Have you heard of flow? It’s that state where you lose track of time because you’re so immersed in your task.
Most people don’t expect that writing essays can end up being enjoyable, and frequently, the level of procrastination that goes into the avoidance of writing essays can pile up into real obstacles that create an experience of guilt, not joy.
However, once you’re in it and actually doing the writing itself, some people do report that the experience of creating a good essay is gratifying.
If you want to know more about flow, here’s a good summary of the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. We’re guessing you have experienced flow in other contexts before, whether that was snowboarding, playing video games, programming a computer, or writing a song.
One way to set yourself up for the possibility of experiencing flow in the writing of MBA essays is to have enough skill that you’re not floundering with the process itself. That means setting yourself up with a map of what the essay needs to say. The very first step is studying the question. Hard. Not just reading it and thinking you understand what it means, but dissecting it and really examining it.
Most people trying for an MBA are doing so because to some degree or another, they’re dissatisfied with life as they’re living it (which, honestly, most of us are, in the third year of a pandemic, so yeah). Studying the factors that make life more interesting, fun, fulfilling can get you there whether or not you’re back in school learning how to be more valuable to businesses who want to pay you the big bucks. Examining where you find flow in your life — and creating circumstances within which flow can occur — this can make things more interesting, no matter what you’re working to improve.
And, brainstorming.
Ideation is the process of churning through ideas and coming up with new ones and looking at options for what might work for this prompt. It’s critical as a necessary step to the end result of a good essay.
Many people skip the ideation phase and go straight into writing, which means that they set themselves up for more rework than necessary. If you don’t do the ideation first, then you’re going to end up doing it later — after you’ve thrown out the first few drafts that were actually dead ends.
To have the most efficient process in the end, you need to front-load the heavy lifting. The heavy lifting is the part where you do the thinking about stuff.
Thinking is hard work. Get as much of that out of the way early on, and you’re more likely to end up in a flow state when it comes time to actually write the draft.
(Shameless plug: Our Essay Ideas App Accelerator can help with some of the hard thinking tasks.)
We promised in the title to today’s post that we’d talk about getting more out of life, so go back to that summary of the concepts of flow and study what they are offering. It’s possible to get into a flow state even on a task you don’t really want to do. That’s pure magic, my friend.
Tell us what you think.