In the Zone

One of the segments of This American Life (my favorite radio program/podcast) last week followed someone exploring the question of whether you would still love the thing you love if you did it as a living. It's an interesting question, actually. There are some people whose work is their passion, but most for most of us the things we really love are hobbies. This particular person described how with his work (writing) he constantly feels the need to get up and do something else, to distract himself every ten minutes or so. But with his hobby, he can work for hours without once feeling the need to even look at the clock. And he wondered if that ability to get in the zone would still be there were he to begin doing his hobby for a living.

That very day I had been thinking about something related to that. There was a ward social on Friday night, and for the hour prior I gave up on trying to be productive with my schoolwork and worked instead on some math problems I've been puzzling through (not for fun - there's a legitimate reason I'm working through these problems). Shortly before the social, I got stuck on a problem and essentially got swallowed up with trying to solve it. I had to force myself to put down the pencil and walk over to the Institute building, and on my way all I kept puzzling it out. In fact, as I passed the school of Social Work, I had an idea and sat down on a bench to try to work it out (it didn't work), and again I had to force myself to get up and continue on to the Institute. I thought perhaps I wouldn't stay more than an hour or so, so that I could go home and do more math.

And it struck me while I was having these thoughts just how rare this experience was for me. I don't tend to think, "Oh man! It's six o'clock and I should go home, but I really, really want to finish writing this paragraph, or work out what this author is saying, or figure out what this data means." I don't lose myself in educational research the way I can lose myself in math problem or a math application. They are two very different types of problem-solving, and the one makes me just want to give up and avoid it when I run into snags (which are many and incomprehensible), while the other (at least sometimes, which is a heck of a lot more than never) makes me want to keep plugging away, even to the sacrificing of other things I enjoy.

Remembering how much I like this particular kind of problem solving made me think a little. And listening to the radio program later on (much later - I didn't leave early to go work on math after all) made me think some more. Would I lose myself that way if I had to work on problems like that? Would I still find it engaging? Or would it lose its appeal?

I have no illusions. I don't expect that I could lose myself all the time in my work. But it would be kind of nice to be able to lose myself at least sometimes.