FLOW: The Psychology of Optimal Experience


Author: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi


Conference/Journal: Book. Harper and Row.
Date published: 1990
Other:
  Word Count: 258  
    Each year hundreds of books are published with advice on how to

stay trim, how to grow rich, or how to develop self-confidence.

While these self-help books may help a reader in the short term,

they are likely to be unsatisfying, for they do little to enhance the

quality of the experience. But what really does make people glad

to be alive. What are the inner experiences that make life

worthwhile?

The author has been studying for over 20 years the states of

optimal experience--those times when people report feelings of

concentration and deep enjoyment. These investigations have

revealed that what makes experience genuinely satisfying is a

state of consciousness called flow--a state of concentration so

focused that it amounts to absolute absorption in an activity.

Everyone experiences flow from time to time and will recognize its

characteristics: people typically feel strong, alert, in effortless

control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities. Both a

sense of time and emotional problems seem to disappear, and

there is an exhilarating feeling of transcendence. Flow: The

Psychology of Optimal Experience describes how this pleasurable

state can be controlled, and not just left to chance, by setting

ourselves challenges--tasks that are neither too difficult nor too

simple for our abilities. With such goals, we learn to order the

information that enters consciousness and thereby improve the

quality of our lives.



Happiness does not depend on outside events, but rather on how

we interpret them



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