Last night at the office foosball table, I lost 10-3 to a colleague who has been playing since he was eight. My wrists were sore from the little snap on the back rod, the flick that sends the ball across the table without lifting the handle. I had the angle wrong for the first four games. Around game five I started getting it right, maybe one shot in six. He still won. I walked back to my desk annoyed and wide awake.
I keep going back to that table because the hard part is specific. I know which movement I cannot do yet: the wrist-snap flick. Difficulty by itself does not prove I am learning. It gives me something to inspect. If I practice straight shots, I will improve at straight shots; the flick uses a different motion and needs its own reps. "Practice more" is only useful when I know what I am practicing.
I first noticed this playing badminton in secondary school. My coach had us do long clears for an hour each session, and I got decent at sending the shuttle from the back court. Then someone put me at the net and I could not make the short push shot. The kid I was playing had spent his time at the net and could not clear to save his life. We were good at different parts of the game.
I read Csikszentmihalyi's book at 22 and thought flow meant a calm, almost meditative feeling. In sport, it has felt more like a balance. When the task is too easy I get bored; when I cannot see a way through it I get anxious. I am most absorbed when the next move is difficult but still within reach. It feels like effort while I am doing it. The calm comes later, when I notice I can do something that was out of reach a week earlier.
I took a while to accept what that means for practice. When I can beat my little cousin at basketball 21-4, playing him again the same way feels good but gives me little to work on. I need another challenge: shoot from farther out, play someone taller, or use my off hand. I want to find the next thing I cannot do reliably.
Looking back at the last few years, I notice that I kept improving when I raised the bar after a skill started to feel easy. That may not explain every difference in talent or progress. It is the pattern I can point to in my own experience. When I stay at the comfortable level, I stop learning much.
When the foosball flick goes wide, my first reaction is frustration. I try to ask what I can change on the next shot. If every shot went in, I would have nothing to change.
I still lost 10-3. I will probably lose the next few too. Around shot twenty-something, though, the flick came off my wrist without me thinking about it. The ball went where I wanted. Forty minutes earlier, I could not do that.