The Ensō of Enthusiasm
According to James Clear, if you’re going to optimize, optimize for enthusiasm.
Here’s the thing. While optimization can be good it can also be overrated. But maybe there’s something to enthusiasm. It might even move me off the word “stoke.”
Go ahead and google enthusiasm. There’s no shortage of results.
Interesting word, enthusiasm.
It means to be filled with the spirit of god.
The word enthusiasm has 5th Century BCE roots - and like many words we casually toss around in daily speech, it carries an even deeper story in its syllables. From the Greek enthousiasmos, it originally described divine possession - en meaning “in” and theos meaning “god.” suggesting to be truly lit up by something wasn’t just being in a good mood - it was, in essence, a spiritual experience. Then at no particular moment along the historical current, sometime between the Sermon on the Mount and the last Ted Talks you watched, enthusiasm began to shed its religious mantle and picked up a secular one. But the core experience remains oddly similar: a surge of energy, a sense of inner light, and a compulsion to act. The vibe.
In the modern psychological landscape, enthusiasm is often treated as a form of positive affectivity - a trait that reflects a person’s tendency to experience high energy along with joyful and confident emotions. This kind of emotional disposition doesn’t just make a person more pleasant to be around. It shapes cognition, resilience, and creativity in profound and trackable ways. In a series of studies, psychologist Barbara Fredrickson demonstrated that positive emotions, including enthusiasm, broaden our awareness and encourage novel, varied, and exploratory thoughts and actions. She called this the Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions. In short, when we’re enthusiastic, we don’t just feel better, we think better. We build psychological and even physiological resources for the long haul.
Enthusiasm plays a key role in helping us enter what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called “flow,” that deeply satisfying mental state where time dissolves and self consciousness fades. In flow, the brain is perfectly attuned: not bored, not overwhelmed, but harmonized with the challenge at hand. Csikszentmihalyi, who spent decades interviewing artists, athletes, surgeons, and climbers, described flow as the experience where “action and awareness merge.” He found that people enter flow most easily when they engage in something they care deeply about and have developed skill in - a kind of personal calling, pursued with curiosity and enthusiasm.
Although enthusiasm is rarely listed as a required ingredient of flow, it turns out to be one of the most powerful antecedents. You can’t enter flow with indifference. You need a certain emotional spark. According to the Handbook of Positive Psychology, flow and positive affect are mutually reinforcing: feeling good supports entering flow, and being in flow enhances well-being. And while enthusiasm doesn’t guarantee flow- attention and challenge are still necessary - it lays the motivational groundwork. Bottom line - you’re far more likely to lose yourself in an activity you’re excited about.
There’s also a physiological case to be made. Enthusiastic engagement activates the brain’s dopamine system, particularly the mesolimbic pathway, which is responsible for motivation and reward anticipation. Neuroscientist Kent Berridge and others have demonstrated that dopamine is not just a pleasure molecule - it drives the “wanting” that precedes action. It’s what gets us off the couch and into the studio, the kitchen and the gym. In this sense, enthusiasm is not just an emotion but a behavioral engine.
The benefits of enthusiasm extend far beyond the moment. In a landmark 2004 paper, Fredrickson and colleagues showed that people with higher daily experiences of positive emotions, including joy, interest, and pride, built stronger coping mechanisms and had better physiological recovery after stressful events. These aren’t vague wellness claims. The researchers measured vagal tone, a biomarker of parasympathetic nervous system activity. Put simply: people who live with more positive emotional engagement bounce back faster - mentally and physically, from adversity.
Enthusiasm also has clear cognitive benefits. Decades of work by Alice Isen, a psychologist at Cornell, revealed that positive mood broadens thinking and increases creativity. In one study, doctors who were given small mood boosters like a bag of candy, made faster and more accurate diagnoses than control groups. Positive affect, which includes enthusiasm, “facilitates flexible thinking, problem solving, and the integration of information,” Isen wrote in the Review of General Psychology. That’s a clinical way of saying we think better when we’re excited.
And it’s contagious. Enthusiasm - real enthusiasm, not the loud look at me Louie type, radiates through social circles. Researchers have long observed that positive emotional states are socially transmissible. In group settings, enthusiasm helps synchronize collaboration, boost morale, and foster trust. In one widely cited paper published in Administrative Science Quarterly, groups with members who exhibited high levels of positive emotion performed better, were more cooperative, and reported higher job satisfaction. Emotional tone, it turns out, shapes team outcomes as much as strategy.
But beyond the science lies something simple and human. Enthusiasm is permission. When someone lights up - whether it’s about string theory or sourdough - it gives others quiet consent to care too. And in a cultural moment thick with irony, detachment, and chronic distraction, there’s something quietly radical about showing up to life wholeheartedly.
Philosopher Alain de Botton once suggested that enthusiasm is one of the best antidotes to disappointment, not because it prevents it, but because it infuses ordinary pursuits with meaning. When we show up with real interest, we become participants instead of spectators. And participation, over time, becomes purpose.
The benefits are not just personal. They ripple. Someone who engages enthusiastically with the world - who seeks flow, who explores, who radiates sincere energy, tends to bring out the best in others. As Mr. Rogers intimated, the people who made the deepest impressions on him weren’t necessarily the most accomplished, but the ones who were “delighted by what they were doing.” And delight doesn’t need a diploma.
So what does it look like to cultivate enthusiasm in a serious and sustained way? It’s not the same as hype. It’s quieter, more internal. It begins with noticing when you feel alert and alive, and choosing to follow that thread - not because it leads to recognition or success, but because it leads you deeper into life. It asks us to resist the gravity of distraction and apathy, and instead, pursue what energizes us.
Enthusiasm and the ensō are twin portals: one names the inspired spark, the other shows its expression. They cradle flow’s arc - from divine possession to timeless execution. It is in this holding of both excitement and creative presence that we trace our own perfect and imperfect circles.
Maybe, in the end, enthusiasm doesn’t need to be divine. But it is a form of attention. So choose what energizes you and sparks your curiosity. Notice the moments when you feel drawn to something - an idea, an activity, a conversation, and lean into it. Do more of what pulls you in. And in a world that moves us in a thousand directions, this ability to be drawn towards towards those things - whatever it may be, could be as close to sacred as we get.
Sometimes an ensō of movement is created while riding a board - and not always just sideways. And sometimes it happens in Aveiro, Portugal with longboard dancer Valeriya Gogunskaya. Pure flow state on wheels. Plus, it was World Go Skateboarding Day yesterday. Enjoy!
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This last week I’ve been reading Emerson’s essay, Compensation.
It’s a primer on Ensōnomics.
I also dig this quote.
“Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Endsō
Kike them all , love this one.