Experts derive great satisfaction from working at the edge of their ability

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The personal benefits could be tremendous as well. I have spoken very little of this here, but expert performers get great satisfaction and pleasure from exercising their abilities, and they feel a tremendous sense of personal accomplishment from pushing themselves to develop new skills, particularly skills that are on the very edges of their fields. It is as if they are on a constantly stimulating journey where boredom is never a problem because there are always new challenges and opportunities. And those experts whose skills relate to some sort of performance—the musicians, dancers, gymnasts, and so forth—report getting great pleasure from performing in public. When everything goes well they experience a level of effortlessness similar in many ways to the psychological state of “flow” popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This gives them a precious “high” that few people other than experts ever experience.

One of the most exciting times in my life was when I worked with Herb Simon and he received the Nobel Prize. Everyone in our group had this sense of being at the frontier of our area of science and feeling really lucky to be there. I imagine it must have been the same sort of excitement that the Impressionists felt as they were working to revolutionize art.