Entrepreneurial flow state
jasonleow • 25 Mar 2024 •
Something I’m picking up from prolific shippers who also happen to make money (lots of it) – a sort of entrepreneurial flow state:
My solopreneurship journey was an accident. I was bored so I played with AI and created MakeLanding. MakeLanding created ShipFast. ShipFast created ZenVoice. ZenVoice created PoopUp. Start somewhere. Then ideas will emerge. – @marc_louvion
What’s flow?
Flow in positive psychology, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity… Flow is the melting together of action and consciousness; the state of finding a balance between a skill and how challenging that task is… Named by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in 1970, the concept has been widely referred to across a variety of fields (and is particularly well recognized in occupational therapy). – Wikipedia
I’ve chased flow states in sports back in school, so this phenom is not unfamiliar. And this is what I know about it – if you chase and achieve flow states, results will follow. Not the other way round. I’ve read about how many Olympic athletes chase this too, not gold medals. And flow isn’t just reserved for sports. It can be experienced in any occupation or activity (like craft), when conditions are right.
Which makes so much sense.
Because in indie hacking, a lot of the success comes down to which idea you select, which game you choose to play in. The how that comes after that is well documented and shared to death by startup gurus. But the opportunity-spotting, being able to smell the opportunity and act on it quickly… that’s HARD.
And that comes easier when you get into a flow of building, launching, sensing, iterating, pivoting, building again. To get into flow you need to be in motion. Law of inertia. An object in motion stays in motion.
And shipping 10x faster is but one aspect of flow. Fast shipping is necessary but it alone isn’t enough.
I don’t have that now, and recently I feel blocked or stuck. Unsure what to build next. Unsure what to do to get to $10k/m.
So my goal now:
Chase this entrepreneurial flow state > chase number of products shipped
Comments
Hmm true true. Fine balance. Flow, but not rushed.
Would be nice to be in this zone all of the time. I think I was able to experience it when I was doing art and photography at college. It changes your mind completely. However, I do wonder if rushing headlong into things might never produce anything of value, especially if you are working at such a high rate.