The final portion of my conversation with Hector Garcia, author of Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life, dealt with the concept of Flow.

Flow is an oft-used word in our modern world, particularly in the realm of content creation. And since that's my area of alleged expertise, I'm going to focus on that realm for this discussion.

A myth that has been perpetuated in the realm of "content creation" is that we can achieve a "flow state", wherein we exist in almost an ethereal state of content-creating bliss. We're led to believe that in this state, the words and ideas flow like Niagara Falls from our minds, which are then channeled through our voices into a microphone, or perhaps fingers on a keyboard.

While in this "flow state", we are unstoppable forces of nature, practically able to shift the speed of the Earth's rotation through the sheer volume of our work.

It turns out this isn't exactly aligned with reality.

I personally have found the process of creating content more akin to the process of converting sap from a maple tree into syrup. I watched a couple of videos on the process of making maple syrup for purposes of writing this section, and would you believe they were incredibly boring? Of course. It's about making syrup; how exciting can it be?

But there's a lot to take away from it as it pertains to this supposed "flow state" we're told exists. It does exist, but it's not nearly as sexy as the sales video for the $97 course on content creation led you to believe.

There's a lot that goes into the process of making syrup before you even drill a hole into the tree. You have to make sure you have the right kind of tree; then the weather has to be just right. Then you insert the spile into the tree, making sure it's tilted slightly down so that the sap will fall into your bucket. The sap doesn't flow like water from the faucet. It's a flow alright, but more of a steady drip. Then after a few days, you've got enough sap to boil down into syrup, which is its own lengthy process.

At the end of the day (or days), you need 40x the amount of sap as you'll wind up with syrup. In the video I watched, they collected 40 liters of sap, which was boiled down to 1 liter of syrup.

The guy says at the very end of the video that syrup you make by hand is the best syrup you'll ever taste in your life.

True dat.

There are so many ways I could take that analogy regarding content creation, but I think I'll save that for another day. Pertaining to our Ikigai, let's just say that flow doesn't just happen. Sure the magic is inside of us, but it takes a lot of work and effort to even get to the place where we can get it to come out of us. Then when it does come out, it's more of a steady drip than a waterfall.

And how sweet is the finished product after going through all that work, and then showing the world the thing we've created or accomplished while "in flow" while in alignment with our Ikigai.