The greatest merit any person could have is to be good and useful. There are different species of love that go under the same name. There is lobe that begins in the head, and goes down to the heart, and grows slowly; but it lasts till death, and asks less than it gives. There is another love, that blots out wisdom, that is sweet with the sweetness of life and lives forever, and is worth having for an eternity. These exceptional moments are flow experience. The metaphor of my flow is one that describes effortless action one feels in the moments that stand out as the best in their lives. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 9

Athletes, like my favourite Philadelphia Eagles player, Kenjon Barner, refer to flow as being in the zone, religious mystics as ecstasy, artist like Post Malone refer to flow as an aesthetic rapture. Athletes, mystics, and artists do very different things when they reach their flow, yet their descriptions of the experience are remarkably similar. Who knows what opportunities a man in love may give against himself? An acknowledged love sanctifies every freedom; and one freedom begets another. However, a man without sensibility exhibits no sign of heart. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 9

There is a pleasure in writing, which only the man who writes knows. Yet no man would write, unless he expected somebody to read. His own reading would be small if he did not expect to have it found out that he had read. Thus self-love is, in a great degree, the spring of all things. Flow tends to occur when an individual faces a clear set of goals that require appropriate responses. It is easy to enter flow in games such as Quadrille, Speculation, Tressette, tennis, or basketball, because they have goals and rules for action that make it possible for the player to act without questing what should be done, and how. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 9

For the duration of the game the player lives in a self-contained Universe where everything has a set of rules to follow to reach their goals. The same clarity of goals is present if one performs a religious ritual, play a musical piece, weave someone’s hair, write a computer program, climb a mountain, or perform surgery. Activities that induce flow could be called flow activities because they make it more likely for the experience to occur. In contrast to normal life, flow activities allow a person to focus on goals that are clear and compatible. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 9

That glorified self-love requires the touch upon imagination of strangeness and unaccustomed grace, to subdue it and make it pardon an outrage to its temples and altars, and its happy reading of the Heavens, the Earth, too: Earth foremost, we ought perhaps to say. The secret of the heart is its pressing love of self. Self-preservation operates pretty equally through the whole species. Flow tends to occur when an individual’s skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable. Optimal experiences usually involve a fine balance between one’s ability to act and the available opportunities for action. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 9

Self-preservation first united mankind in civil society. The contempt of life is not meritorious in itself; on the contrary, self-preservation is enjoined by the law of nature. If challenges are too high one gets frustrated, then worried, and eventually anxious. If challenges are too low relative to one’s skills one gets relaxed, then bored. If both challenges and skills are perceived to be low, one gets to feel apathetic. However, when high challenges are matched with high skills, then the deep involvement that set flow apart from ordinary life is likely to occur. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 9

I cannot conceive anything better calculated to excite sympathy than the spectacle of a man devoting his life to self-worship. The climber will feel flow when the mountain demands all his strength, the singer when the song demands the full range of her vocal ability, the hair weaver when the design of the tapestry is more complex than anything attempted before, and the surgeon when he reconstructs the spinal cord because the operation involved new procedures and required unexpected variation. #RyanPhillippe 7 of 9

A typical day is full of anxiety and boredom. Flow experiences provide the flashes of intense living against this dull background. We seldom find in men a strong desire of obtaining anything which depends on human power who have not be able to obtain it. Victory depends upon ardor more than numbers. The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it is the finest in the World. When goals are clear, feedback relevant, and challenges and skills are in balance, attention becomes ordered and fully invested. #RyanPhillippe 8 of 9

Because of the total demand on psychic energy, an individual in flow is completely focused. There is no space in consciousness for distracting thoughts, irrelevant feelings. Self-consciousness disappears, yet one feels stronger than usual. The sense of times is distorted: hours seem to pass by in minutes. When an individual’s entire being is stretched in the full functioning of body and mind, whatever one does becomes worth doing for its own sake; living becomes its own justification. In the harmonious focusing of physical and psychic energy, life finally some into its own. #RyanPhillippe 9 of 9