Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [0]
The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
For Isabella, and Mark and Christopher
Contents
Preface
1 Happiness Revisited
Introduction
Overview
The Roots of Discontent
The Shields of Culture
Reclaiming Experience
Paths of Liberation
2 The Anatomy of Consciousness
The Limits of Consciousness
Attention as Psychic Energy
Enter the Self
Disorder in Consciousness: Psychic Entropy
Order in Consciousness: Flow
Complexity and the Growth of the Self
3 Enjoyment and the Quality of Life
Pleasure and Enjoyment
The Elements of Enjoyment
The Autotelic Experience
4 The Conditions of Flow
Flow Activities
Flow and Culture
The Autotelic Personality
The People of Flow
5 The Body in Flow
Higher, Faster, Stronger
The Joys of Movement
Sex as Flow
The Ultimate Control: Yoga and the Martial Arts
Flow through the Senses: The Joys of Seeing
The Flow of Music
The Joys of Tasting
6 The Flow of Thought
The Mother of Science
The Rules of the Games of the Mind
The Play of Words
Befriending Clio
The Delights of Science
Loving Wisdom
Amateurs and Professionals
The Challenge of Lifelong Learning
7 Work as Flow
Autotelic Workers
Autotelic Jobs
The Paradox of Work
The Waste of Free Time
8 Enjoying Solitude and Other People
The Conflict between Being Alone and Being with Others
The Pain of Loneliness
Taming Solitude
Flow and the Family
Enjoying Friends
The Wider Community
9 Cheating Chaos
Tragedies Transformed
Coping with Stress
The Power of Dissipative Structures
The Autotelic Self: A Summary
10 The Making of Meaning
What Meaning Means
Cultivating Purpose
Forging Resolve
Recovering Harmony
The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes
Notes
References
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
THIS BOOK SUMMARIZES, for a general audience, decades of research on the positive aspects of human experience—joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life I call flow. To take this step is somewhat dangerous, because as soon as one strays from the stylized constraints of academic prose, it is easy to become careless or overly enthusiastic about such a topic. What follows, however, is not a popular book that gives insider tips about how to be happy. To do so would be impossible in any case, since a joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe. This book tries instead to present general principles, along with concrete examples of how some people have used these principles, to transform boring and meaningless lives into ones full of enjoyment. There is no promise of easy short-cuts in these pages. But for readers who care about such things, there should be enough information to make possible the transition from theory to practice.
In order to make the book as direct and user-friendly as possible, I have avoided footnotes, references, and other tools scholars usually employ in their technical writing. I have tried to present the results of psychological research, and the ideas derived from the interpretation of such research, in a way that any educated reader can evaluate and apply to his or her own life, regardless of specialized background knowledge.
However, for those readers who are curious enough to pursue the scholarly sources on which my conclusions are based, I have included extensive notes at the end of the volume. They are not keyed to specific references, but to the page number in the text where a given issue is discussed. For example, happiness is mentioned on the very first page. The reader interested in knowing what works I base my assertions on can turn to the notes section beginning and, by looking under the reference, find a lead to Aristotle’s view of happiness as well as to contemporary research on this topic, with the appropriate citations. The notes can be read as a second, highly compressed, and more technical shadow version of the original text.
At the beginning of any book, it is appropriate to acknowledge those who have influenced its development. In the present case this is impossible, since