How to solve the big problem with Nigerian Media (Part 1)
This article is the first of two articles.
My aim is to preach about flow states and deep work.
I’ll be discussing what they are and why their absence in the Nigerian Creative industry is causing the lack of original content we observe these days.
This article talks about flow and deep work, and how both concepts are relevant to creating original work.
I’m of the opinion that original work is getting rarer in the creative industry and a lot of people these days do shallow, copy and paste work.
By creative industry I refer to music, writing, photography or any industry that relies on individual creativity, and is utilizes the art for commercial purposes.
I’m not against borrowing ideas from other people, after all; artists are the biggest inspiration of other artists, stealing ideas from other artists and adding your own essence to create your own piece of art is a technique that has been applied since time immemorial.
But these days, there’s more borrowing and less remixing.
I really won’t blame anybody though, it’s hard to capture people’s attention, it’s hard to sit down and brainstorm on what an audience will like, and there are so many more artists in this period than in any other period in history so the competition is stiffer than ever.
But still in spite of all these factors I feel now is the time more than ever to go beyond what other people are doing, past all the social trends and popular opinions into the realm of deep work in order to create original work.
Deep work is an extended period of immersion into your work, where you’re intensely focused on your craft with no distractions, just you and your work, you can think of it as making love to your work.
Approaching work like this has tremendous benefits, because the more time you spend focused on doing something, the better you get at it and the deeper you go into it, but I think the best benefits of doing deep work is that it enables you to enter a state of flow.
I have a friend named Doyin; he’s a creative that is into paper crafting, pen art, design and illustration.
I asked him to help me with an illustration once, and I was fortunate enough to be able to watch him as he worked.
And I must say, watching anybody work, especially when they are good at it is quite pleasurable, at least to me.
It’s been that way ever since I was young, I used to enjoy watching my father work on his projects, I remember enjoying watching the painters paint our house anytime we had a renovation, and I enjoyed watching my friend create the illustration.
I enjoy watching the intense focus, the methodology applied, and the absent mindedness to the people around exhibited by people doing work they’re good at. And most of all, I enjoy watching the project start from scratch and go through all its stages till it gets to completion.
There are different names for this mode people go into when they do work they’re good at. Some people call it the zone, some call it their happy place, but the official name, given to it by performance psychologists, is “flow”.
The term flow was first coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly (pronounced six-sent-mihali) and he defined it as the mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and enjoyment in the process of the activity and is characterized by a loss of the sense of space and time.
The following experiences describe what it’s like to go into flow;
1. Intense and focused concentration on the present moment
2. Merging of action and awareness: your reflexes become much faster
3. A loss of reflective self-consciousness: you’re not thinking about yourself or how you look at that point
4. A sense of personal agency over the situation or the activity: your confidence is sky high and you feel in control
5. A distortion of your sense of time: you can spend hours on the activity without knowing it
6. Autotelic experience: you enjoy doing the activity for the sake of the activity not for any rewards.
Chances are you’ve gone into flow at one point or the other in your life, irrespective of whatever it is you were doing. It’s happened a lot for me, especially during activities like playing football, writing, playing video games and so on.
It’s different for everyone, for my dad it’s fixing cars and finding solutions to problems, for my mom it’s teaching and cooking, for my brother it’s photography and finding solutions to problems as well and for Doyin it’s creating art.
Getting into flow is an essential part of deep work, but like every good thing, it’s not easy to achieve, it comes from huge amounts of practice and familiarity with the techniques and principles of the activity, which is why experts find it easier to enter flow than people who are just starting out.
Still the more deep work you do, the more you get into flow and the more you get into flow, the more deep work you do and the resultant outcome of all this is that you get better and better at what you do until you eventually attain mastery which is the key to creating original work.
So that’s it for this post, in the next part I’ll talk about ways we can include deep work into our lives and the reason we all need to aim for mastery rather than just regurgitating what everyone else does.
In the meantime I’ll leave you to ponder this quote by Robert Greene, from his book, Mastery:
“As years go by and we remain faithful to this process (practice/deep work), yet another leap takes place — to mastery. The keyboard is no longer something outside of us; it is internalized and becomes part of our nervous system, our fingertips. In our career, we now have a feel for the group dynamic, the current state of business. We can apply this feel to social situations, seeing deeper into other people and anticipating their reactions. We can make decisions that are rapid and highly creative. Ideas come to us. We have learned the rules so well that we can now be the ones to break or rewrite them.”
