+flow
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
on Flow
Today you might hear self-help gurus talk about flow so constantly that the monosyllable has become a cliché without a clear definition. Csikszentmihalyi summed it up this way:
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.
That’s pretty good. But of all the passages in his 1990 book Flow, I think this one comes closest to capturing the nearly spiritual quality that he was trying to convey:
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. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives
Flow suggests a waterway—something liquidly effortless, an unimpeded stream. But the wisdom of Csikszentmihalyi was to recognize that well-being is no lazy river. It is neither ease nor effortlessness that leads to the highest happiness. It is something close to their opposite. It is immersion in an activity that is hard, but just hard enough; it is the discovery of comfort at the outer realm of difficulty. Life feels best, not when it is smoothed with frictionlessness, but when it is filled with achievable challenges.
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