We tend to imagine happiness as a life of rest and leisure. But after years of study, one psychologist found that our deepest satisfaction arrives somewhere else — in the middle of a demanding task, where challenge and skill are finely matched and the ordinary sense of time and self slips away
spacedaily.com
The afternoon at the second café is where it tends to happen, if it happens at all. The morning block is the warm-up. Lunch breaks the day open. Then sometime between two and four, in a place that isn’t my desk and isn’t where I started, the focus I have been chasing all morning finally […]

Again and again, he found that people reported some of their most positive experiences not during passive rest, but when they were absorbed in something demanding enough to stretch them and structured enough to let them respond. Challenge sitting a hair above skill. Goals clear. Feedback immediate. The self, for the duration, mostly out of the way.

In his own words: “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” (Flow, 1990, p. 3)