The zone of proximal development is magic.

Too far beyond your ability: impossible, frustrating, noise.

Too close to your ability: boring, safe, uninteresting.

Proximal development: interesting, challenging, growth.

In humans the zone of proximal development is called the "flow state"--a resonant emotional experience, you "feel like a million bucks".

But other systems have it as well, and it's magical for them, too.

The zone of proximal development is the goldilocks zone of maximum growth and learning.

Easy enough to keep at it; hard enough to stretch you.

Stretch just a bit, but within your adjacent possible.

A lot of secrets of success in a system is to keep it in its zone of proximal development as much as possible.

How do you maximize the amount of time the system is in its zone of proximal development?

How do you create your maximal learning environment?

A couple of examples:

Toddlers will lock into their zones of proximal development, do a task 10 times in a row until they master it.

As a parent you see this happen often, perhaps once a day, always on a different task.

They're locked in at that moment, totally focused on repeating the task.

But never for a task they were told to do, always for a thing they decided to do on their own.

Coevolutionary loops in adaptive systems are also a mutual zone of proximal development.

Coevolutionary loops give huge amounts of momentum.

Because you have an adversary that is well matched and you keep on trying to get an edge, which leads them to match and find a new edge, back and forth.

Constantly in the zone of proximal development.

One of the reasons Generative Adversarial Networks work so well.