PDF Summary:Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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When we realize life isn’t as easy as we thought, we may:

• Ignore it and seek out more of what we’ve been told makes life good. For example, we may acquire more material wealth, such as fancy cars or a powerful job. But despite our success, we rarely feel satisfied, and we still want more.
• Address the problem with concrete solutions. For example, if we realize we’ve gained weight, we may join a health club and make fitness goals to get healthier. While this may help in the short term, it’s impossible to escape the reality that the body isn’t immortal and will eventually wear out. If you don’t come to terms with this, you’ll waste energy feeling upset that your efforts to stay healthy won’t thwart death.
• Escape from reality with hobbies, alcohol, or drugs. Though these can be good distractions, they don’t typically help us find meaning in life.
• Turn to religion. Religion is one of the main ways people find meaning in life, but it can be difficult to reconcile with science or other contemporary teachings.
• **Develop anxiety about the beliefs we held about how the world works and feel disillusioned or apathetic about our purpose in...

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• The brain is capable of processing up to 125 bits of information per second. That means we can process up to 7,560 bits per minute, and half a million in an hour.
• In a 70-year lifetime, we can process 185 billion bits of information. All of our thoughts, feelings, and actions come from this.

Yet it’s unclear whether we regularly reach this capacity. Some experts think we’ve evolved to facilitate information intake so that we focus only on important information and constantly expand our processing capacity. For example, when you learn to drive, it takes all of your concentration at first, but eventually becomes easy, freeing your attention for other things. We’re also able to compress information for ease of processing. For example, a story in the Bible might contain a lesson distilled from the experience of many people that we can learn readily with one reading.

But Csikszentmihalyi is skeptical that consciousness can be constantly expanded. First, despite our ability to compress information intake, we still spend 15 percent of our waking hours eating and doing basic bodily maintenance, such as showering. Though these tasks don’t require much...

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The key is to use both strategies together. If you just adjust your environment by buying locks, you haven’t done anything to address your tendency to be fearful of your surroundings, and you’ll likely experience new fears.

Pleasure vs. Enjoyment

To adjust your experience of life, it’s important to keep in mind the difference between pleasure and enjoyment.

You experience pleasure when your biological needs or needs you’ve developed through social conditioning are met. When you experience psychic entropy, or a disruption of your consciousness by something inconsistent with your goals, you may seek pleasure to restore your body’s equilibrium. Some common ways people seek pleasure are through buying things that provide comfort, eating, and having sex. For example, watching television and having a drink to relax from a hectic workday can be pleasurable. Traveling can be pleasurable because it’s a departure from your routine.

But pleasure alone can’t provide happiness. Pleasurable activities like eating restore the body’s sense of balance, but they don’t help you grow as a person or make you more complex. In other words, pleasure helps order your consciousness, but it...

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• One pygmy group in the Democratic Republic of the Congo expects all members to contribute to the enrichment of each other and the tribe. In addition to activities for survival, such as hunting or fishing, members of the group are expected to make art, tell stories, sing, and more.

Falling Short

Why do some cultures fall short in offering flow experiences? Here are five scenarios:

• The government or culture makes it difficult to survive. When people are focused on survival, they don’t have time or energy to grow their skills and become more complex.
• There’s too much structure. Similarly, if the culture or government creates too much structure in everyday life, there isn’t time or opportunity for people to seek out meaningful, enjoyable activities.
• Societies respond to adverse situations in ways that don’t benefit the people in the long term. Over time, these responses can become ingrained in cultural customs because people think it’s their only option. For example, Dobu Islanders were steeped in a culture of fear: They believed they could be subjected to sorcery or betrayal from the environment, family, or community at any time. Dobu leaders...

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To transform an activity into a flow activity, create a framework for what you want to do and how you’ll measure progress. Here’s how:

1. Set a goal. Write your main goal and any related, smaller goals you need to achieve first.
2. Decide how you’ll measure your progress. This could be any unit of measure. For example, if your goal is to decrease the time it takes you to run a mile, you’d measure progress in time.
3. Concentrate on the activity. Flow comes with focus. Choosing an activity that is challenging enough will help you concentrate on it.
4. Study all aspects of the activity to understand its nuances. For example, if your goal is to improve your golf game, you might study different putting techniques.
5. Develop the skills needed to take advantage of any new opportunities. When you first set a goal, you may not be aware of all the opportunities available to you. As you learn of them, develop the skills you need to take advantage of them.
6. Don’t get bored. Once you’ve mastered your goal, your activity won’t feel challenging and may become boring. Recognize when you’re starting to get bored and create a new goal to challenge...

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It may seem illogical to distinguish mental activities that produce flow from physical activities that produce flow—all activity, whether primarily physical or not, requires some thinking to be enjoyable. For example, athletes have to practice mental discipline to be successful, and recognizing their achievements requires thinking. But the activities discussed in this chapter require symbolic thinking, or mentally manipulating language or concepts.

Words

One of the most important ways humans can structure their minds is with words. We’ll discuss:

• The role of memory and systems of order in this process
• Word-centric activities

The Role of Memory

Memory is one of the most important mental skills. It allows us to retain knowledge, build on it, and share it with others. Before the development of writing systems, remembering information and sharing it orally was the only way to communicate information. For individuals, memory helps build knowledge that orders the mind and life and builds confidence in our skills and abilities.

Here are two common activities that depend on memory:

1. Recounting your ancestry. Before we had writing systems,...

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• What they were doing
• How they were feeling
• How many challenges they were dealing with
• How many skills they were using

A person was deemed to be experiencing flow when they were dealing with an above-average number of challenges for the week, and they were using an above-average number of skills. Here are the results:

• Overall, people reported being in flow about 33 percent of the time.
• During work, people reported being in flow 54 percent of the time.
• During leisure—including activities such as eating out, socializing with friends, and watching TV—people reported being in flow just 18 percent of the time. (People also reported being in flow less frequently doing leisure activities that required outside resources, such as equipment or energy, versus those that didn’t.)

The more regularly a person was in flow, the more likely they were to report a high quality of experience. When in flow, they described feeling “active,” “creative,” “concentrated,” “motivated,” and “strong.” In contrast, people experiencing apathy—facing a below-average number of challenges and using a below-average number of skills—described feeling, “dull,” “dissatisfied,”...

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People who live alone and don’t attend church report their worst moods of the week on Sunday mornings: With no one around, and without things they need to do, they feel anxious and restless. Typically, by midday, people decide to do something to fill the rest of the day, such as watching a football game or visiting with a relative—they create a new goal that allows them to focus their time and feel purposeful.

Here are some other responses to solitude:

1. Watching TV. TV’s ability to order consciousness, even just enough to keep your mind from worrying, is one reason it plays such an important role in people’s lives.
2. Using drugs. Drugs contain chemicals which seem to alter your consciousness and can make you feel more creative. However, what they’re actually doing is changing your perception of what you think you can accomplish in relation to what you can actually accomplish, which isn’t necessarily as rewarding as seeking out and rising to the challenge of new opportunities. For example, if you depend on drugs for creativity, you might gain some ideas you can use later, but you also run the risk of losing your ability to exercise your consciousness for new...

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People who are able to use positive coping strategies are often admired for being courageous and resilient in the face of hardships. Even just the act of admiring people with these qualities is a helpful exercise because it means you pay close attention to how they do it so you can replicate it for yourself.

The rest of this chapter will discuss coping styles in more detail because it’s the easiest to adjust of the previous three factors—your psychological resources are determined by genetics, while outside support is only helpful if you already have appropriate coping skills. We’ll first examine the three qualities that allow people to successfully cope.

Three Components of Transformational Coping

Transformational coping consists of three main components:

1. Unconscious self-assurance. No matter what happens, you feel in control of your destiny and able to adapt to whatever environment or situation you encounter. For example, a pilot is trained to navigate any weather conditions, and because of their training, they’re confident that they can tackle any challenge.

2. Focusing on the world instead of yourself. If you’re narcissistic, and your environment...

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1. Accepted. Like an inauthentic life purpose, an accepted life purpose is when you accept a life purpose developed by someone else. For example, you may accept the meaning of life given to you by your religious institution.
2. Afterlife-inclusive. Social philosophers have argued that people need a purpose that encompasses how they think about life and the afterlife. For example, Ancient Greeks sought to achieve heroic deeds that would be commemorated in stories or songs that would survive them. Christians, on the other hand, opt for acts in service of God so they can go to heaven. Both are examples of making life into one large flow experience where all acts serve one unified purpose.

The Phases of Life Purpose Development

Finding and realizing your purpose involves alternating between focusing on yourself and focusing on the world around you, differentiating yourself from others in your community and becoming more ingrained in your community. Here are the four stages of developing your life’s purpose:

1. Keeping yourself alive. This means satisfying your basic needs, including finding pleasure and comfort.
2. Finding meaning in community. Once your...