Quotes About Csikszentmihalyi

Attaining a state of flow can be quite rare because there are many barriers to freeing our minds. Csikszentmihalyi identifies negative forms of perfectionism, fear, self-doubt, and self-censoring as primary obstacles to flow.

People who experience flow describe it as "a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems," and their descriptions of the joy of that state are so compelling that Csikszentmihalyi has called it an "optimal experience.

However, by Sunday noon--not coincidentally, the unhappiest hour in America--you may have run through your options and wind up slumped on a couch, suffering from the Sabbath existential crisis. It's at just such unfocused, unproductive times, says Csikszentmihalyi, that "people start ruminating and feeling that their lives are wasted and so forth.

In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to flow as the time when you become lost in your actions, whether climbing a mountain peak, painting or playing soccer.

the phrases used by Csikszentmihalyi to describe what generates flow include notions of stretching your mind to its limits, concentrating, and losing yourself in an activity—all of which also describe deep work).

Csikszentmihalyi even goes so far as to argue that modern companies should embrace this reality, suggesting that "jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely as possible flow activities.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience BY MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

began by writing about creativity. Creativity took him into the study of play. And his exploration of play unlocked an insight about the human experience that would make him famous. In the midst of play, many people enjoyed what Csikszentmihalyi called "autotelic experiences"—from the Greek auto (self) and telos (goal or purpose). In an autotelic experience, the goal is self-fulfilling; the activity is its own reward.

Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create new order in consciousness.

Competition is enjoyable only when it is a means to perfect one's skills; when it becomes an end in itself, it ceases to be fun. But

The good things which belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.

THE AUTOTELIC SELF: A SUMMARY

We tried to answer these questions with the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), the procedure I developed at the University of Chicago to study the quality of experience.

Jeanne Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi wrote, "What constitutes a good life? . . . Flow research has yielded one answer, providing an understanding of experiences during which individuals are fully involved in the present moment. Viewed through the experiential lens of flow, a good life is one that is characterized by complete absorption in what one does" (italics theirs). But this is actually a poor answer to the question of what constitutes a good life. Flow can be trivial.