“I'm picking a fight here that I don't really need to pick, but it bugs the shit out of me. I'm like, deep work is another word for flow, brother. Like, I'm sorry, you've coined a new term. … You've just rebranded something else and you've just made it harder for people who are trying to study this and get smarter about it.”
The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish) · Ideas & Essays · October 2026
Context
Shane Parrish raised Cal Newport's argument that flow isn't the best state for learning, because learning needs discomfort. Kotler agreed that struggle matters, but said it's simply the first phase of the flow cycle, and complained that new labels for the same state have long slowed down the research.
Transcript
…have to sort of do that. Or, you know, I see this with writers. And it's amazing because I've like, I see really smart people who are amazing contributors to this world. And I can't tell you how much time they're, you know, like flushing down a toilet because they want to argue with their critics.
One thing we haven't talked about with flow is its relationship to learning. So I know Cal Newport argues that flow isn't the optimal learning state because we need a lot of discomfort. I'm curious, what's your reaction to that?
One of my pet peeves is people who coin a whole bunch of new language for themselves. One of the reasons flow research was so damn hard, so damn hard, the entire altered state space is everybody wanted to coin a new name, right? Maslow called it peak experiences. Chick sent me high was flow. Then Phil Jackson, the zone. And so I look at Cal, and I think, and I'm picking a fight here that I don't really need to pick a fight, but like it bugs the shit out of me. I'm like, deep work is another word for flow, brother. Like, I'm sorry, you've coined a new term. When he says, well, no, you're going to need a lot of struggle for flow. Well, that's because there's a flow cycle. The front end of a flow state is what is known as struggle. It's a loading phase. Flow is unconscious when we can perform tasks without much conscious interference. To perform something unconsciously, we first have to learn it consciously. Right. And so that's why there's a four, the first front end of the flow state is struggle, right? It's all conscious. It's all thinking. And Cal is exactly correct. And this is Colleen Seifert sort of…
want to come back to something. Maybe double-click on pattern recognition and anticipation, the relationship between those two things.
The brain fundamentally is a prediction engine, right? What the brain is doing at every moment of every day is it's trying to predict what is about to happen, right? And what it wants to do is lower uncertainty, wants to minimize uncertainty, and it wants to know exactly how much energy. Right.…
Let me tell you about the best new product that I've used in the past five years. It's the Matic Vacuum. This thing vacuums, it mops, Matic does everything. Other robots bump into things, but the Matic
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