Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi book, Flow, is a manual on how to live life with optimal experience. His research focused on how people report feeling during random times during a day. From this information and the research of others he has been able to determine when people are optimally engaged in life or under the presence of flow.
Interesting research tidbits include a study that found an inverse correlation between the amount of non human energy consumed and the enjoyment of the activity. For example, I take more enjoyment paddling a canoe with a friend than racing around the same lake in a speed boat. Paddling requires more concentration and engages more of my body.
He strongly advocates doing what we can to become a more complex person by continuing to learn new things or learn more about a specific topic. He calls this putting more psychic energy into a topic or a relationship. From his research, marriages that continue to grow in complexity have a better chance of succeeding than ones that remain stagnant. This reminds me of a screenplay axiom that heroes change and adapt and villains remain the same.
He teases out the concepts of people engaged in autotelic activities. These are activities not done for material gain but for the pure enjoyment of the activity. A simple example would be crossword puzzles. A more complex example is the problem solving that motivates engineers and scientists to solve problems or conduct research.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi speaking about happiness and flow at a TED conference
The book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is available from Amazon.com
No comments:
Post a Comment