Flow state, villains, and a 100-day challenge
Hello friend,
This week’s edition is a special one, almost a selfish one you could say.
For the first time, I am only sharing what I wrote in the past 1 week, thanks to the new challenge I picked up.
There is something about streaks and challenges that excite me.
2 years ago, during the pandemic, I had picked up a “100 day, 100 words” challenge during which I wrote at least 100 words for 100 consecutive days.
It was organized by a small Facebook community and I enjoyed it thoroughly. There was something liberating about letting the words flow on the page without any worries about making it perfect.
You can still find the archive of those 100 posts on my old blog here. Nothing groundbreaking, just 100 days of consistent, shitty writing with some occasional good insights! 😀
One of my favorites from those 100 posts is this story about The Kid. It is deeply personal and has a surprise ending! 😉
Last week, I picked up a similar challenge once again.
You can subscribe to this substack where all posts from around 30 creators taking part in the challenge would be shared in daily emails. The good thing is it runs only for 5 days a week so I am glad to have a breathing space.
This time, the stakes are higher because I am also posting them on Twitter though I don’t expect to get tons of engagement due to a lack of followers and lack of a consistent theme in these posts.
Nevertheless, the feeling is the same. I am happy to be engaged in some form of creative self-expression on a daily basis.
This brings me to the topic of flow- one of the things that I wrote just yesterday.
Finding flow as a new freelancer
According to the psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the flow state is a state of mind during which one is completely immersed in an activity. It involved a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment.
The flow state is often termed the holy grail of productivity.
Knowledge workers stand the most to gain from accessing these flow states to produce high-quality work around ideas and original insights.
In this piece, I shared 5 simple things that have helped me in the past few days to get into the flow state on a daily basis.
Rethinking Heroes, Villains, and Saving the World
This is a ‘fresh out of the oven’ piece as I just published it before sending out this newsletter.
While this is a result of today’s prompt of the challenge, I have been thinking about this for a long time.
It combines my love for two movies, Everything Everywhere All at Once (possibly the best thing I’ve ever watched this year), Spiderman: No Way Home, and a book called Feeding the Demons.
Tale of Two Passions
This is more of an introspective piece where I reflect upon the two creative fields/passions that have emerged in my life so far.
The first one has its origins from a decade ago but it did not come close to reality until this year.
The second one was there but it evolved more as a hidden support system to help me pursue and hopefully sustain my first passion.
I am not sure if the first one is sustainable yet.
But this was a fun exercise to look at the trajectory of my life so far as a pursuit of seemingly disconnected avenues under two broad themes.
Like Steve Jobs said that you can only connect the dots by looking back.
That’s all from me this week, folks!
Did you resonate with or like reading any particular piece from the above?
Let me know your thoughts in the replies! 🙂
That’d help me generate more ideas like these and hopefully come up with better pieces in the future! 🙂
Until next time
Love
Vishal