Book Babble #14: "Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

"The Psychology of Happiness"

A classic in the positive psychology movement and talking about a fundamental feature of enjoyment and production… flow!

Mihaly Csik... who? Flow… what?

Let's start off with the guy's name. I would pronounce it something like: "Mee-HAI-lee Check-SENT-me-hai" just in case you want to drop it into conversation ;). I'll be referring to him just by his first name or MC (otherwise, I would lose my sense of flow and MC wouldn't want that)…

Mihaly is a Hungarian psychologist and this encompasses the central work of his career - that being a highly focused mental state, the science behind it and how to achieve it.

He's a member of a 'new wave' of people in the industry that came to prominence at the start of this century and the emerging field of positive psychology.

Up to this point, most of psychology focused on the negative - helping people from going from an adverse psychological state (perhaps with 'mental illnesses' like schizophrenia or depression for example) to some sort of 'normal'. By the way, I use these terms very lightly to make my point, there are some societies that hold people with so-called disorders in high regard as they believe them to be advanced or have contact with another plain. But that's another article.

So, psychologists (and related professions) were about taking people from -10 up to 0. Some sort of equilibrium for a reasonable life. The positive psychology wave is more about taking you from +2 to 10, ie. the other side of the equation, from just basic 'getting by' to thriving, excelling and enjoying.

You could say that Abraham Maslow was the grandfather of this back in the 1960s but the more modern 'father' of the movement is said to be Martin Seligman. He has books of course too, so maybe we'll take a peek at his chit-chat another day. Along with Seligman, we had Mihaly himself along with others who have continued the work.

Flow could also be said to be in the zone, where time stops still and you feel yourself engrossed in a task and nothing else exists. You are in the moment and in your element. We've all had glimpses of this but it's about increasing the frequency and intensity.

Quotes from the book followed by my additional thoughts…

“We are always getting to live,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson used to say, “but never living.”

Actually living the life rather than just going through the motions. Living for the hope of tomorrow rather than fully embracing today.

There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.

You're going to have a spot of trouble with the former. I mean, you'll do yourself a serious mischief and even if successful will require a lot of effort… and I'm not quite sure how you can possibly control things out of your control.

The latter is where it's at. We can certainly do what we can to influence the outside world to our liking, but how we process the experience and fit them into our plans is where the fun lies.

What I 'discovered' was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

You're in control. Nurture that control. Interpretation and reaction are key.

"Don't aim at success–the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself" ~ Quoted preface of Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Happiness and success come as a result of pursuing a 'higher' calling.

The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Finding out what you're capable of. Pushing your body and mind to their limits in a controlled way expands the boundaries.

Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfilment.

Enjoy the process, appreciate the working parts. This will help obstacles fall away or be less of an issue.

How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences.

It's all perception. We filter the world through our worldview, we must adjust this accordingly.

The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.

Back to the old journey vs destination debate. Both are important and it's never one or the other. The point here, is that if you're overly focused on arriving you'll miss everything along the way, and that may even affect the outcome too. I agree, that makes the 'journey' less pleasurable and more pressure on the end result and the feelings that go with it. Also it makes you less malleable - you may need to adapt your plans as conditions change. The goal is only ever a target to keep you on track, but targets move, as should you.

To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.

Unshakeable central core regardless of outside circumstances. Having that inner resolve and confidence.

The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment.

It's up to you what you take from any given situation.

The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.

This is the Utopian wonderland! Could you imagine??

Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.

This is key. If a task is too difficult, then it induces anxiety. Too easy and you get boredom. You need to be doing activities that give enough of a challenge to make things interesting, without being so much that they're overwhelming. Find that balance and you might meet up with our old friend flow.

Thanks MC! Anything else?

It's all a bit heavy going in places and can drag on a bit. Some parts are super interesting but I don't really need to know all the science behind it or the experiments involved. That's not my bag, but many people do like the behind the scenes, nuts and bolts.

Overall, the book is great and I've heard some describe it as a 'life-changer'. I wouldn't go that far, but certainly worth a read if you're into this type of thing, want to achieve this sort of state and discover more of the science behind it as well as the positive psychology field in general. You will for sure retrieve some gold nuggets from the book but it will take a bit of effort to get through and a second reading may be pushing it a bit.

As for the core subject of the book - you wouldn't want to be in an intense flow state the whole time, but we do want to be able to dip into it at will to focus and achieve what we want to achieve. It's the hallmark of great sportspeople of course, musicians and many 'creatives' out there. It can also apply to the most seemingly banal of tasks.

It's available to all and worth being aware of and tapped into… I would say even more so now in this modern, technological age. It's increasingly difficult to keep our concentration due to constant ridiculous distractions.

Make no mistake, this affects the rest of your life too. If you've got this area going well, I think everything else falls into place. If you haven't, you feel like something's missing and you're unfulfilled. It's partly why I do these Book Babbles ;).

Recently, I've been thinking of a quote from Charles Bukowski – "find what you love and let it kill you". To me that means finding out what you're really passionate about and throwing yourself in full force. That's flow.

Another quote that springs to mind - "Never make fun of someone's passion, because that's the thing that saves them from the world". Remember that for both yourself and others. Finding that thing, doing it in something akin to a flow state, and sharing it with the world could be the difference for the individual, those around them and the people it reaches.

And how about you? Have you read the book? And what's your flow activity?

Check out the others in the series…