Book SummaryFlow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Flow

Though we live longer and have more material wealth than ever, many people feel anxious rather than happy. In Flow, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi offers an antidote: “Flow.” In this summary, we’ll explore what flow is, how it influences our happiness, and how to cultivate it.

Flow: A Clue Toward Happiness

People are happy when they feel a sense of control over their thoughts and feelings. When this happens, we experience a “flow” state: We enjoy ourselves, we feel a sense of purpose and meaning, and other things don’t seem to matter as much. Csikszentmihalyi also refers to these states as “optimal experiences,” glimpses into a life we wish we could live all the time. For example, an artist immersed in creating a beautiful painting is experiencing flow (an “optimal experience”). It can also happen when you gain an important insight during tough times.

Optimal experiences occur most frequently when you’re voluntarily working hard to achieve something important. For example, a swimmer competing in the most difficult race of her career may experience muscle cramps and fatigue, but she may look back on the experience as worthwhile because she directed her actions and accomplished something admirable.

How Consciousness Works

To better facilitate flow experiences, you need to understand what your consciousness is and how it operates.

Intention and Attention: Basic Ordering of Consciousness

Consciousness is a mental state of awareness in which we perceive, process, order, and act on sensory input and information—feelings, ideas, and perceptions. You evaluate every piece of information you encounter to determine whether it supports or threatens your goals.

When you get feedback that doesn’t align with your goals, you experience fear and anxiety, making working on your goals difficult. Csikszentmihalyi calls this “disorder in consciousness” or “psychic entropy”: Your attention is divided, making it near-impossible to achieve a flow state.

In contrast, when you get feedback that affirms your goals, such as seeing you’re on track to completing a marathon, you’re in a state of flow. Csikszentmihalyi calls these kinds of experiences flow experiences because people describe feeling like they’re floating and that their energy is flowing in the direction they want.

To reach a flow state and accomplish your goals, you need to direct your attention. When your attention is so focused that everything else fades into the background, you achieve what Csikszentmihalyi calls “inner order” or “order in consciousness.”

Because all of your thoughts, feelings, and memories are shaped by how you direct your attention, attention is the most important tool you have to order your consciousness and improve your quality of life.

The Benefits of Flow

Doing activities that produce flow as frequently as possible has three main benefits:

1. You become more self-confident because you feel skilled and capable, and you’re investing energy toward goals you’ve deemed worthwhile.
2. You improve your experience of life. Even boring tasks are rewarding when made to align with your goals.
3. You become a more complex individual. Complexity has two parts. First, you feel a sense of differentiation because you’ve done something that makes you feel capable and unique. Second, you feel a sense of integration: Your consciousness is well-ordered and you feel in balance with the different parts of who you are.

Characteristics of the Flow Experience

This section describes the characteristics of enjoyable flow experiences. First, you’ll learn what distinguishes a merely pleasurable experience from an enjoyable one that creates flow.

Pleasure vs. Enjoyment

You experience pleasure when you meet biological needs or needs you’ve developed through social conditioning. But pleasure alone can’t provide happiness. For example, eating restores the body’s sense of balance (a pleasurable experience), but it’s often passive and doesn’t help you grow as a person or make you more complex. Pleasure helps order your consciousness, but it can’t create new order. In other words, pleasure doesn’t foster personal growth.

In contrast, enjoyment can create new order in consciousness because it requires effort. Enjoyable experiences occur when you satisfy a need or desire, and you:

• Achieve something unexpected or unimagined
• Feel a sense of accomplishment and newness
• Feel like you’ve changed and grown more complex as a person

To reorder your consciousness and feel happier, you need to seek new, challenging goals and work toward them frequently.

The Nine Elements of Enjoyment

When people describe an enjoyable experience conducive to flow, they mention one or more of the following nine components:

1. You’re able to concentrate on an activity for an extended period of time.
2. The task has a clear goal.
3. You receive immediate feedback on your progress.
4. You have the skills to complete the task.
5. You feel a sense of control.
6. You’re absorbed in the task, and it feels almost effortless. You’re not thinking about stresses from the rest of your life.
7. Your sense of time is altered. You either feel like time passes quickly or that it has slowed in a helpful way.
8. You don’t feel self-conscious, and your sense of self emerges stronger.
9. The experience is autotelic: You want to repeat it because it was so enjoyable.

Activities and Personality Traits That Promote Flow

Flow-producing experiences unfold in stages. This section explores the stages of flow and the personality characteristics that promote flow.

The Stages of Flow-Producing Activities

Your consciousness becomes more complex in several stages. When engaging with an activity, you enter and exit a flow state depending on whether you’ve reached your current goal. The stages are:

1. Flow 1. You start an activity and immediately have to master...

Flow Summary Chapter 1: Introduction

Throughout human history, people have sought happiness for its own sake, and have sought other things, such as wealth and power, to achieve happiness. Though we live longer and have more material wealth than ever before, many people think their lives are being wasted and spend time feeling anxious and upset rather than happy.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote Flow to offer insight on cultivating happiness that he learned from researching when people feel the most enjoyment and happiness. Though it’s not a prescription, he hopes people can use this knowledge to structure their lives to feel happier. This chapter provides an overview of what happiness is, how our genetics and culture shape our quest for it, and how to cultivate it.

Sources of Discontent

Understanding what happiness is requires understanding where discontent comes from. Csikszentmihalyi offers two reasons it’s difficult to find happiness:

1. The universe is a harsh place. Cold temperatures and darkness make the universe inhospitable to life. On Earth, disease, natural disasters, and famine have made survival challenging for millions of years.

To weather chaos, humans created myths, religions, and...

Flow Summary Chapter 2: How Consciousness Works

At different points in human history, such as Republican Rome, having control over the inner workings of your mind was considered necessary for fitting into and succeeding in society. People preferred thinking things through rather than acting on instinct. Today, it’s more popular to act on instinct, and we consider people who seek control of their emotional states uptight or operating outside of the norm. Yet evidence shows people who master their inner life are generally happier than those who don’t.

To control your consciousness, you’ll first learn about what your consciousness is and how it operates. Then, you’ll learn how controlling it facilitates flow experiences.

What Is Consciousness?

Consciousness is a mental state of awareness in which we perceive, process, and act on information and sensory input. Information includes feelings, ideas, and perceptions. Because consciousness gives you the ability to process and prioritize information, it can be thought of as “intentionally ordered information.” Having the ability to act is also key: If you weren’t conscious, you could still process information, but your body would only be able to react in a...

Shortform Exercise: Explore Psychic Entropy

Reflect on a recent time you felt upset through the lens of psychic entropy (a disordered state where you feel stuck).

Describe a time that upsetting information entered your consciousness. What was the information?

Flow Summary Chapter 3: Characteristics of Flow Experiences

So far, you’ve learned how flow experiences benefit your growth and well-being. In this chapter, you’ll learn two strategies to improve your quality of life, and what distinguishes a merely pleasurable experience from an enjoyable one that creates flow.

Two Strategies to Improve Your Quality of Life

Generally, there are two ways to improve your quality of life:

1. Adjust your environment to align with your goals. This might involve looking to external benchmarks, such as power or material goods, for success.
2. Adjust your experience of your environment to fit your goals.

Most people are conditioned to adjust their environment to align with their goals and achieve success. For example, when you see people with power, status, or wealth, you might assume they’re happy and that you’d be happier if you had those things, too. If you go on to acquire these symbols, you might feel happier initially, but true happiness doesn’t come from what you own or what other people think of you; it comes from how you think about your experiences. In a survey of people in the U.S., the wealthiest participants reported being happy 77 percent of the time, while people with average...

Shortform Exercise: Understand Your Relationship With Pleasure and Enjoyment

Examine your habits around pleasure and enjoyment. (Remember, pleasurable activities, such as watching television, can help order your consciousness, but they can’t bring new order and don’t require concentration the way enjoyable activities do.)

This chapter discusses how pleasure is a way to order to your consciousness when it has been disrupted. What is an activity you do regularly that gives you pleasure and orders your consciousness? Why do you do it?

Flow Summary Chapter 4: Activities and Personality Traits That Promote Flow

Though you can experience flow unexpectedly, you’re most likely to experience it when you deliberately take part in certain activities and possess the skills or traits necessary to facilitate it. In this chapter, we’ll explore the activities and personal traits that facilitate flow in detail, as well as obstacles to experiencing flow. First, we’ll discuss how culture shapes flow experiences.

The Influence of Culture on Flow Experiences

The culture you live in can influence how you experience flow. Cultures are structured to minimize disorder with norms, beliefs, and opportunities for fulfillment. For example, successful governments convince people that supporting the government will help them achieve happiness. While cultural structure can limit people’s opportunities, it can also streamline their success by helping people channel their energy into achieving a narrow set of goals. When people work toward specific, challenging goals, they’re more likely to enter flow.

The degree to which cultures actually help people succeed in pursuing their goals and experiencing flow varies widely. It’s easy to judge the success of a culture based on your own culturally shaped...

Shortform Exercise: Achieve Flow

Evaluate whether you have an autotelic personality.

Autotelic people habitually achieve flow by doing four things: observing their environment and acting on opportunities, setting goals, concentrating on activities, and enjoying a variety of activities. Based on this list, do you think you have an autotelic personality? Why or why not?

Flow Summary Chapter 5: Find Flow Through Movement and the Senses

Everyone experiences highs and lows, but many people haven’t learned techniques to escape the lows. This chapter discusses how to reorder your consciousness using physical activity and the senses to find flow and improve your experience of everyday life.

Mining an Untapped Resource: Physical Activity and Senses

There are a variety of enjoyable ways to use your body. Every sense we perceive—such as tasting and hearing—and movement we’re capable of making corresponds to one or more flow experiences. The ability to run, throw, swim, or sing could all yield flow experiences if you work on them in the context of a goal or social setting that offers structure and challenge. Yet many of us don’t use goal setting to actively cultivate our senses or physical ability to maximize our enjoyment of life, leaving the senses, to provide us with chaotic, disordered information.

For example, if you don’t train yourself to run efficiently, you might feel clumsy or move in inefficient ways that make it less enjoyable. Training gives order to your consciousness and helps you feel more in harmony with the world around you. To achieve this, find the motivation and discipline to set goals...

Shortform Exercise: Choose the Right Activity

Reflect on enjoyable, flow-producing activities mentioned in this chapter.

Consider flow-producing physical activities and activities that engage the senses. Which of these activities have you done and enjoyed?

Flow Summary Chapter 6: Find Flow Through the Mind

Just as every movement and sense is associated with a suite of skills and activities that can provide flow, there are many activities associated with thinking that can produce flow. This chapter discusses the mental activities capable of producing flow: wordplay, history, science, and philosophy. First, we’ll revisit the general state of mind.

The General State of Mind

As we’ve discussed, our mind is disordered and chaotic when left to its own devices. Most people can’t focus for more than a few minutes at a time without some kind of external stimulus. Giving order to your mind through mental flow activities is a way to find enjoyment without depending on external circumstances.

We’re not aware of how uncontrolled our minds are because we build routines and habits that make our attention move smoothly from one activity to the next throughout the day. For example, when you wake up, you make breakfast and do other tasks to get ready for work. You work, come home, relax, and get ready for bed. But if there’s a moment that your attention isn’t focused on something external, your mind wanders to what is most bothersome or worrisome to you. For example, you may think...

Flow Summary Chapter 7: Find Flow at Work

Since you spend a large portion of your life working, whether you enjoy your work can greatly affect your quality of life. This chapter explores what makes work feel worthwhile. First, we’ll look at some of work’s negative connotations. Then, we’ll discuss people’s relationship with work in the U.S., and some examples of people—real and fictional—who successfully make the most of work.

Work’s Negative Connotations

To understand our relationship with work, we first need to understand the function of it in our life. One reason we work is to satisfy basic needs. If we were content to use our income to meet our basic needs, then work might feel more worthwhile. For example, nomadic peoples of the Kalahari desert hunt and gather for sustenance, but they don’t invest as much energy in maintaining a dwelling or acquiring material goods. As you widen your ambitions to include acquiring expensive material goods, you’ll likely have to invest even more energy into work to afford them.

What work consists of and how different cultures view it varies widely. Many cultures view work as a necessary part of life, but one to avoid as much as possible. For example, in the Bible, Adam...

Shortform Exercise: Find Possibilities for Flow at Work

Examine whether your work provides sufficient flow opportunities.

Do you enjoy your work? Explain your answer, using concepts from this chapter such as preferring leisure, the work being too challenging or too easy, or work conflicting with personal goals.

Flow Summary Chapter 8: Find Flow in Your Relationships

After enjoying your work, the second biggest influence on your happiness is your relationships with friends, family, and community. This chapter discusses techniques to transform your close relationships into flow experiences. First, we’ll discuss relationship challenges and the pitfalls of solitude.

Relationship Challenges

From an evolutionary perspective, being together provides safety in numbers, allowing for the survival of more group members. Having people around tends to improve any activity, even tedious work, such as working on an assembly line, and boosts positive emotions. However, some of our most severe upsets come from relationships. For example, unresolved disagreements with your significant other can erode the quality of the relationship. Like most important things in life, relationships are amazing when they work out and distressing when they don’t. Interacting with the same person can be positive or stressful. For example, you might receive a compliment from a supervisor on one of your projects, and later that day, receive criticism from that same supervisor for how you’re managing another project.

**Because we depend on people’s affirmation, learning to...

Shortform Exercise: Assess Your Relationships

Examine the quality of your relationships with family members.

Choose a family member or romantic partner whom you wished you had a better relationship with. Write two to three sentences describing the quality of your relationship.

Flow Summary Chapter 9: Navigate Challenges and Trauma

Everyone encounters challenges and obstacles to their health and happiness, some of which are so severe that they make living difficult. And yet, many people who experience difficult circumstances survive and thrive. This chapter discusses how people create optimal experiences and find flow despite difficult circumstances.

Dealing With Challenges

People deal with challenges differently. The same challenge may completely overwhelm one person, while it may galvanize another to action. Three factors affect your ability to deal with challenges:

1. Psychological resources. Having certain mental skills helps you overcome challenges. For example, making friends at a new job may feel easier for an extrovert than an introvert.

2. Outside support. Even if you face challenges, having support from family or friends can help you overcome them successfully. For example, if you’re diagnosed with colon cancer, having family or friends you can confide in and insurance that covers the cost of treatment would help you weather it better than you would without those resources.

3. Coping style or coping ability. People have different strategies, or styles of coping with...

Shortform Exercise: What’s Your Coping Style?

Reflect on your coping style.

Think of a recent time you experienced a major setback. How did you react at the time and in the days and weeks that followed?

Flow Summary Chapter 10: Find Meaning in Life

Achieving flow in one or more activities doesn’t mean your life will feel unified and purposeful. For example, Bobby Fischer was an outstanding chess player, but didn’t function well when he wasn’t playing. To live a balanced, meaningful life, cultivate a sense of purpose to guide the goals and activities you pursue and relate them to each other, making your life into one large flow experience.

This chapter describes how to accomplish this, and includes three stages of finding meaning:

1. Find an overarching purpose, or goal, for your life.
2. Dedicate yourself to the goal.
3. Achieve harmony.

We’ll now go over each of these and what they mean in detail.

1. Find an Overarching Purpose, or Goal, for Your Life

Although there isn’t one universally accepted meaning of life or supreme being, you can give meaning to your own life by choosing an overarching goal that has a clear outcome, rules of engagement, and requires significant energy. For example, you might want to raise children capable of living successful lives, or you might seek a cure for pancreatic cancer.

This section will discuss types of life purposes and how individuals and cultures shape...

Shortform Exercise: Find Your Life Purpose

Reflect on your progress (or lack thereof) toward finding and pursuing your life’s purpose.

Is having a life purpose important to you? Why or why not?