Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Hungarian American psychologist, died yesterday, at age 87.
He was the one, who recognised and named the psychological concept of 👉 FLOW, a highly focused mental state conducive to
productivity.
Celebrating his life achievement, some excerpts from his book, Flow:
On rare occasions, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.
Moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, relaxing times. These moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. This is what we call optimal experience.
Flow is the state in which people are so involved in
an activity that nothing else matters. The experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.
By stretching a skill, by reaching toward higher challenges, the person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual.
Take the rock climber’s example: you make your body go and everything hurts; then you look back in awe at the self, at what you’ve done, it just blows your mind. It leads to ecstasy, to self-fulfilment. If you win these battles enough, that battle against yourself, at least for a moment, it becomes easier to win the battles in the world.
THE WASTE OF FREE TIME
Although, people generally long to leave their places of work and get home, all too often they have no idea what to do there.
Free time is unstructured, and requires great effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.
The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences. Thus, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours watching athletes playing in stadiums. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, rather watch actors who pretend to have adventures.
This vicarious participation is able to mask the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges.
The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere.
Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. Mass leisure, mass culture leave
us more exhausted, more disheartened than we were before.
Most jobs and many leisure activities – especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media – are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving only feeble husks.
People who learn to enjoy their work, who do not waste their free time, end up feeling that their lives as a whole have become much more worthwhile.
#flow,
#csikszentmihalyi,
#positivemindset,
#positivepsychology