You might not have heard the term “flow state” before, but I can almost guarantee you’ve experienced what it describes. In simpler words, it’s when you’re in the zone, working your way through a challenge or set of tasks like a hot knife through butter. We encounter it in different settings and scenarios, but Larry Kosilla finds it in the painstaking process of car detailing.
Kosilla is the guy at Ammo NYC. He’s also the focus of The Drive‘s latest YouTube video, alongside his Porsche 964. But don’t think this is some promo shilling for a company that won’t touch a car this side of a classic 911.
Instead, this 10-minute sit-down explores the emotions and affections behind obsessive detail work. Kosilla describes the process as “4,000 little things” that most people never see, adding that it “kills [his] heart” when someone sees a car he poured days into and says, “Wow, that’s really shiny.”
“Being dirty is disorganized to me. Things are not in flow,” Kosilla told us. “If I can clean that, and take the chaos away, and bring calm in order, then my life is great.”
“I want to take things that are chaotic and bring them back to calmness, back to order,” he continued. “And it’s not about how dirty it is—it’s about going through that ritual.”
Kosilla’s 993 is proof that he lives that out on his own time, too. My favorite detail about the car is its Bentley Beluga Black paint, which he likens to “if oil came up from the ground.” Caring for it is a chore, but that’s what he signed up for. That much was evident when he purchased the Porsche and promptly removed the engine so he could spend six months piecing it back together to perfection.
I can’t say I’ve ever reached flow state while cleaning my daily driver, and I certainly haven’t while working on my rusty old junk, but what he describes certainly resonates with me on a deep level.
“Once you’re done with that whole process, and the person picks it up and they’re excited, then they drive away… There is that ultimate satisfaction,” he recounts, adding, “I know I put everything I possibly can in that. I get that high and then I go, ‘Where’s the next one?'”
Like what you see? Check out the rest of our YouTube upload library here! And for more on the concept of flow, check out psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi!