Our daily lives are filled with ambition, deadlines and competition.
<ul>
<li>It is taught to us that we have to strive for everything: accomplishments, prosperity, or happiness.</li>
<li>We have to do stuff: act, think, eat, dance, slog, sleep or practice, trying to optimize our ways of being.</li>
</ul>
It is a never-ending rat race where the faster we run, the more we have to sprint ahead, as there is always someone ahead of us.

Striving Hard To Live

In the state of flow, our attention is on a limited perceptual field which gets our full attention and investment, not bothered about the score, we are fully into the action and awareness of the activity, doing what we love.

The Flow State

<ul>
<li>It is often found that practising hinders progress and that real, authentic and individualistic mastery emerges when one gives up formal practising and gets completely natural and experimental.</li>
<li>The 10,000 hours of practice formula, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Outliers, has the stamp of ambition and goal-seeking.</li>
<li>Our inner amateur turns the teaching upside down, and instead of ambition, injects fearlessness, spontaneity, aliveness and commitment to the activity.</li>
</ul>

Embracing Our Inner Amateur

The word amateur came to the English language in the 18th century, making the distinction between the newbie and the professional. The amateur does the particular activity (painting, music, sport)without any spirit of mastery or competitiveness, making the pursuit itself the reward.
Once we remove goal-seeking or constant competitiveness from our aspirations, we come into the optimal experience zone, which according to many psychologists is akin to happiness.

Our Inner Amateur

When I rekindled my relationship with the piano and tapped into my inner amateur, I discovered a quiet room of my own

The Flow State

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