Working Like a Lion

Flow state gets talked about a lot these days as more coding, analysis, and research work becomes automated by AI. But humans still need to stay very much in the loop. We have to drop in and out to supervise, steer, correct, and sometimes just sit with complexity. That switching is nontrivial. It is a lot for the brain to grok and process at the same time.

Modern knowledge work is also not linear. Our minds are closer to GPUs than assembly lines. We have to keep many threads alive at once. Context. Abstractions. Half formed ideas. Background problems quietly running while we do something else. This kind of parallelism is definitely powerful, and clearly exhausting. Yikes.

Over time, I think I have built an operating model for myself for how to scalably operate in flow state.

Work like a lion. Or more plainly, operate like an athlete.

You start with training. Reading. Practicing fundamentals. Building your knowledge system. Going deep without the pressure to immediately produce outcomes. This is where capacity is built.

Then you sprint. You operate with intent. You narrow focus. You deliver outcomes. You measure impact. You stay in it long enough to see whether the work actually mattered.

Then rest. Please, please rest. Not just switching tabs or contexts. Not pretending to slow down while still burning cycles. But real recovery.

Then you reassess. What worked. What did not. What was noise. What should change the next time around.

And then you repeat.

I increasingly believe that this is perhaps the only scalable way humans, or at least I, can operate in the long term. The time you spend in each phase can change. Some seasons demand more training. Some demand shorter sprints. Some demand longer rest. Other parts of life matter too, and they should shape the rhythm.

Ultimately, it is about finding a cadence you can sustain, evolve, and update.

Funnily enough, this reminds me of the duality of light, how it can be understood both as particles and as waves. Perhaps something similar is true for humans. When we eat, we are matter. When we run, we are matter. When we exercise, we are matter. But when we ideate, work, think, and collaborate with AI as a copilot, sometimes as an assistant, sometimes in more autonomous ways, we become more like a wave. We pick up a rhythm, and we operate within it.