Find Your ‘Flow’ and the Money Will Follow
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The well-worn phrase “Do what you love and the money will follow” leaves a lot to be desired. Even if you could get paid to watch episodes of LOST (you can’t), you’d probably yearn for more rewarding work.
There is a marked difference between things you love that could make money and things you love that won’t. As a general rule, if it helps you enter a ‘Flow state’, it’s a winner. If it doesn’t, it won’t make for gratifying or lucrative work.
‘Flow’ (see Wikipedia page), a psychological phenomenon, is how you feel when performing a task that absorbs 100% of your focus. Time seems to run faster while in a flow state - hours can pass without notice because you are too focused to care about the passing of time. If you stop and think about it, I’m sure you can think of one activity that makes you feel this way, whether it’s writing a blog post, web design, exercising or developing new business ideas.
To enter a flow state while performing a task, the following criteria need to be met:
1. You must be challenged, but not too much. You’d be unlikely to enter a flow state as a beginner guitarist trying to learn Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’. Simply eeking out each note, let alone arranging them in the correct rhythm, would be extremely difficult and frustrating. You’d quickly want to bail out and try ‘Ode to Joy’ instead. Thinking about other tasks instead of the one you’re doing is not compatible with flow. On the other hand, a talented guitarist is not going to enter a flow state playing ‘Ode to Joy’ by the book. There’s no challenge in it, so her mind is likely to wander and not achieve the 100% focus required for flow.
2. You must be doing creative mental work. This includes problem solving, strategic thinking and thinking ‘on your feet’.
3. You must see great value in the work. I find my monthly accounts challenging but not too challenging to do, but this doesn’t mean I enjoy them. To find flow, the task you’re doing must have personal value to you.
No Flow, No Happiness
Psychologists have found that regularly achieving a state of flow is one of the primary determinants of happiness.
It follows, then, that the best possible way to make a living is to make money by doing tasks that put you into a flow state. The greatest thing is, because these tasks require specific skills to complete - skills that you have - ‘flow’ is the perfect way to separate things you love that people might pay you for (they require skill) versus things you love that are extremely hard to get paid for (watching LOST, which only requires a television!)
If you don’t feel that any of your current skills have monetary value to someone else, searching for ‘flow’ is an excellent way to discover new skills that you will love practicing. If I find myself 100% focused and losing track of time when reading beginner-level articles on stock trading, this is a signal that the skill is worth more investigation.
Two Ways to Fill a Life Missing Flow
If you’re interested in blogging, you’re probably familiar with the ‘Blog Profits Blueprint‘ school of thought, aimed at creating sources of advertising and affiliate income that require only a few hours of maintenance each day. Ideas around passive income and The Four-Hour Work Week come from the same angle - that you should minimize income ‘work’ to leave more time for non-work activities that help you achieve flow.
While possible, this setup is extremely difficult to achieve - and perhaps personal experience has shown you that! If working 2 hours a day on income generating activities and earning $5,000 a month, you still need to earn over $80 per hour that you work. Someone earning $5,000 a month with a four-hour workweek would need to earn over $300 an hour.
To me, this seems unnecessarily complicated and difficult. If the aim is to minimize ‘work’ to make time for activities that put you into ‘flow’, wouldn’t it make more sense to seek a scenario where your ‘work’ and ‘flow tasks’ were one and the same?
It’s true that you could never spend 100% of work time in ‘flow’, unless invoicing and clearing your inbox are passions. But nor could you make a living from AdSense and affiliates without spending some amount of time on boring admin tasks.
The laws of probability also make a case for earning money from your flow tasks. Working 40 hours a week doing tasks you find flow-inducing (and assuming all hours a billable), you can make $5,000 a month earning about $31 an hour. If you’re ‘working’ 2 hours a day and making money from affiliate marketing, you need to earn roughly 250% of that amount per hour. If you’re doing a 4-hour work week you need to earn a whopping 10x that amount per hour!
Needless to say, there are a lot more ordinary people earning $31 an hour (and more) as freelancers than there are people earning $80 an hour as bloggers and affiliate marketers, or $300 an hour as passive income gurus. Sure, they do exist, and congratulations to them, but only a very small percentage of people who try to lead the ‘passive income’ lifestyle succeed.
The biggest irony I see is people who work thousands of hours to set up modest passive income streams to support themselves while they pursue unpaid ‘flow’ activities using skills that have a going rate of $50 - $100 an hour! The could have earned more and saved months or even years of their lives making money from their skill directly.
Is Passive Income Really the Recipe for Happiness?
In an ideal world we could work 1 hour a day and spend the rest of the time at home programming apps or playing piano or whatever else puts us into flow. In reality, when left to our own devices we’ll often pick ‘junk food’ tasks over flow tasks because flow tasks are challenging while junk food tasks provide instant gratification. Examples of junk food tasks are things like aimlessly browsing YouTube, watching bad mid-day television or taking naps. As psychologist Dan Gilbert has shown, humans are often very bad at predicting and doing what really makes us happy. Without external motivators we may spend the rest of our day watching re-runs of Family Guy rather than working on the blog design of our dreams.
Instead, try adding income and reputation to the mix and it becomes much easier to motivate yourself to consistently perform tasks that put you into flow. The person with only self-imposed pressures to create their dream blog design will probably finish three months after the person being paid $60 an hour with a Monday deadline.
Lastly, working for ‘flow’ is a fantastic opportunity to become a genuine expert at something. Malcolm Gladwell argues that it takes 10,000 hours of hard work before someone can call themselves an expert. Dabble in something on evenings and weekends for a total of 10 hours a week and you can gather 500 hours towards expertise each year (I’ve subtracted 20 hours a year for practice time missed due to unforseen events - this figure is being very generous though). Keep at it for 20 years and voila, you might just be an expert.
Contrast this with 35 hours a week of practice (say, in Flash game design), and you can hit that 10,000 hour mark in about 5 years and 9 months - roughly 1/4 of the time. If you’re being paid only the average rate for a Flash programmer (about $50 an hour) you’ve earned a total of $500,000 acquiring your expertise, instead of the $0 earned practicing in non-work time.
The Best Way to Make a Living from Blogging Is…
Selling a service that puts you into ‘flow’ is the best way for most people to make money from blogging. Even if you don’t have a skill that can be easily commodified yet, learning a new one will be much easier than making thousands of dollars each month from advertising and affiliate programs. The latter requires just as much practice and may never be rewarded at all.
While being an expert in a niche is valuable, being an expert in a professional skill is even more valuable. (Being an expert in both is better, and that’s what I hope to teach you.)
If Google decides it doesn’t like you, if AdSense changes drastically, if you lose your mojo and traffic dries up, so can your income if it is solely based on advertising and affiliate sales. But the skills you have, with continual practice, will last forever.
This is a topic I want to discuss much more. I feel that there’s an over-abundance of information on how to make a pittance with advertising and affiliate programs, but very few credible sources of information on how to earn a good living with a freelance business fed through your blog. I’ve done it, and I’m confident I can teach any person to do the same. That being said, I know this lifestyle is not everyone’s cup of tea and for that reason I won’t be devoting a lot of time to the topic on this blog. Instead I’ll be creating a newsletter on this topic, so only people who want to learn will receive the content.
I know some of you have been trying to earn an income through blog ads and affiliate sales and are getting tired of not being rewarded. I know some of you are interested in freelancing but unsure of how to make money from your skills or where to start. I know some of you are already freelancers but would like to get more clients, charge more and ween yourself off local work so that you can take your business anywhere. I’m confident the newsletter will teach you how to do all these things - and it will also be fun for me to try something different!
Stay tuned :)
This is the most exciting thing I’ve seen all week, and relates to topics that I am struggling with right now in my life.
Can’t wait to hear more. Please don’t delay, Skellie! I miss your wisdom…..
Interesting choice of subject matter, Skellie. I’ve been quite fascinated by the concept of flow for the past few months. I’d think doing real work would be ultimately more satisfying than other common wisdom.
“If Google decides it doesn’t like you, if AdSense changes drastically, if you lose your mojo and traffic dries up, so can your income if it is solely based on advertising and affiliate sales. But the skills you have, with continual practice, will last forever.”
I love that you’re advocating a balance here between skills and what you sell. And how a person can leverage their credibility to help sell products and information, but always have the skills to fall back on should the selling go belly up.
It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately and want to examine for my own business, and I’m thrilled you’ll be covering it more in entries to come. Thanks for your generous sharing of valuable thoughts and ideas.
You had me at ‘Flow state’
I await your next dispatch
It seems your three rules apply to mental work, not physical activity.
Let’s take running as an example of the most basic physical activity, which gets you into a flow (if you are a relatively good runner not to be distracted by the extreme effort). Anyone who has run a 5k or a 10k (or longer, such as a marathon), will tell you that time flies during running: you don’t track it at all, unless you are wearing a stopwatch.
It mostly follows the first rule, “You must be challenged, but not too much”, and it’s true: you only need to run instead of walking and just think about whatever you want.
However, running isn’t really “doing creative mental work.” You mostly think about how to get round the next corner, how to jump over stones, branches or whatever obstacles are on the course or how to keep your techniques straight. The key thing here, in my opinion, is not creative work, but lots of different mental work: it keeps your brain busy. I rarely have to think about outside-running issues, when I run. It’s almost always “Man, I sure hope there aren’t any dog walkers around the corner”.
” You must see great value in the work. ” Yes and no. Mostly no. If you run, it’ll get you into the flow. You may not see great value in the process, aside from getting healthy, enjoying the weather and building a stronger body. In my opinion, it’s also about enjoying the process. If you don’t enjoy it, you don’t flow.
Enjoyment strongly correlates with how hard the work is, so you are right that it doesn’t need to be very complex or very, very intensive. It needs to be something you are doing with normal effort: sometimes you do great things at such effort, if you are trained sufficiently enough - in anything.
Actually the original author on Expertise and 10,000 hours is Dr. Ericsson - his writings are fascinating.
I truly enjoyed the concept of flow state which I hadn’t heard before, but perfectly describes what happens when I get lost in code. Lost in a good way, not a confused way.
Oh, to maky my previous comment more relevant to the post: the example with running practically proves that you best get into the flow, when you enjoy what you are doing, thus proving your both points :)
P.S. Why the line breaks don’t turn into paragraphs? Weird formatting for WP.
Creating a synergy between your ‘flow’ activities and work certainly has strong appeal and can be very sustainable for some.
I think it’s also worth pointing out, however, that some people feel that “monetizing” their passion/flow activity actually ends up altering the value of that thing for them. Building a business around something you love can work incredibly well, but for some people it doesn’t jive and leads to creative burn-out or frustration.
I think it’s also important to be specific when understanding your flow state. For example, if creative writing puts me in a flow state and I decide to make money as a freelance writer, the work I get may be largely misaligned with my flow and passion.
Ultimately, I think the picture you’ve painted is very worthwhile and yes, sustainable. Though it may not work for everyone, I think it’s very attractive to those of us with entrepreneurial drives and dedication.
nice post thnxx
Now this makes a lot of sense and I look forward to reading more!
This is an amazing post! Passive income is so boring!
@ Patrick: Great to hear from you Pat - really glad you found the post exciting! I can’t wait to write more on the topic :)
@ Mark Dykeman: I think so too :)
@ Reese: well, you are a perfect example of the kind of person I hope will be inspired by this post and the future writing I want to do on this topic - I think talented freelancers can build an incredible business using these methods.
@ Yura: Thanks for your thoughtful contribution. I was actually thinking about physical flow states when I wrote ’see great value’, but I think my meaning was a bit unclear. I think runners do see great value in their running, not monetary but more in the experience itself and the effect it has on the mind/body. Actually I have just started the C25K training program so I’ve been thinking about running a lot lately :)
@ Sean: Hey Sean, thanks for pointing that out. I’ve only heard of the concept through Gladwell but he cites a lot of psychological studies in his work. The 10,000 hours concept has fascinated my lately so I should read some wisdom from the source!
@ Zoe: Hey Zoe, I think you make a great point about monetizing your passions changing them in some way. I do think it’s important to find a balance between the way you practice your passions for money and the way you do it for intrinsic value. My ideal goal is to get people doing work that has both monetary and intrinsic value to them.
Thanks to everyone else who commented!
@ Skellie - I think that’s a wonderful goal. It’s a big reason why I read your blog :)
Great post, once again. I will have to bookmark it and comeback for another read once I have fully engaged both brain cells! :)
As a relatively new freelancer still finding my way, I really appreciated this post (which I found on Blogher). I’ve now subscribed to your feed and look forward to the promised newsletter! Thanks so much.
I always love your posts Ellie, and you certainly didn’t disappoint here. Surprisingly I really get into a ‘flow’ during web design, even more so than writing blog posts, but I don’t think I could do it for a living.
Nice to see you writing more regularly!
Cheers,
Glen
Selling a service that puts you in the flow….
Very true indeed! And from selling that service, you can build your list even more…which then enables you to sell related services in the future.
Great post! Barbara
[...] possible. Check out this post at skelliewag.org. It gives a great idea for you on how to do it: Blogging, freelancing and entrepreneurship advice that’s different - Skelliewag. Hope this helps, [...]
Awesome post! It gives a lot of ideas for my project. I am a big believer in Do what you want and money will follow. Thanx for this post and I’ll be definitely signing up for that newsletter ;)
What I like about Gladwell’s suggestion is that you can ramp that up if you want. 10 years sounds like a prison term. 10,000 sounds like something you can work on. Same thing, but shows how important information is communicated couched in different terms.
Loved your post Skellie, can’t wait to hear more. We REALLY need your wisdom! :)
I so fully agree with this, Skellie. It did take me a long time to figure it out though, round about six months. They weren’t wasted months however, as I needed time to learn. Now that I’ve learned I know what to do. Coincidentally, it was Gladwell’s outliers that really helped me. I LOVED that book and felt fantastic reading it, as though my thousands of hours were ready to coalesce into something remarkable.
This is so refreshing to hear!
At our blog, we’ve been doing an interview series with people who created their own jobs, and it’s been fascinating to see how many people have made money not by copying someone else’s system, but by just focusing on doing things they really honestly love and enjoy doing…and the rest follows.
Skellie,
This is a great post - well thought out and reasoned. You’ve hit the nail on the head with the idea that we (as humans) often default to the (presumed) easier tasks, or those who don’t want to do the hard thinking that’s required to give birth to something new.
Now, about those naps. I am a napper and have been since I was a kid. A nice 20-minute nap in the afternoon is usually what recharges me and kick starts my brain. On days when I’ve wanted to nap, but couldn’t, my performance was less than stellar. So, I guess the key is knowing whether you’re taking a nap to avoid something or to recharge your mental and physical batteries.
Looking forward to learning more!
Lis
Skellie,
Reese captured the major takeaway for me, “I love that you’re advocating a balance here between skills and what you sell. And how a person can leverage their credibility to help sell products and information, but always have the skills to fall back on should the selling go belly up.” Why say more, she’s right on target!
Dependence of adsense and affiliate programs isn’t healthy. I don’t use adsense but love my Thesis theme. :) Anyhow, I hit a state of flow while writing my last blog post. The feeling was so good I have to step away from it for an evening before pushing it live. Like when writing a research paper, when I challenge myself to go after the professor, I hit that flow state and write quality a paper but I still have to step away from it, come back and polish it up before turning it in.
-Mig
This looks great!! Please do the newsletter, it’ll change lives!
My first time on your blog and this post may just have captured me. Very inspiring piece, and I’m looking forward to reading more.
Best,
Brian
[...] Blogging, freelancing and entrepreneurship advice that’s different - Skelliewag. [...]
Skellie: you are right, with “understand that it does them good” would have probably worked much better. However, I do think that enjoyment is much more important. How much fish oil can you drink or run,if you don’t enjoy it?
Good luck with your running. You won’t enjoy running, if you don’t run, so get running :)
Great post, to the point.
What do you think of selling products through a blog? ie, your own or other people’s ebooks?
I’m looking forward to your newsletter!
[...] Skelliewag explains that if we find our flow, the money [...]
Very nice article. I have a story of my own regarding the Flow state,
Last year I was working for this Japanese web developing company. I was 19 and I was a manager, “impressing” people will say. Yes impressing, but time consuming, I had so much energy I wanted to do so much but unfortunately I couldn’t because I had to work 8 to 16 hours a day (the Japanese style) and didn’t have to much time for myself, and I was consumed because of that job, the missing purpose. In autumn I had a revelation, what if I started a business of my own, work in my own style, for how many hours I’d like, take a vacation and travel whenever I like, be my own boss, master of my life, finally do whatever I have to do. I can do it for this company, I can win them thousands of euros, and I can’t do it for myself?
What’s the purpose in winning so much money for a company and consuming my life, when I can do it for myself, travel, be financially independent, and live free, right? Well that is what I started doing since September 2008. The company was closed down because of various reasons (It wasn’t my fault! I SWEAR!!:-)) ) and I started creating this whole plan about launching my own website…
When I started thinking about it and asking my best friend’s opinion, I /they said “It’s crazy, probably I will never make it…sounds challenging, it’s nuts, nobody has ever done this before…I’ll DO IT!”. 7 months later on 5 March 2009 I launched Creative Luggage, my personal brand, company, blog, website! It was a HIT! I’m getting client after client, that is because I trusted myself, listened to that inner voice: “DO IT!”, “BELIEVE!”, “DON’T BACK DOWN!”, “BE FREE!”.
So I got into that flow, I was never tired or nervous while I worked on this project (…only a little before the launch…I was a little nervous then…so many things to finish) I was going with the flow, ideas were flowing, clients are flowing, people are following me now, I’m inspiring people and it’s the best thing I ever did! The best thing in my life. While I was working for that other company I was nervous and pissed off all the time, but hey, I had to stay there to get all the experience possible! Here I am now! BMF! I made my choice! Have you?! Success, it’s a mind game!
Hope my experience and what I did will inspire you to live a free life! Do something for yourself before you do it for the world, give more to yourself and than if you want you can give to the world as well.
This is a fabulous article. I have read several of Csíkszentmihályi’s books and they are spot on. Your article has brought the ‘discussion’ back to the top of my list. I have spent the morning thinking about when I have been in a state of flow and also thinking about how I can proactively create more time in flow with work/entrepreneurial endeavors. Sign me up for your newsletter!
Loved this article. You do a great job in explaining that true joy is finding balance between something that brings out your passion,as well as persistence and hard work. I look forward to more about this topic.
[...] Skellie made a point about going into the state and finding your ‘Flow’. [...]
As a newbie in freelancing, blogging, flowing, and simply searching for a way to feel good inside again, I applaud this writing! I put in my 25 yrs helping the fat cats get fatter and finally made the decision to voice my experiences online hopefully to help others. I’ll admit it’s a wonderful notion that i’ll be compensated over time. But, from the heart, all I can truly hope for is the opportunity to find an outlet to help others. I’m still in the planning stages and trying to absorb all the information possible because ultimately I need to find a flow, or in my particular case, inner peace. I noticed how all the wonderful comments signals you have touched people, including myself. So, best regards to you and I also want to get in line now looking forward to your newsletter.
Really enjoyed reading this article and interested to see what else you have to say about flow and how it relates to work.
[...] main aim of this program is to help you learn how to monetize a skill that puts you into flow. This will make you a happier and wealthier [...]
The prime focus of Csíkszentmihályi’s work was regarding what was fun. What makes something enjoyable? More often than not, what he found was the intrinsic value of an activity, and not the perceived reward, motivated people to pursue activities that put them in flow.
External factors such as money or prestige, usually had an initial motivating effect when introduced experimentally, but when they were withdrawn resulted in flow activities losing their intrinsic value.
Put simply, make sure your motivation is the love, not the money.
[...] Skelliewag.org » Posts » Find Your ‘Flow’ and the Money Will Follow (tags: freelance) [...]
[...] Posted in Uncategorized by gaurishpatil on the May 14, 2009 I m this article from http://www.skelliewag.org/find-your-flow-and-the-money-will-follow-941.htm#more-941 byskellie. I love thias article…so I wana this article with me… Find Your ‘Flow’ [...]
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Love the last part of this post skellie
Making money from advertising or with affiliate programs is an enormous challenge that can quickly frustrate and disappoint would be bloggers. Even if the changes aren’t on Google’s part, blogging is such a competitive (and unsaturated - meaning there are still a lot more people who don’t blog who will yet make it more competitive) market that getting sufficient traffic is a surmountable task alone.
That said, blogging to influence and create awareness of yourself can pay dividends on behalf of your professional profile and reputation. A few innovative ideas, well written positions, and entertaining, thought provoking pieces will get attention and establish you in your industry.
[...] Find what puts you into flow and, if you want, build a business on it [...]
[...] Following that logic, launching an online business is either a side effect or a desperate measure. It’s potentially the most corruptible, unless it’s tied directly to the goal of making a true contribution to the world by writing and being more creative. And unless it’s a bi-product of something else I’m doing, I’d have to be diligent not to let it become just about the money. (What’s the point in selling out just to get to the good stuff?) [...]
I tried searching the site to see about the newsletter but cannot find it. Have you started the newsletter? I am very interested.
You know, what I have read here has made more sense out of trying to make a living doing what you love and are damn good at, than I have heard in my 27 years as a struggling artist.
Hi Skellie,
Another deep post here. I’ve experienced this “flow” you’re talking about, while doing various mundane tasks such as: washing dishes, ironing, washing clothes, etc. I may not make any money doing them, but I save money by doing them myself, plus get exercise, maintain my home and I have found that it soothes my soul.
It’s kind of funny, but I have also experienced the “flow” when blogging and I haven’t made much money from it either. Plus, I have been blogging 3 years this month, and I, too, am stepping back and reassessing how I want to do it going further. So I am interested in finding out more about this newsletter you mentioned above.
Hi Skellie,
Great post as usual. I would love to be on your newsletter mailing list, please let me know when that gets going.
Thanks!
dt
It’s great to jump into this kind of community. Thanks, Skellie, for posts that make people gather and show themselves.
Love the post, and yes that is a big question to us current freelancers looking to use the blog to better inform people about the service they offer and ways to make money, even if it’s small, while doing so.