Exponential Effort

Rian Doris is co-founder and CEO of the Flow Research Collective. As you might guess from the name of his company, he is extremely knowledgeable about how to achieve and maintain flow state.

What Doris and his team have discovered is that flow state runs along a “flow channel” balanced between the intensity of a challenge at the top end and our tolerance for boredom at the lower end - relative to our current skill levels. It is essentially a goldilocks story - our ideal work state is not too overwhelming and yet not too monotonous and familiar. Flow is that feeling of being “just right”.

The secret to expanding our capacity for great work lies in widening our flow channel so that we are easily and constantly able to work “in the flow channel” with low levels of stress.

There are two paths to widening our flow channel and accelerating our Rocket Goals with far less stress. One is to gradually increase your skills baseline, effectively raising the entire game while taking on more and more responsibility. But Doris recommends a quicker and more compelling approach that he calls “exploding the flow channel”. In this approach, the goal is to take on a massively challenging and specific project that is way outside of your current comfort zone. By deliberately raising the top end of the flow channel we permanently increase our capacity for working at the level. It is important to just take on one particular challenge rather than spreading your focus on multiple things at once. Overload yourself with one immense 100X backpack rather than 10Xing across 10 backpacks. During this Overload phase, blast past your perceived limitations, don’t move incrementally.

After initiating the overload, and throwing yourself into the water, it’s time to use everything in your power to adapt. This combination of overload and adaptation will explode the top of your flow channel higher as you call on new reserves to meet the outrageous challenge you have put yourself in

The final step - after a set period of intensity - is time to deload. This the phase to step back and take a break from the overload phase. The good news is that after metaphorically lifting the 100X backpack for weeks on end, you will easily be able to handle a 10X pack.

If you’d like to learn more about exploding your flow channel, take 20 minutes and listen to Rian Doris walk thru the Overload - Adapt - Deload protocol in highly engaging detail.

It might feel a little overwhelming, but that’s the point! You can learn to unlock exponential effort by systematically expanding your flow channel to gracefully handle larger and larger amounts of effort across whatever projects you’re focused on.