Brian Johnson explains Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow model: match your skill level to the challenge. Too much challenge causes anxiety, too little causes boredom. The fix is simple: dial down the difficulty or level up your abilities.
Hi, this is Brian. Another micro class I'm really excited about. Anxiety, boredom, and getting into flow. Just got this idea suggested by Remy that I do a micro class on flow. And as it turns out, I had been prepping for this. I've got a stack here, pretty thick of ideas that I've sketched out that I am just so excited to share. Tons of them. We're going to have a thousand of these micro classes in the not too distant future, but for now, let's focus on flow. Thank you, Remy. Everyone else, you should be able to submit ideas to me. I see every single one of those and reply to every single one of them. So keep the ideas coming and I will keep the micro classes coming on whatever you want to see, in addition to everything I'm already planning. So Flow. This is from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, his great book, Flow. He tells us, among many things, we're gonna do several videos on flow. There are a lot of different things we want to consider, but for right now, we're gonna look at a couple different variables. First, Csikszentmihalyi tells us we need to look at the relationship between our current level of skill, skills and the challenges we're facing. He says this. If your skill level matches the challenge level all the way around, along this line here, you're going to be in flow. You're properly matched your skill to your challenge. That feels great. Now, if your skill level is low and your challenge is high, guess what you're going to experience? Anxiety. If your skill level is high and your challenge level is low, of course you're going to experience boredom. Now, again, we want to find that connection where you're stretching yourself and your skill matches your challenge, maybe you're a little bit up, that forces you to stress yourself, but if you're too far up and this, the challenge is just way bigger than your current level of skill, you need to do a couple of things, or you have a choice, I should say, of a couple of things. You can reduce the challenge level or you can increase your skill, or you can do both, of course. Right, Kind of map up. Now, this applies to anything. If you have, say, a physical challenge and you want to exercise a certain amount and you're finding yourself really stressed out, anxious about the goal you set for yourself, well, set an easier goal. Match your current level of skill. There's nothing wrong with doing, what, one pushup a day? If that's how you want to build strength over time, you'll have a Nice solid base of consistency and then you can move up. You always want to start with consistency before you go into load. We talk about this in no Sweat by Michelle Seeger. Now if you're feeling bored, what do you do? Well, one thing you can do is to increase your level of challenge. Make it harder. If you're doing boring work like at work, that's kind of grunt work. I always love to make things like that fun by seeing how masterfully I can do it, how quickly can I do it, how excellently can I do it. That increases the challenge and my boredom goes away. There's no need to ever be bored. All you got to do is make it more interesting, more challenging, no matter what it is. If you're mowing the lawn, you can see if you can mow it perfectly. See if you can make perfect lines back and forth. Guess what? You just took a boring activity into flow and that feedback good. So that's a quick look at anxiety, boredom and getting into flow. Like I said, we're going to look at a lot more around this idea. Remy, thank you so much for the idea and I look forward to sharing more soon. Hope you have another awesome day. See ya. Hey guys, this is Brian. A lot of people don't know what I do beyond these YouTube videos I put up, so I thought I'd give you a quick tour of our membership platform. Thousands of people have joined us already. 10 bucks a month get access to a ton of stuff that's in addition to what I put up on YouTube for free. So the basic idea is you just watched a micro class. Hope you enjoyed that. I share. I just started doing these micro classes, but I Now share over 50 of these per month. We've shared dozens so far and it's basically a quick class on my absolute favorite stuff across the different domains of optimal living. Two to three maybe five minute little micro classes on how to optimize your life. In addition to that, you get access to every single one of our Philosopher's notes. We now have over 250 philosopher's notes on some really, really good books. A lot of them in each one of them. You're familiar with the PNTV videos if you've watched many of those. But we also have PDFs and MP3s of our Philosopher's notes. So here's let's take a look at what a PDF looks like. This is an example of a Philosopher's note. It's a six page PDF where I basically share some of my favorite thoughts, riff on it talk about how other teachers say the same things and give you a nice playful kick in the butt to go out and apply the wisdom that that is a philosopher's note. I record that as an MP3 that you can download as well. And 250 of those, I produce 10 of those at least per month that I share with you in addition to the micro classes. And then you also get access to all of our old classes. We have the five day immersion, reboot habits 101, confidence 101, getting stuff done 101, meditation 101 and then future classes including relationships 101, energy 101, purpose 101, biz 101, goals 101, etc. So there you go. Really blessed to have some extraordinary support and I will share with you where you go to sign up. I'll put a link to this, but basically cruise on over here, you can sign up. And this is the kind of response we've gotten so far from our members. It's pretty neat. I've made more positive changes in my life, my brief membership only three months so far, than I did through years of counseling. Yes. Brian Johnson, you are a rock star. Thank you very much. That's very kind of you. And I'm making huge strides in optimizing my life as a result of your philosopher's notes and optimal living classes. I spend $19 a month on my gym membership to take care of my body. A mere $10 a month on an optimal living membership is the biggest value invest investment I've ever made in my emotional, mental and spiritual health. Thank you for the incredible work you're doing to inspire us to be rock stars in our own lives. Unbelievably inspiring and humbling. In 24 hours, we received hundreds of extraordinary notes from members around the world. So there you go. That's a quick look at what we're up to. 10 bucks a month. Hope to astonish you. There you go.
