Your Team Is Your Flow State
The conditions for doing your best work are mostly created by the people around you
The best work doesn’t feel like work. The hours disappear, the thinking feels easy, and you’re not grinding through a problem, you’re just inside it. When you finally look up, you can’t quite believe what got built.
Most people who care about their work have had this at least once, and most of them can’t explain why it happened when it did, or why it’s so hard to reproduce on purpose.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it flow: total absorption in an activity, where the experience itself becomes so rewarding that the work continues for its own sake. I read his work years ago and the concept stayed with me, not the research framework, but the feeling he was describing. What his framework doesn’t fully account for is the role of the people around you.
The framework is right, but it’s incomplete
Csikszentmihalyi was studying individuals. The conditions he identified for flow are almost entirely about the work itself: the right challenge-to-skill ratio, clear goals, immediate feedback. His framework is right, but it treats flow as something a person either achieves or doesn’t, based on their own internal state and the nature of the task.
What I’ve come to believe, from watching teams over years, is that the environment is most of the conditions, and the environment is mostly made of people.
The conditions are mostly other people
Among the states Csikszentmihalyi identified as essential to flow: no worry of failure, and distractions excluded from consciousness.
These sound like individual mental disciplines, but they’re not, or at least not entirely. You can’t decide to stop worrying about failure, but you can be in an environment where failure is handled safely, where a mistake is treated as information rather than evidence of inadequacy. You can’t will away interpersonal distraction, but you can be on a team where trust is high enough that you’re not spending mental energy reading the room or second-guessing how something you said landed.
Your team isn’t separate from your capacity for great work, it’s a direct input to it.
The highest-performing teams have one thing in common
Google spent two years studying what actually predicted team performance. Their Project Aristotle research looked at hundreds of teams and found that the answer wasn’t individual talent, role clarity, or average IQ. It was psychological safety, defined as the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. That finding is usually discussed as a management insight, but it’s also a flow insight. The conditions psychological safety creates (reduced fear of failure, lower self-consciousness, freedom from social monitoring) are exactly the conditions that make flow accessible. A great team doesn’t put you directly into flow, it removes the friction that keeps you out of it.
Who you hire determines whether flow is even possible
Across every team I’ve built over the years, including at Big Cartel, I’ve watched this play out in both directions. The hires that changed the conditions for the better are easy to feel: something shifts, people seem lit up. The ones that didn’t work out taught me more. A person can be genuinely talented, even excellent at their craft, and still change the conditions of the environment for the worse. Not because they’re a bad person, but because the fit with how the team operates isn’t there.
The framing I’ve landed on isn’t culture fit. That implies the culture is a fixed target and new people need to match it. Culture is always changing; the same team evolves over time, and new people are part of that evolution. The more honest question is: does this person strengthen the conditions that make great work possible? Does their presence make it easier for the people around them to get into flow, or harder?
When it isn’t right, the signs are hard to miss: more relationship management, more ambient tension, more cognitive overhead spent on interpersonal dynamics instead of the work itself. The wrong person doesn’t just underperform. They make flow harder for everyone around them, regardless of how capable they are individually.
Most career decisions skip the most important question
Joining a team is a flow decision, even when nobody frames it that way. The questions most people lead with when evaluating a role (product, compensation, trajectory, growth potential) are real, but they don’t tell you whether you’ll consistently be able to do your best work there.
The problem is that the easy questions don’t surface this. “Is the culture good?” gets a yes from everyone. “Are the people smart?” Yes. “Is it a good business?” Obviously. These answers are almost always true and tell you almost nothing useful.
What’s harder to assess, and what actually matters, is more specific. Seen through the lens of what flow actually requires:
Does failure carry social cost here? Not the official line, but what actually happens when someone gets something wrong. If mistakes are treated as evidence of inadequacy rather than information, part of your brain will always be managing that risk instead of doing the work.
Can you lose yourself here? Flow requires self-consciousness to disappear. That only happens when you trust the people around you enough to stop monitoring yourself, to speak before an idea is fully formed, to raise a concern without gaming out how it will land. After an hour talking to these people, did you feel more like yourself, or more careful?
Is feedback here something that happens with you, or to you? The distinction matters more than the timing. Fast, direct feedback exists on plenty of teams, but what’s rarer is feedback from someone who’s been paying close enough attention to say something true, and who you believe is being honest because they want you to grow rather than because it’s efficient. When that’s the context, you can push back, sit with it, have a real conversation instead of spending the rest of the day managing your reaction to it. That overhead isn’t just frustrating. It keeps you out of flow.
Do people operate from shared values, not stated ones? Shared values reduce the cognitive overhead of working together. When you’re not constantly translating or interpreting, the cognitive space that frees up is exactly where flow lives.
None of these questions are on most people’s interview checklist but they probably should be.
The best career moves aren’t always to the biggest company or the most exciting product. Sometimes the right move is to the team where you consistently find yourself looking up at the end of the day, not quite believing what got built, because the conditions were right, not because you worked harder.
Those conditions are mostly the people around you. That’s worth looking for on purpose.