge. So go when unsure. Certainly will arise out of uncertainty.
But nothing will ever arise if you simply decide to do nothing.
Seth Godin has repeatedly said he doesn’t believe in writer’s block. He proves this fact by writing a blog each day. And he’s been doing this everyday now, for 25-years, reaching 10,000 posts on 8th April 2025. Malcolm Gladwell also doesn’t believe in writer’s block. Once asked in an interview by Tim Ferriss, how do you deal with being blocked? He answered along the same tune saying, you can’t. As in, you actually can’t. It’s not allowed. The boss gives you the story at 10am and he wants it by 4pm. If you go back and say to him I’m struggling with this story or I’m blocked, he would look at you like you’d gone crazy. So any insecurities you have about your writing gets trained out of you in a hurry when working for a major news publication. Therefore if you are stuck, or struggling with a problem, the problem is more than likely that you have not studied enough. If you don’t know what to do or say, then you need to read more. The more you read and the more often you read, the more you will be able to think and write. If you don’t know what to do then, you simply haven’t learned enough. It’s also not about how much you read but rather what you read and how you read it that matters. In addition to that I propose another thing that doesn’t exist: boredom. It’s just never on the cards. There is always something interesting or exciting to learn, read or explore. There is no such thing as boredom. Same way if you don’t know what to say, it’s because you have not done enough learning. Therefore, if you are experiencing the state of boredom, this is because you do not know how to direct your attention. And if you do not work on that problem you, not might, but will find yourself some day stuck inside a meaningless void. Then you’ll really know what being stuck really feels like.
Finding flow avoids this.
This is also not some esoteric destination where you wake up one day and finally you have arrived at the finish line and can stop moving now. This is a way of living your life, a way of engaging with the physical world and mental landscape around you, a way of making each moment count, having a purpose and filling your days with that which fulfils your life. Many people only know their jobs and nothing else to define who they are. It was through an interest in music that led this to me. It’s been through engaging with this process now for over a decade which has been enjoyable. However I am not focused on the experience anymore that making music can provide, but rather how we can use this experience to enrich the quality of our lives. And how we can achieve this easier through listening to music. And how to create more of these experiences in other areas of life. Because I did think about that but realised not everyone wants to make music, but almost all of us want to know how to be happy. At least that’s my assumption I’ve gone for and chosen how to increase happiness as the aim instead now. And music, can help with that.
Although making music is a good way to increase one’s level of experience in well-being too, as there are so many things involved you must learn to do in order to make music and what that process actually does to and for the brain. But there’s also this whole other world of things to explore and untapped potential in other fields I’m also interested in. I would much rather push that boundary wider, then go deeper by amalgamating everything together down the line. That way, you may be able to follow and use this as a tool kit for creating your own flow experiences too. I can express to you the contents of my imagination. But unless you learn and understand how to internalise these rules and do the hard work yourself then this will be useless for you. As each person’s experience in consciousness is subjective to each individual. Therefore, what that means is that it is quite possible that no two people can do the same thing and share the exact same experience.
If you’re in your 20’s and reading this and feeling really sure about what you want for the rest of your life, that’s fantastic. However, there is only one problem with that for many, because they still lack life experience, can’t even realise it yet: that it’s not what you’ll always want. A lot will happen and change in your life in the next 10-years in this process. So what you want now could merely just be a stepping stone that will lead you towards something else further down the road, something better again,.
You’ll just have to wait long enough however to discover what that is.
But without that initial thing that got you started you may never have found it. As many wake each day to drag themselves somewhere for 40-years without ever discovering what they were truly capable of, or who they really were. They lived a life, but only experienced a semblance of its potential, then went to their graves without having really lived at all. So I’m going to give you an exercise here now to scare you, but with good intentions:
Imagine you’re old now and you’re about to die. In fact, the next chapter of your life story is death. Because that actually will be the case for you one day. So I want you to imagine where you are right now, both working and with your life, and for income but not for living, as these two things are diametrically opposed. What you do for work and money should be two different things. Now imagine still being there in your later years, if you’re even lucky enough to make it to later years. And that being the only place you’ve been able to identify with who you are. Now think of your retirement, if you are lucky enough to get one. There is going to come a day when you will no longer be able to or be needed to do your job. What does your life look like now? Imagine yourself grey and old and being the same, in the same doing the same then asking yourself: am I happy with how life turned out?
If the answer to this question is no, aren’t you really glad I made you ask yourself that before it was too late?
Because if you answered no, then now is the time to make a better plan of action for the rest of your life.
HAVE NO REGRETS
Here’s where this gets simultaneously confusing and exciting: if my goal here was to write on the subject of flow, then I was in flow while writing this. When we see someone doing something they enjoy and they are trying their best to perform it to their best, you can bet we’re witnessing them in a flow state. So if you want to get better at your work, and feel better about life, getting better at working out is a great entry point here for starting. Physical discipline develops and increases mental resilience. You are not procrastinating at all. Endurance exercise is a discipline for improving the mind. And by doing so, the work you want to do will also get better. If you wish to read books by professors and doctors then that’s what your goal is now to do. No one can tell you you can’t write about that unless you’re qualified. That’s nonsense. If you study and discover something worth sharing, you are qualified to share that. You can learn whatever you want. That’s the beautiful thing about being born into this technological era: there is absolutely nothing you cannot learn. Therefore, if one learns happiness and studies everything about happiness, then one shall find the way to always live happily. And if one learns and even finds happiness is happening while studying happiness, then unlikely is it they’ll ever feel bored or depressed while doing so. For they know what makes one happy. So how we increase people’s overall levels of life satisfaction and happiness seems more important now than ever. Not a bad thing to learn by the way. Not only how to be happy. But to know also how and what makes to continuously create this experience within the self.
So this will be about a few things: philosophy, psychology and neuroscience. And how we can employ various tools from each of these fields into our own lives. Where the goal is to improve the quality of life, the flow theory points the way to happiness:
Psychology: who we are and the way we think, behave, act, and perform in the world to make us feel the way we do.
When the goal is to increase one’s level of endurance over pain and suffering, and without complaining, stoicism points the way:
Philosophy: how we perceive life and the right way in which to manage yourself in every situation, what to do and how to do it.
The way then we operate under difficulty requires all of our mental efforts and physical strength. By engaging our ‘self’ we have the ability to push past and stretch our cognitive capacity well beyond its limits, thereby improving the self and our brain health:
Neuroscience: the deliberate act of engaging with difficult physiological and psychological challenges in order to increase in complexity and develop the growth of our mind.
The doctor cures the body, but it is the philosopher who cures his own mind.
How we take these three disciplines and fuse them together in such a way is the recipe to achieving a far greater, much richer, extraordinarily rewarding, quality experience of living.
May the force be with you…
“And by ‘we’ he means, of course, himself.” – STEVEN KOTLER.