“When am I in the zone, and how will I double the time I spend in the zone in the next 12 months?”
Entrepreneur and author Raj Setty has been publishing “Quoughts of the Day” on his blog since late December, 2006. (A “quought” is a question that provokes thought.) Back on January 13, I wrote about Raj’s excellent “quoughts” series and suggested three quoughts of my own. Since then, Raj and I have become acquainted via email, and today he has published my quought at LifeBeyondCodeBlog.
I’m a big fan of “being in the zone.” I believe we all do our best work when we’re in the zone. Almost all really, really great work is produced by people in the zone. Entrepreneurs. Athletes. Teachers. Writers. Doctors. Salespeople. Musicians. Architects. Chefs. Gardeners. Artists. Preachers. Mothers. Fathers. Students. CEOs. Auto Mechanics. The elite ones get “locked-in” when they’re practicing their craft.
I believe we need to spend at least a few hours every day in the zone, or we’re depriving the world (and ourselves) of our most valuable stuff. I worry about people I love who don’t appear to spend any time in the zone during the day.
When in your lifetime, including when you were a kid, do you remember being in the zone? (If you’re Christian Laettner (left), you remember being in the zone on the night you took this shot, with 0.2 seconds left, after catching an 80-foot pass from Grant Hill, to win the 1992 East Regional NCAA Tournament game in overtime against Kentucky, 103-102. Laettner was 10 for 10 from the floor, and 10 for 10 on free throws in this game. That’s some serious zoneage. The story of this game is here.)
Can you pepper your schedule next week – and for the rest of your life – with more “zone-time?”
“Work is my obsession but it is also my devotion…. Absorbedness is the paradise of work.” — Donald Hall, poet and essayist
Crawdaddy Cove 