Flow
February 20th, 2005The Psychology of Optimal Experience
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
ISBN: 0060920432
Generally speaking, I am too judgemental and practical a person to invest much energy or belief in ideas which, when written in book form, can be found in the self-help section of a bookstore. But people who didn’t strike me as flaky recommended this book, and the general buzz about it was positive. So despite it at first setting off my flakiness meter, I decided I wanted to read it.
Flow is how Csikszentmihalyi refers to the experience of being so engrossed in an activity that one doesn’t have any attention left over — the passage of time doesn’t matter or isn’t noticed, being cold or hungry isn’t noticed — because nothing intrudes to interrupt the activity during flow.
Most people have had the experience of being “in the zone” or “in the groove” when at work, or in athletic pursuits, or when engaged in artistic endeavors. Flow as the “optimial experience” is what Csikszentmihalyi’s book attempts to explain: how it works, how people can increase the likelihood they’ll be in states of flow, and how flow states improve life.
But Flow is not a how-to book. There isn’t a list of ten steps to reach flow, or seven effective habits to maintain flow, or five traps that keep you from reaching flow. Csikszentmihalyi avoids the quick-fix guarantees that doom so many so-called psychology books written for a general audience. Instead, he explains general principles, cites numerous examples, and puts the onus back on the reader to make changes (or not) in their patterns of thinking and acting.
Whether or not you will find his ideas revolutionary, ho-hum, or just common sense will depend on your own point of view, and I suspect, whether or not you feel like you spend much time in “flow activities” already.
In a nutshell, flow is possible when a person’s skills match the challenge facing them, when a person has clear goals, and when feedback is forthcoming. In other words, if a task is too easy, it doesn’t demand complete attention. If you don’t know why you are doing something (whether it is trying to beat your personal high score on a video game or graduate with a 4.0) it won’t completely absorb you. If you have no way of measuring yourself, of determining if you are nearer your goal, you are frustrated and unlikely to sustain your course of action.
Csikszentmihalyi goes to some length to point out that flow doesn’t have to be about climbing Mount Everest or writing the Great American Novel. Flow can be about making better use of your time in line at the grocery store or being less frustrated with a seemingly boring job, all because you learn how to control your consciousness.
Controlling your consciousness also has the upside of not leaving you open to mass media commercial messages, which presumably you’d otherwise be mindlessly ingesting along with your beer at the end of a drudgery-filled work week. I don’t mean to be snide here — as I am in general agreement with his point of view — it is just that this book didn’t set my brain on fire in the way I had expected it to.
Perhaps that is because I am lucky: I enjoy my work, I enjoy my leisure-time pursuits, and I am reasonably able to keep my focus on living in the present. I can’t really put myself in the position of not being this way and then trying to guess what impact reading this book may have.
That said, I’d recommend this book to folks who are interested the buzz about the psychology of happiness as an intellectual pursuit. To folks who are wondering if reading Flow will open up new ideas and possibilities for enjoyment in daily life, I’d say if you are already living a life with a reasonable amount of enjoyment in it, you don’t really need to read about it, do you?
