Flow: Being your best
Psychology, for long, has been focused on investigating what’s wrong with people and how to remedy those issues. However, over the last few decades, with the advent of Positive Psychology, there’s a lot more discussion and discourse on how to live happier, and more fully, and the book which is at the epitome of this movement is Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
First published in 1992, the book is timeless, and every time you read it you get newer insights. By no means a fast or an easy read. You would be required to read slow, take appropriate pauses to reflect, and then take efforts to bring some of those insights to your thinking and leading a more fulfilling life.
Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as,
“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.” (pp.4)
The hallmark of this book is the only graph which it has: The Flow Channel.
The Flow Channel is signified by a balance of difficulty and skill, where one strives to take up newer challenges while also investing in developing adequate skills to remain interested and develop oneself in the process.
We all have our flow channels: playing musical instruments, reading and reviewing books, writing stories and poems, playing sports, tracking, cycling, or several other activities that involve us completely, leaving little mental energy to think of anything else. The book sheds light on how to have an optimal experience while trying to be in a state of flow for extended periods of time.
The author contends: “optimal experience depends on the ability to control what happens in consciousness moment by moment, (and) each person has to achieve it on the basis of his own individual efforts and creativity.” (pp.5)
Such experiences are characterized by a situation where: people become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing. (pp.53)
He further adds that the control of consciousness determines the quality of life. The information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important as it determines the content and the quality of our life. It is further shaped by our psychic energy, which is determined by what we chose to pay our attention to. A disruption in our consciousness leads to psychic entropy, leading to internal disorder.
To quote the great emperor Marcus Aurelius, “If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.”
Csikszentmihalyi characterizes those in a perpetual state of flow as follows.
Such individuals lead vigorous lives, are open to a variety of experiences, keep on learning until the day they die, and have strong ties and commitments to other people and to the environment in which they live. They enjoy whatever they do, even if tedious or difficult; they are hardly ever bored, and they can take in stride anything that comes their way. Perhaps their greatest strength is that they are in control of their Iives. (pp.10)
The author distinguishes between pleasure and enjoyment and contends that while pleasure makes up happy, enjoyment by involving challenge in the task we perform adds complexity to our lives and helps us grow. In fact, most enjoyable activities are not natural, they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. Enjoy, says the author, doesn’t depend on what you do, but rather on how you do it.
In a state of flow, a person experiences a loss of self-consciousness which doesn’t involve a loss of self, and certainly not a loss of consciousness, but rather, only a loss of consciousness of the self. As it turns out, occasionally giving up self-consciousness is necessary for building a strong self-concept.
He identifies eight conditions of what qualifies as a flow activity, or where one feels in control of the psychic energy.
- The experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing
- We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing
- The concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals
- The task provides immediate feedback
- One acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life
- Enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions
- Concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over, and finally
- The sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours.
The author concludes that the combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it. (pp.49)
Each para in this book is deeply researched and highly relevant, and requires re-reading.
A few incisive quotes from the book.
Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experiences will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy… It is a circuitous path that begins with achieving control over the contents of our consciousness. (pp.2)
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. (pp.3)
The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy — or attention — is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action… These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives. (pp.6)
There is no inherent problem in our desire to escalate our goals, as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way. (pp.10)
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. (pp.16)
The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment. (pp.19)
Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act. (pp.52)
What people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations. It is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines. Only when a doubtful outcome is at stake, and one is able to influence that outcome, can a person really know whether she is in control. (pp.61)
We have seen how people describe the common characteristics of optimal experience: 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. Concentration is 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. An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult, or dangerous. (pp.71)
Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed to reduce the impact of randomness on experience. They are adaptive responses, just as feathers are for birds and fur is for mammals. Cultures prescribe norms, evolve goals, build beliefs that help us tackle the challenges of existence. In so doing they must rule out many alternative goals and beliefs, and thereby limit possibilities; but this channeling of attention to a limited set of goals and means is what allows effortless action within self-created boundaries. (pp.81)
Children who grow up in family situations that facilitate clarity of goals, feedback, feeling of control, concentration on the task at hand, intrinsic motivation, and challenge will generally have a better chance to order their lives so as to make flow possible. (pp.89)
In many respects, what the West has accomplished in terms of harnessing material energy is matched by what India and the Far East have achieved in terms of direct control of consciousness. (pp.103)
Unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment: it will focus on some real or imaginary pain, on recent grudges or long-term frustrations. Entropy is the normal state of consciousness — a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable. (pp.119)
But if control of consciousness is judged to be at least as important as the ability to get things done, then learning complex patterns of information by heart is by no means a waste of effort. A mind with some stable content to it is much richer than one without. It is a mistake to assume that creativity and rote learning are incompatible. Some of the most original scientists, for instance, have been known to have memorized music, poetry, or historical information extensively. (pp.123)
Philosophy and science were invented and flourished because thinking is pleasurable. (pp.126)
Writing gives the mind a disciplined means of expression. (pp.131)
There are few things as entropic as unskilled work done under compulsion. (pp.143)
Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. (pp.162)
The quality of life depends on two factors: how we experience work, and our relations with other people. (pp.164)
The way to grow while enjoying life is to create a higher form of order out of the entropy that is an inevitable condition of living. (pp.172)
The reason tragic events were seen as positive was that they presented the victim with very clear goals while reducing contradictory and inessential choices. (pp.193)
The recognition that one’s goals may have to be subordinated to a greater entity, and that to succeed one may have to play by a different set of rules from what one would prefer — is a hallmark of strong people. (pp.204)
To be able to transform random events into flow, one must develop skills that stretch capacities, that make one become more than what one is. Flow drives individuals to creativity and outstanding achievement. (pp.213)
What counts is not so much whether a person actually achieves what she has set out to do; rather, it matters whether effort has been expended to reach the goal, instead of being diffused or wasted. (pp.217)
If goals are well chosen, and if we have the courage to abide by them despite opposition, we shall be so focused on the actions and events around us that we won’t have the time to be unhappy. And then we shall directly feel a sense of order in the warp and the woof of life that fits every thought and emotion into a harmonious whole. (pp.227)
On the process of creativity (pp.136–137)
Nicolaus Copernicus perfected his epochal description of planetary motions while he was a canon at the cathedral of Frauenburg, in Poland. Astronomical work certainly didn’t help his career in the Church, and for much of his life the main rewards he had were aesthetic, derived from the simple beauty of his system compared to the more cumbersome Ptolemaic model. Galileo had been trained in medicine. and what drove him into increasingly dangerous experimentation was the delight he took in figuring out such things as the location of the center of gravity of various solid objects.
Isaac Newton formulated his major discoveries soon after he received his B.A. at Cambridge, in 1665, when the university was closed because of the plague. Newton had to spend two years in the safety and boredom of a country retreat, and he filled the time playing with his ideas about a universal theory of gravitation.
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, held to be the founder of modern chemistry, was a public servant working for the Ferme Generale, the equivalent of the IRS in prerevolutionary France. He was also involved in agricultural reform and social planning, but his elegant and classic experiments are what he enjoyed doing most Luigi Galvani, who did the basic research on how muscles and nerves conduct electricity, which in turn led to the invention of the electric battery, was a practicing physician until the end of his life.
Gregor Mendel was another clergyman, and his experiments that set the foundations of genetics were the results of a gardening hobby. When Albert A. Michelson, the first person in the United States to win a Nobel prize in science, was asked at the end of his life why he had devoted so much of his time to measuring the velocity of light, he is said to have replied, “It was so much fun.”
And, lest we forget, Einstein wrote his most influential papers while working as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. These and the many other great scientists one could easily mention were not handicapped in their thinking because they were not “professionals” in their field, recognized figures with sources of legitimate support. They simply did what they enjoyed doing.