Everything Mihaly had described was there—the loss of ego; the loss of time; the sense that I was growing into something bigger than I had been before. Flow was carrying me through the difficult patches, the frustrations. It had unlocked my focus.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi from the University of Chicago. He wrote the 1990 book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

New research on its recently unimagined neuroplasticity shows that what you pay attention to, and how, can actually change your brain and thus your behavior. This extraordinarily practical scientific breakthrough shows that like physical fitness, the mental sort that sustains the focused life can be cultivated.