Hardcore Flow Artists

Hardcore Flow Artists

The most striking case of Flow Arts can be found in extreme action sports. Action sports include Skydivers, Extreme Surfers & Skateboarders, Base Jumpers, Rock Climbers, Wingsuit Flyers and… you get the idea. Physical/Athletic sports that you can lose your life over. These are Hardcore Flow Artists. Lots of people label those who do action sports as extremist and those who are addicted to adrenaline, but this could not be further from the truth. In reality, what most of these athletes are addicted to, is the state of Flow.

Steven Kotler interviewed hundreds of athletes in his book “The Rise of Superman” and noted that most share professional kayaker Tao Berman’s sentiment when he says “I’m the farthest thing from an adrenaline junky. I can’t stand that feeling. If I’m feeling adrenaline, it means I’m feeling too much fear. It means I haven’t done my homework. It means it’s time to get out of my [kayak] to reassess”.

So, how do we KNOW that these athletes are really getting into the Flow state? The presence of Flow in an art, or discipline, is marked by three distinct features:

(1) The speed at which the art progresses.

(2) The difficulty of the art, or in other words the level at which it is performed.

(3) If the results of studies that have been done on Flow & high performance over the past 100 years are consistent with what we find in said art.

In other words, art that both progresses quickly despite a high level of difficulty share certain general characteristics. These characteristics are called “Flow triggers” which I will discuss later.

Action sports, at the professional level, have demonstrated all of these characteristics. In particular, action sports have demonstrated an extremely fast progression and an incredibly high level of required performance, at least, at the professional level.

In some action sports, we really REALLY like to see flips. As it turns out, flips are also a good way to measure levels of difficulty AND speed at which an action sport progresses. In the 1904 Olympics platform diving’s crazy trick was the double front somersault, a 720-degree flip. In 2004, one hundred years later, the crazy trick of platform diving in the Olympics was “the reverse four and a half”, a 1620-degree flip. It took 100 YEARS for this art to advance 900 degrees (TROS).

Contrast this with “Big Air” skiing, in which skiers make huge jumps and do as many flips as they can between takeoff and landing. In 1999, JF Cusson did a “Switch 720” which was considered insane, but just twelve years later, in 2011, TJ Schiller performed a “Double Cork 1620”. The Double Cork 1620 amounts to 2340-degrees of rotation. That means it took only a little more than a decade to gain 1640-degrees, whereas divers needed TEN TIMES that amount of time.

Need more convincing? In freestyle motorcross, it took DECADES for riders to land a backflip. 4 years later they were doing double backflips. In skateboarding, the 900 was the greatest impossible trick for so long. It took Tony Hawk 13 YEARS to land the infamous 900-degree spin, which he finally landed in 1999. In 2012, Tom Schaar, 12 years old, mastered the 900-degree spin in 3 months, and while still only 12 years old landed the 1080-degree spin. A trick that nobody else in the world had ever done.

So, what’s happening here? I mean really, is the growth that we see in action sports really a consequence of these athletes tapping into the Flow state? Or, is this growth a result of the new generation learning from the older generation?

The answer is both. The human brain is hardwired to be able to achieve the Flow state, so anybody can attain it, and we humans have gotten better at teaching the newer generation how to attain that state in many different scenarios, not just action sports.

How do you prevent/stop yourself from being bored? Flow. How to prevent/stop yourself from feeling anxiety? Flow. How do you feel happiness more often? Flow. How can I increase my creativity? Flow. How do I increase my productivity? Flow. It seems that the answer to questions concerning optimal experience and performance, how you feel and how you perform, is more and more being answered with Flow.