“The way to get out of the competition trap is to be authentic, to find the thing you know how to do better than anybody. You know how to do it better because you love it, and no one can compete with you.”
It was a humid summer afternoon in 1978 and Jay-Z was on his way home to the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn after a Little League game. As he wandered the maze of concrete paths, he noticed a group of kids huddled, rocking back and forth in a circle. Jay-Z shouldered his way toward the middle to see what was going on.
When he got through the crowd, he found an older kid named Slate freestyling and rhyming at the center. Slate threw out lyrics off the top of his head, rhyme after rhyme like he was possessed. He carried on like this for 30 minutes without pausing to stop.
Jay-Z was captivated. He had never seen anything like it. And he immediately thought, I want to do that…no, I know I can do that.
As soon as Jay-Z got home, he grabbed a spiral notebook and started filling it with his own rhymes. He covered every crevice on the page with lyrics—horizontally, vertically, writing as small as he could. He pounded beats on the kitchen table. He scoured dictionaries for new words. From the time he woke up in the morning until he went to sleep, he practiced. He lived and breathed rapping, writing lyrics, and composing rhymes.
Poetry came naturally. And he didn’t view the hours he spent practicing as painstaking work. It was something he loved to do.
Even when Jay-Z was out running around town with his friends, if a rhyme came to him, he would stop what he was doing, grab a brown paper bag from the corner store, and spread it on a mailbox to write down the idea to get it out of his head. His mind was constantly working, turning things over. Nothing was more important than writing rhymes.
As Jay-Z got older, another rapper named Jaz-O took him under his wing to teach him the fundamentals. They locked themselves in a room to hone their craft together—trying new flows and pushing themselves to improve their speed, delivery, composition, and structure. At school, Jay-Z practiced to beats in the cafeteria during lunch.
Eventually, Jay-Z talked his way onto the tour of a successful rapper named Big Daddy Kane. He spent four months touring with Kane, unpaid, sleeping on the bus floor. During intermissions in the show, Jay-Z would get on stage and practice his freestyle—sharpening his lyrics and delivery.
He studied Kane on stage, watching his breath control, his wordplay, and the way he stacked rhymes. Jay-Z was a student first, enamored by the craft.
Jay-Z had found his flow—a sacred place where time seemed to melt away while focused on the task at hand. Rapping came naturally to him, and he combined this with dead-serious discipline. He could outwork anyone. Because he loved it. As he immersed himself in writing lyrics, performing, and practicing the fundamentals, he tapped into a flow state.
Find the intersection of what you love doing and what you’re good at
Your own flow state will guide you to what you should spend more time doing. It points to the intersection of what you love doing and what you’re good at. When you identify this, you can outwork just about anyone. Because you’re immersed in something deeply rewarding to you—no matter how hard it is. It’s a competitive advantage that leads toward something you are uniquely positioned to create.
Ask yourself, what activity are you engaged in when hours seem to pass by in the blink of an eye? What feels like work to other people that feels like play to you? What type of work invites you into a state of relaxed concentration where you feel like you’re in the zone?
You’re not going to win or create your best work by pursuing something that feels mundane or uninspiring. It’s impossible to keep up with someone who truly loves their craft—they are just willing to give more than you are capable of. When you’re not invested in what you’re doing, you give up on creating anything worthwhile. Life becomes an exercise in watching the hours pass, living for the weekend, jumping from one distraction to the next.
When you find your flow state, it’s not that work stops being hard. It will still feel challenging. But it will feel worth it because you’re engaged in what you’re doing. When the work you’re doing resonates with you on a deeper level, you can persevere through almost anything. You can push through endless agitations and tireless hours of practice. The work is the reward. You don’t need the same level of external validation that dictates other people’s lives because the act of doing is what’s fulfilling.
It will take years of hard work to create something meaningful—to bring the best version of your work to life. There are no shortcuts. If you want to be able to persevere long enough to create your best work, you have to find where your flow lives.
Jay-Z loved rhyming for the sake of rhyming. He immersed himself in practice—challenging himself to stack his rhymes and structure his songs in the most compelling way possible. He experimented with moving around couplets and triplets, speed rapping, and adding multiple layers of meaning. It was all he could think about. It’s what helped him make sense of the world and channel his energy.
It takes years of honing your craft before it starts to pay dividends. And honing your craft requires thousands of hours of effort and practice. That’s why it’s paramount to identify the work that energizes you and pulls you into a flow state. Leaning into that type of work will allow you to sustain the engagement over the years and decades required to become exceptional at what you do.
Magic is the product of relentless effort
After 14 years of practice, Jay-Z stepped into the beginning of his professional career. Clark Kent, an A&R representative at Atlantic Records, pushed Jay-Z to lay down a song with another rapper, Sauce Money. Patrick Lawrence, the producer in charge of booking studio time, set the date and brought the two rappers together to record.
Jay-Z and Sauce sat there laughing and telling stories for the first three hours. As the night wore on, Lawrence grew agitated. Finally, he told Jay-Z that he had to record his lines. They were running out of time.
Jay-Z asked to hear the song, so Lawrence played the track. Jay-Z began mumbling to himself over the track. He picked up a notebook and seemed to write a few things. He continued pacing, muttering words, appearing to scribble on the pages. After a few minutes, he placed the notebook on a table and told Lawrence he was ready.
Jay-Z stepped into the sound booth to record his part, and Lawrence picked up the notebook to see what he had written. The pages were completely blank. Not a single word. It was all an act. With over a decade of constant practice, Jay-Z had developed the ability to memorize all his verses instead of writing everything down. What appeared like magic to everyone else was the product of relentless effort.
But to get to that point where it looks like magic to everyone else, it requires you first to identify what immerses you in your own state of flow. That’s the work you should invest more of yourself in.
Your flow state is the clearest indicator you will get in this life. Whether it’s building, coding, cooking, leading, performing, writing—whatever provides your shortcut to a state of mind where time melts by and you’re completely immersed in your work is a signal worth following.
There’s no better indicator of who you are than the work you lose yourself in
The question you must ask yourself is, what part of your life triggers this for you? You must answer this with precision. What are you focused on when you feel like you’ve stepped into a flow state? You must constantly come back to and find a way to harness this.
I have reflected on this question more times than I can count throughout my life. I use it as a checkpoint to bring myself back into focus.
But the first time I gave it the attention it deserved, I was wandering through my mid-twenties. As I dug for my answer, I remembered how much joy writing brought me when I was growing up. It always felt natural to me and I excelled at writing assignments with less effort than my peers. I loved the puzzle of crafting and structuring a compelling story.
One afternoon I walked over to a coffee shop in Nashville near my crumbling duplex on Grandview Drive to attempt writing again. I put on my headphones, opened a word document, and started writing—whatever random thoughts came to mind. As I wrote, a great sense of relief came over me. This was my thing.
Once I found it, I was all in. I returned to that coffee shop every weeknight, like clockwork at 5:00 PM, and spent four uninterrupted hours writing. I didn’t have some grand plan to get rich off my writing. I just loved the act of writing. And I still do. That’s my craft. It’s where I go to find or lose myself. It’s how I make sense of the world.
If you’re unsure what your thing is, experiment with as many different ideas as possible. Before I realized with precision where I found my flow state, I tried returning to academia, recording music, producing music videos, pursuing medical school, working in marketing, running triathlons, and waiting tables at a Tex-Mex restaurant. It wasn’t always pretty, but each attempt taught me something new. It allowed me to cross something else off the list. And ultimately, this discovery period led back to where I found my flow state—in writing.
As long as you continue to spend your time somewhere where every hour feels like an eternity, you’ll be marginally effective. But once you identify and lean into what brings you into your flow state, you alter your trajectory. You shift the playing field in your favor. No one is going to outwork you. And there’s no better indicator of who you are than the work you lose yourself in.