Scientific validation of our Prompt of the Week
As set forth in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's brilliant book FLOW
This is going to be a short one, as I’m on holiday this week. I’m reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s classic book FLOW, and though I’m only halfway through it is already one of my favorite books. It’s full of deep, original wisdom lit with flashes of dry humor.
Czikszentmihalyi is the psychologist who identified and defined the state of flow, but what I didn’t know before I started reading was that he articulated the concept of flow as a way of understanding happiness: what creates it, what it consists of, how to induce it even in the most unpromising situations.
The simplified popular conception of flow is that it’s a necessary state in which to do things well. That’s not what Csikszentmihalyi means at all. He values subjective experience over objective results: and of all subjective experiences, happiness is the most sought-after. And often the most elusive, because it is being sought in the wrong place: outside the self.
Flow is not a means to an end. It is the process of doing, without regard to the end. It’s not a strategy or a fortunate accident or a rare state available only to expert practitioners. It’s a way of being. An approach to life.
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