Flow

MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

Reviewed by Jack

The pursuit of happiness has been contemplated by many thinkers over the ages, from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson to Viktor Frankl, and the conversation continues today. No matter how much society has evolved in physical comforts or cultural achievements, happiness remains elusive. We talk about it, we write books about it, and yet we barely recognize it.

But we have all experienced it. Happiness comes in those moments of effortless concentration when minutes, even hours, seem to pass without so much as a glance at the clock. It’s the point guard unconsciously dropping three-pointers in the big game. It’s the writer sitting at her keyboard while the story writes itself. In those moments, we have experienced what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow, when we are totally focused and completely un-self-conscious. This achievement of flow captures that longed-for state of happiness.

These moments appear to us as fleeting and unpredictable, though Csikszentmihalyi’s research shows otherwise. Certain pursuits and activities lend themselves to reaching a state of flow. Csikszentmihalyi describes the common characteristics of these activities as including “a sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal-directed, rule-bound action system that provides clear clues as to how well one is performing.” Games, in the broadest sense of the word, contain those elements. Rules provide boundaries. Practice builds skills. And scoring systems offer immediate feedback on your performance.

If jobs were constructed like games, Csikszentmihalyi posits, flow would be reached more often at work. He offers surgeons as an example of workers who reliably achieve flow. A surgeon’s goal is clear: fix what is broken. The feedback is immediate and continual: check heartbeat monitor. The intense challenge is recurring, though no surgery is the same. The operating room itself is designed to block out distractions. And because the risk is so great, a surgeon is in a state of concentration “so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted.” All of these features create an emotional rush for a surgeon. The only time a surgeon loses that level of engagement is when he or she gets into a position of rote repetition and the game becomes predictable.

Flow is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

The premise of this book is based on an experience we have all had: those precious moments when time flies and we find we have accomplished a great deal. I have included Flow here at the beginning of this section as a starting point, a broad discussion about our mental approach to accomplishing tasks. But the significance of these optimal experiences extends beyond productivity and lies in their ability to provide us with periods of happiness. I know the feeling of flow, the kind of high it gives, and as with all good things, I want to learn how to tap into that feeling more often. There seems to be no more worthwhile endeavor. JC

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Harper Perennial, Paperback 1991, ISBN 9780060920432

WHERE TO NEXT? Here for the art of possibility Here for the art of leadership Here for the art of self-awareness | EVEN MORE: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl; The Pursuit of Happiness by David G. Myers; Group Genius by Keith Sawyer