Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Review & Rating: Weak 8. But Definitely not a 6. /10

A book about Flow State from the researcher who popularized in modern work culture. Flow is about achieving mastery over your life. It’s also referred to as deep work and the optimal experience. The state where you are so immersed in an activity that you forget all sense of time, you forget to eat, shit and feel euphoric.

The common view on flow, the optimal experience, is that it’s the icing on the cake of health and wealth. The book argues against this. Flow is the foundation required to build sustainable health and wealth. Health and wealth shouldn’t be viewed in materialistic results but through translation to quality of experiences.

The book delves into what flow states are, how to build them into your life and why they matter. I found the book to be repetitive. I also had to consider the author’s own prejudices when he’d cherry pick various examples to support his points.

I had expected it to be a dense tome of psychological research. Instead, I found it to be a book granting me permission to follow my curiosity. The result of following curiosity is hitting flow state which will not only result in better performance but a happier life. We all know it’s right to follow your curiosity. Some need a push and this book is one more resource that can help with that. Yet another way to rationalize the choice we want to make but are too afraid to. I think it’ll help readers move one step closer to living a life honest to who they are.

I found chapter eight to be the most valuable. It doesn’t touch on flow states directly. Rather, it looks deep into our relationship with the self, the social elements of friend, family, and community in relation to understanding and developing the self.

Book Notes:

It’s “Why” over “What”. Those who chase “what” are on a treadmill of dissatisfaction:

“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.” - Viktor Frankl

The “optimal experience”, what folks synonymously refer to as “flow” is something one creates. It’s not handed down. Only you can intentionally stretch your mind to the edge of its abilities. An inability to have optimal experiences means the fault resides in the individual.

Mihaly’s definition of flow:

“…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.”

Control of one’s experience and the ability to derive joy from it is how one achieves fulfillment. Wealth and power can aid in this pursuit but it’s a tricky slope the person without self-awareness will not be able to utilize properly.

Happiness is about inner harmony. Not our control on the external world but control of the internal.

Unattainable goals can lead to resentment. A balancing act is required to have goals that are achievable, to keep his ambition, whilst being present enough to feel contentment every day. The prerequisite to achieving the balance appears to be “control over one’s life”.

You can’t play every game. Pick the few to focus on. Everything else, you can get decent at.

Civilization is built on repressing individual desires.

Mihaly believes social order can only be established by forcing habits and skills that the culture required on individuals. I disagree. A proper allocation based on individual conditions and strength can achieve the same. Capitalistic incentives achieve the same without forcing as well.

I noticed Mihaly to be rather pessimistic about humanity. His views seem to be influenced by the generation (i.e. a highly critical view on divorce).

Control over one’s life requires liberation from external things. Consider Taoism, Stoicism, Zen Buddhism for reference.

“….if Christ had returned to preach his message of liberation in the Middle Ages, he would have been crucified again and again by the leaders of that very church whose worldly power was built on his name.”

Flow is about achieving mastery over my life. That requires control over my consciousness. This requires control over the quality of experiences. Quality is controlled through intrinsic motivation (instead of extrinsic). This focuses on what to do in the present versus what you want in the future.

Consciousness + Intention + Attention = Flow. Consciousness is the manifestation of everything we’ve selectively taken in via our senses. Intention is what we do with the information from consciousness. It can be instinctual like eating because our consciousness tells us we are hungry or led by us, choosing not to eat so we can lose weight given our consciousness of our physiology. Attention is how we use the limited hours of energy per day (about 1/3 of our waking moment) to select the information we allow into our consciousness.

Whatever we repeatedly give attention to will morph our consciousness and attention. Assigning attention to garbage will fill the consciousness with garbage and all intention will be trash.

Control over life begins with deciding what to give attention to. This includes purposefully recharging (i.e. meditation, exercise, walks). We have limited attention and choosing to focus is another choice after selecting what to give attention to.

Attention is energy. Energy we use to invest to shape our being, which is in turn shaped by it.

Consider how an accidental event like seeing the coral reef on vacation imposes on a person’s consciousness. This leads to placing attention on the self’s feelings and experiences (self-awareness). This leads to setting goals with the intention to become a marine biologist. This requires attention to achieve the goals (the self’s intention leads the attention).

Psychic entropy is when information disrupts consciousness by threatening goals. This is a disorganization of the self and if not dealt with, will impair the self’s ability to give attention and set goals.

Mihaly notes how divorces lead to situations where the separated parents each compete for the love of their children. This creates psychic entropy for young children, often leading to suicides. I can empathize with why Mihaly is critical of divorces given their impact on the children who grow up in such environment. I don’t think the problem is the divorce but people are not ready for the responsibility of having children having them. If the problem of divorce is the impact on children, we should be examining the problem of people who aren’t fit to be parents having kids in the first place. I think children are ruined by parents. Every child comes into existence ready to be molded and it’s what their biggest influences (the parents) do that determines in large part who they become and what they do in society. Being a parent is a thankless job and those not prepared for that struggle have no business jumping into it light-heartedly.

Discipline is the battle for the self. A struggle to control attention.

“Flow helps to integrate the self because in that state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well ordered. Thoughts, intentions, feelings, and all the senses are forced on the same goal. Experience is in harmony."

Qualify of experience > wealth, power, status, sex. Fitness and wealth are great if they make us feel better. But most who have them find themselves on a vicious cycle for more.

“….instead of worrying about how to make a million dollars or how to win friends and influence people, it seems more beneficial to find out how everyday life can be made more harmonious and more satisfying, and thus achieve by a direct route what cannot be reached through the pursuit of symbolic goals."

Enjoyment is the fulfillment you experience from focused work (i.e. reading, exercising, your craft). Pleasure requires no effort (i.e. things you can buy). Quality of experience requires learning to build enjoyment in everyday activities.

Enjoyment of task requires: 1) ability to complete, 2) able to concentrate on the task (no distractions like phones or people!), 3) clear goals, 4) immediate feedback (the kind doesn’t matter, only that it tells you if you’ve achieved your goal), 5) tasks that remove frustrations of everyday life because of the intense concentration they require, 6) control over action (not being in control but exercising control), 7) loss of self-consciousness (fear of the external eye), 8 ) sense of duration of time is altered.

You can make waiting at the doctor’s enjoyable by incorporating the eight elements above. An hour of waiting can be made purposeful by reading a book to get better at one’s craft while listening to ambient music that blocks out chatter to focus on reading.

Enjoyable activities that produce flow can get highly addictive. Consider investing or other games of chance. Surgeons say operations become addictive and it’s like taking heroin. The negative to flow is when one loses control and becomes captive to the experience.

Autotelic experience is an activity where itself is the reward and it's not done for an expected future benefit. Investing to make money in the future is not autotelic but to do it so learn more about a business or the world within is. This is the journey versus destination argument. Finding autotelic tasks seems essential for flow state but also to find something worth mastering. Rather, I think you can’t master something that isn’t autotelic. Autotelic means the person is paying attention to the activity for its own sake instead of the consequence.

Enjoyable activities are hard work. They aren’t natural. They take effort people are reluctant to make. Consider Pressfield’s “resistance” for creators. Writers who love writing spend most days running away from the act of writing. That is the nature of it.

Some activities give flow experiences that are not widely available in ordinary life. Consider fighting in a war, car theft, vandalism, etc…. Many who commit crimes get addicted to the feeling of breaking in and stealing for the act itself.

Every flow activity transformed the self by making it more complex. It provided 1) sense of discovery, 2) creative feeling to a new reality, 3) pushed performance to high levels, 4) undreamed-of states of consciousness

The key condition for achieving flow seems to be being intrinsically motivated at whatever you are trying to pursue mastery in. This doesn’t mean to ignore the extrinsic but to not take the self so seriously as to let ego make you self-conscious about your purpose. A meaningful goal/purpose can be everything you ever need. It’s what helped the various prisoners in the Vietnam war, Russian Gulag, and Nazi concentration camps alive as they visualized various activities. Viktor Frankl noted the survivors of the concentration camps were ones who had a strongly directed purpose that was not self-seeking. A non-self-conscious individualism.

Bertrand Russell on achieving personal happiness:

“Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.”

Organizations can seek to cultivate flow in culture by setting simple goals, giving clarified feedback, and providing employees with a sense of involvement in their life (i.e. meaning/purpose). However, a flow-inducing culture may achieve this at the expense of others (i.e. Athenians and Americans had slaves).

Organizations can try to cultivate an environment that can help with inducing flow states but the ultimate decision to put it upon the self is the individual’s decision. The individual has to want to restructure his consciousness.

Two requirements to create flow in companies: 1) Jobs designed to induce flow (ownership, autonomy, control). Consider surgery, hunting, writing, rock climbing for reference. Supervisor/managers were 64% more likely to be in flow than clerical workers at 16%. 2) Hire and develop people w/ autotelic personalities. Employees that want to seek out self-mastery.

“…if workers really enjoyed their jobs they would not only benefit personally, but sooner or later they would almost certainly produce more efficiently and reach all the other goal that now take precedence."

Flow can be cultivated in all aspects of life, not just your profession. Seek it in music, viewing art, cooking, exercise, sex, relationships, etc… To be enjoyable, a relationship must evolve to become more complex. Sexuality requires the cultivation of greater complexity to become enjoyable. Whether it’s looking at art or listening to music, focus on the experience. Not the externalities of whether someone is famous or it’s highly regarded. Learn to get in touch with your body.

To find the “right” activities to induce flow, follow your interests. Ignore what others say. Do the activity to learn for the sake of learning. Not about ego, perception, or results. Follow your curiosity to find things you can hit flow with.

Thinking can be a flow activity. I believed this but it’s nice to read it in the book too. It’s giving me permission to enjoy thinking. Something that is not readily supported in a society obsessed with doing for the sake of doing. The skill to learn is to sit with your thoughts quietly for an hour.

Writing is a slow and organically evolving process of thought. It’s about creating information, not merely passing it along.

“…it is never a waste to write for intrinsic reasons….writing gives the mind a disciplined means of expression.”

Muller and Bednorz won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1987 but didn’t share their work with colleagues until after the award because they were afraid of possible ridicule. Chasing curiosity is hard, lonely work that takes courage. It’s not supposed to be easy.

Galileo was trained in medicine but he followed his curiosity with gravity. Newton discovered gravity while in 2 years of quarantine because of a plague. Lavoisier worked for the French gov’t tax agency but became the father of modern chemistry. Galvani invented the electric battery but he was a physician. Einstein was a clerk in the post office.

“Breakthroughs in science still depend primarily on the resources of a single mind….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.”

The cultural dogma that says only people “trained” in a certain subject giving them the “right” to be professionals is a joke. This truly applies to hacks. It’s unfortunate labeling that stops people from taking their curiosities seriously.

Amateur is a Latin term referring to someone who loves what they do. Consider how the Olympics is for amateur athletes. Modern labeling of amateur is someone who does something for a hobby is an issue of labeling. If we called entrepreneurs and passionate professionals amateurs, it would hold a different meaning.

Many jobs will have flow-like qualities given the built-in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges they provide compared to leisure activities. Those with discipline can use leisure activities as a way to recreate their life by turning that into their profession.

Flow states are up to the person. Ultimate responsibility resides on YOU:

“Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing. Most jobs and many leisure activities especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media - are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else.”

“The future will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.” - C.K. Brightbill

Substances aren’t going to make you creative. It’s just a druggy looking for a reason to escape reality. Remember but Stephen King said, alcoholic and druggie writers are writers who just drink a lot and take drugs.

“Work that is carried out under the influence of drugs lacks the complexity we expect from good art - it tends to be obvious and self-indulgent.”

Time shouldn’t be something to kill. It’s the most precious currency. Any free time should be used to develop the self.

“A person who rarely gets bored, who does not constantly need a favourable external environment t enjoy the moment, has passed the test for having achieved a creative life.”

Lonely is a feeling. An inability to sit still with yourself. An addiction to fill voids with external stimulus. You are chased by loneliness. Being alone is a choice. You can choose how to use your state of solitude. You can feel lonely and fill it with useless consumption. It’s in solitude that you can achieve goals that can’t be done in the company of others. It’s in solitude you create the space to do deep work. It’s required to get into flow state and push yourself to your peak creative state.

Learning to enjoy solitude is a skill. Uncomfortable with being alone means a life running away from the feeling and never looking into who you are.

“Even pain is better than the chaos that seeps into an unfocused mind.”

The self is the sum of goals. Change your goals and change the self.

Constraints => Freedom.

“Cicero once wrote that to be completely free one must become a slave to a set of laws. In other words, accepting limitations is liberating.”

Parenting. Children are ruined and strengthened by parents.

“If parents just talked more about their ideas and dreams - even if these had been frustrated - the children might develop the ambition needed to break through the complacency of their present selves. If nothing else, discussing one’s job or the thoughts and events of the day, and treading children as young adults, as friend, help to socialize them into thoughtful adults. But if the father spends all his free time at home vegetating in front of the TV set with a glass of alcohol in his hand, children will naturally assume that adults are boring people who don’t know how to have fun, and will turn to the peer group for enjoyment."

Power of a loving support group of friends and family:

“…excessive conformity is usually caused by fear of disapproval. It is much easier for a person to try developing her potential if she knows that no matter what happens, she has a safe emotional base in the family.”

Power of friends

“It is in the company of friends that we can most clearly experience the freedom of the self and learn who we really are. The ideal of a modern marriage is to have one’s spouse as a friend.”

Friendship is cultivated like a job and marriage. They don’t happen by chance. Given how people feel happiest with their friends it’s something we should make a conscious act.

Any social change can only be mad possibly when the individual changes his own consciousness. All activists should focus on changing before complaining about the world.

“Reform yourself, That way there will be one less rascal in the world." - Thomas Carlyle

Become an autotelic self. A person able to turn adversity into an enjoyable challenge to maintain inner harmony. A self that is never bored, seldom anxious, and in flow most times. A self with self-contained goals. Learn to turn the necessary suffering and chaos into a newfound purpose. Much of building a happy life and self is about how you respond to the inevitable hardship of life.

An autotelic self 1) sets goals with constant feedback to see if it’s achieved. 2) is immersed in the activity at hand. This means focus. An environment with no distractions. 3) Aware of his relation to society at large. An ability to build flexible systems that can evolve to the changing world and self. 4) Present to the immediate experience.

Our ability to control consciousness happens after 18. If you think about it, your ability to be an independent person only begins after this point. So, a 25 year old has only spent 7 years learning to be independent. Only 3-4 years if you consider the regimented structure of universities.

Achieving flow means achieving harmony with who you are and the world around you to do something that has meaning. Sounds like someone who has a “why” per Simon Sinek’s work.

It takes work. David Foster Wallace said we all worship something. Whether it’s a God or money or power, creating a goal for yourself is finding something for your self to worship.

“Many of us have to discover a goal that will give meaning to life on our own, without the help of a traditional faith.”

A man with a why will find a how.

“Purpose, resolution, and harmony unify life and give it meaning by transforming it into a seamless flow experience.”

Use constraints to help you commit to goals. Too much freedom can lead to paralysis and anxiety given a new set of problems. Goals will justify the effort demanded in the start but the effort will justify the goal as the journey continues.

No one will tell you what your goals should be. It’s up to you.

With a goal in mind, ask yourself if it’s something you really want to do. Is it something I enjoy doing? Am I likely to enjoy it in the foreseeable future? Is the price that I will have to pay worth it? Will I be able to live with myself if I accomplish it?

Reflection needs to be married with action so that you devote energy to authentic projects. You want to avoid doing things you think you should do merely because everyone else does it.

Pursuing authentic projects is hard because they often have less social legitimacy. They aren’t going to be things everyone else does. They will be idiosyncratic. Others might look at you like you’re crazy.