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Everyone wants a shortcut into flow state. I want to start with a number that should reset your expectations.
In almost 20 years of competitive short track speed skating - five or six skaters, shoulder to shoulder, at 35 miles per hour - I experienced true flow state exactly ten times.
Not ten times a season or ten times a year, but ten times in a career - thousands of hours of training, thousands of races, decades of mental preparation, and I hit that effortless, timeless, transcendent state maybe once every two years.
I want you to sit with that number for a second because it probably doesn't match what you've been told. The books and podcasts and optimization culture make flow sound like something you unlock, like there's a system, like if you just build the right morning routine and do the right breathing exercises you'll find yourself in "the zone" on demand.
I tried everything. Started meditating daily at fourteen years old. Worked with sports psychologists who taught me visualization techniques so detailed I could feel the cold of the ice before I stepped on it. Built rituals and trigger words and breathing protocols so precise they bordered on obsessive - same warmup, same music, same exact movements in the same exact order before every single race.
None of it could summon flow on demand.
That's the honest answer to the question. No. You cannot force it. I had every resource elite sport can offer - coaches, psychologists, two decades of deliberate practice - and the best I could ever do was make myself available to it.
Time didn't slow down - it disappeared entirely. I wasn't making decisions anymore, the decisions were making themselves through me. My body knew things my conscious mind hadn't processed yet.
I'd watch the race replay later and not remember half the moves I made because there was no "me" making them. Something else was operating.
Those moments were transcendent and they were magic and I would give almost anything to feel them again.
They were also unreliable.
We want flow to be a skill we can develop, a state we can access. And I get why - because when you're IN it, you feel invincible. You feel like the version of yourself you've always suspected existed but could never quite reach. Of course we want to live there.
But here's what I've found, at least for me - the chasing is the trap.
I've watched leaders and founders and executives burn through enormous amounts of energy trying to manufacture peak states. They read the books, buy the supplements, attend the retreats, all in pursuit of those magical moments of effortless performance. And meanwhile the foundational work that creates the conditions for flow to occasionally show up gets neglected.
The other 99% of my career? That was thinking.
Constantly thinking. Analyzing gaps in the middle of a race with five or six skaters moving at 35 mph in a space the size of a basketball court. Adjusting position, managing fear, fighting through noise in my head, grinding through competitions where I felt nothing special at all.
There's a 4:30am memory that sticks with me, and it isn't one morning so much as hundreds of them. I'm a young skater in the Seattle area, my dad is driving me through the dark to training before his workday starts, and by the time most people's alarms are going off I'm already deep into the intervals.
There's no flow happening. There's no transcendence. It's just cold and dark and my legs are screaming and the only thing keeping me going is a decision I made before the alarm went off - I would show up whether the magic came or not.
That's not a peak state. That's work.
And work is what won the medals.
I think about this all the time now, especially working with organizations and teams. Because flow obsession isn't limited to sport - it shows up everywhere.
Founders chasing the creative high instead of building systems. Sales teams waiting for confidence instead of picking up the phone. Leaders postponing hard conversations because they're "not in the right headspace."
What I've noticed over the years: people who build careers around chasing peak states usually burn out. The ones who learn to love the 99% - the grinding, the thinking, the showing up when nothing feels magical - those are the ones still standing at the end.
I've sat across from CEOs who feel like they're failing because Monday doesn't feel like the highlight reel. Talked to founders who think something is wrong with them because the passion they felt in year one has turned into something quieter, heavier, more complicated.
What I try to share with them is what I wish someone had said to me at 22 - that quieter, heavier version IS the work. That's not a symptom of something wrong. That's what sustained performance feels like from the inside.
You don't command it. You set the table and let it decide whether to show up. That's not me being poetic - it matches the research.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who named flow and spent decades studying it, laid out the conditions in his 2004 TED talk: a clear goal, immediate feedback, and a challenge just beyond your current skill. Short track handed me all three every time I stepped on the ice. The goal was the finish line. The feedback was the clock and the skater six inches to my left. The challenge was always a half step past what I could comfortably do.
Most workdays have none of those conditions. The goals are vague, the feedback arrives quarterly if it arrives at all, and the tasks are either mindless or overwhelming. Then we wonder why we can't find the zone at our desks.
And the gap is worth closing. When McKinsey's Susie Cranston and Scott Keller asked executives to estimate how much more productive they were at their peak than on average, the most common answer at senior levels was five times. That's self-reported, so hold it loosely. But even if the real number is half that, it's worth engineering your days for.
So here's what I'd actually run this week. Not to summon flow - to stop blocking it:
Run that for a month. Flow might visit, or it might not. Either way the work gets done, and the work is what wins. I go deeper on this exact system in my peak performance keynote.
This past February I was back at the Winter Games - this time on the other side of the boards, covering speed skating for Yahoo Sports at Milan-Cortina 2026.
Watching races I wasn't in gave me a view I never had as an athlete. You can see who's chasing a feeling and who's executing a process. The skaters who reached the podium didn't look transcendent in the warmup. They looked precise. Same lines, same tactics, same routines they'd drilled for a decade. If flow showed up for a lap or two, it showed up on top of that foundation - never instead of it.
Twenty-four years after my first Olympics, the formula hadn't changed. Conditions first. Magic maybe.
Flow is something that happens to you. Discipline is something you choose. And the gap between those two things is where most of us live.
I won eight Olympic medals. Most decorated U.S. Winter Olympian in history. And I can count on two hands the number of times I experienced the state half the internet is trying to sell you a shortcut to.
Maybe that's discouraging and maybe it's freeing (I think it's freeing).
Because it means you don't have to feel transcendent to do transcendent work. You don't have to be "in the zone" to perform at the highest level. You have to keep showing up, keep thinking, keep adjusting, keep choosing the work even when - especially when - there's no magic in it.
The magic, if it comes, is a gift. Not a strategy.
And the people who understand that? In my experience, they tend to outlast everyone else.
I dig into this stuff in Hard Pivot - my free newsletter. Come find out what the other 99% can do for you.
--AAO
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