I want to describe a specific kind of evening from roughly the first four years of this — the years when I was traveling the most and the hotel room practice was most consistent.
It’s 10:30 or 11 at night. I’ve had a full day. Client meetings, presentations, the particular kind of focused professional engagement that leaves you tired in a specific way — mentally used, but not in a way that makes you want to sleep immediately. The hotel is somewhere in Austria or Germany or occasionally further afield. The room is generic: desk, bed, television I won’t turn on.
I take out the deck.
What I’m planning on is maybe thirty minutes. A manageable session given the hour and the day I’ve had.
I look up from the desk and it’s 1:30 in the morning.
The Disappearance of Time
Csikszentmihalyi’s research identified time distortion as one of the defining markers of flow. In the flow state, subjective time either speeds up or slows down — usually speeds dramatically. Three hours pass and feel like thirty minutes. You emerge from the session genuinely surprised to discover how much clock time has passed.
This is not the same as the time distortion of boredom, where time drags and you’re acutely aware of its passage. It’s the opposite: time disappears because attention is entirely occupied. There is no residual attention left over to monitor the clock.
When I first read Csikszentmihalyi’s description of this phenomenon, I recognized it immediately. I’d experienced it dozens of times in the hotel room sessions without having a name for what was happening. The evenings that turned into middle-of-the-nights were flow evenings. Something in the practice had caught, the challenge-skill balance had landed in the right zone, and the absorption had become total.
The Counterintuitive Finding
One of the less intuitive findings in the flow research is that solitary, structured activities produce flow states more reliably than social or passive activities. Most people assume that the most enjoyable experiences are social — with other people, in shared activities. And this is partly true: social activity can certainly produce flow.
But Csikszentmihalyi’s data consistently showed that passive leisure activities — watching television, resting without structure, many forms of entertainment consumption — produced low-flow states despite being rated by subjects as highly enjoyable in advance. People anticipated these activities as rewarding and then reported lower than expected engagement during them.
Meanwhile, challenging structured solitary activities — the chess player working through a problem set, the musician practicing a difficult passage, the writer wrestling with a paragraph — produced the most reliable flow states. The very activities that required effort and felt like work in advance were the ones that delivered the deepest absorption.
I find this genuinely remarkable. And it maps precisely onto the hotel room experience.
Traveling 200 nights a year, I had access to every form of passive relaxation the hotel industry could provide. Television, room service, whatever the minibar contained. I partook of all of these at various points. None of them produced anything like the quality of the evenings where I had a deck of cards and a specific problem to work on.
The work was better than the leisure.
What Made It Flow
Not every hotel room session was a flow session. There were plenty of evenings where it was genuinely thirty minutes, felt like thirty minutes, and I put the cards away and went to bed. Those sessions had value too, but they weren’t the same kind of experience.
The sessions that became flow sessions shared certain characteristics.
First: a specific problem. Not a general “I should practice tonight” intention, but a defined question or challenge. Something particular I was trying to figure out, or a specific element I was trying to improve. The specificity gave the attention somewhere to go — it created the clear goal that Csikszentmihalyi identifies as a precondition for flow.
Second: the challenge was real. It required genuine engagement. If I came to a session with material that was too easy, nothing caught. If the material was too hard and I didn’t have the tools to make progress, frustration took over and the session stalled. The sessions that became flow evenings were the ones where the challenge was at or just beyond my current level — demanding enough to require everything I had, not so demanding that I couldn’t move.
Third: there was feedback in the work itself. I could tell, in real time, whether what I was doing was working. Not external feedback — the cards themselves, the quality of the movement, the feeling of something coming together or not — provided enough immediate information that attention could stay engaged without external validation.
These three elements — clear goal, appropriate challenge, intrinsic feedback — are exactly what Csikszentmihalyi’s research identifies as the structural conditions for flow. The hotel room practice sessions that produced them weren’t accidental. They had the architecture.
The Relationship to Solitude
There’s something else about the hotel room context that I think mattered specifically: it was genuinely solitary. No audience, no judgment, no performance pressure. Just the work.
I’ve read accounts from performers in various fields of having difficulty practicing with full commitment when others are present. There’s a performance reflex that activates — some monitoring of how you appear, some management of the impression you’re making — that takes attention away from the intrinsic engagement with the task.
Alone in a hotel room at 11 at night, that reflex had nothing to activate against. There was no one to manage. The entire available attention could go to the cards and the question I was working on.
Csikszentmihalyi found that for people who had developed the capacity for solitary flow, quality of life indices were high even during time spent alone — often higher than during social time. The ability to generate deep absorption independently of social context is a significant source of resilience. You’re not dependent on external conditions to access quality experience.
The hotel room practice sessions were teaching me this capacity. Not as a theory, but as something I could reliably access with a deck of cards and a real problem to work on.
What It Left Behind
The deep flow sessions in hotel rooms over those years left something permanent that isn’t fully captured by the improvement in specific skills.
They taught me what genuine absorption feels like. Not the kind of absorbing I did at the desk all day — focused professional engagement — but something more total. The kind where self-consciousness dissolves and there’s only the problem and the attempt to solve it.
Once you’ve experienced that a number of times, you can recognize when you’re approaching it and you can sometimes recreate the conditions that produce it. You know the difference between practice that’s going through the motions and practice that’s genuinely caught.
The hotel room was the practice laboratory. But it was also something else: proof that a certain quality of experience was available, alone, late at night, with work that required me. That proof has been worth more than any specific skill that was built there.
If solitary flow is one dimension of this — the experience of the practicing performer — there’s an inverse question that follows naturally: can you design the experience of your audience to produce something like flow in them? Can you architect the show so the audience is drawn in rather than merely impressed? That’s where Csikszentmihalyi’s framework gets genuinely interesting for magic.