Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [155]
But complexity consists of integration as well as differentiation. The task of the next decades and centuries is to realize this under-developed component of the mind. Just as we have learned to separate ourselves from each other and from the environment, we now need to learn how to reunite ourselves with other entities around us without losing our hard-won individuality. The most promising faith for the future might be based on the realization that the entire universe is a system related by common laws and that it makes no sense to impose our dreams and desires on nature without taking them into account. Recognizing the limitations of human will, accepting a cooperative rather than a ruling role in the universe, we should feel the relief of the exile who is finally returning home. The problem of meaning will then be resolved as the individual’s purpose merges with the universal flow.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
Happiness. Aristotle’s views of happiness are most clearly developed in the Nicomachean Ethics, book 1, and book 9, chapters 9 and 10. Contemporary research on happiness by psychologists and other social scientists started relatively late, but has recently begun to catch up with this important topic in earnest. One of the first, and still very influential, works in this field has been Norman Bradburn’s The Structure of Psychological Well-Being (Bradburn 1969), which pointed out that happiness and unhappiness were independent of each other; in other words, just because a person is happy it does not mean he can’t also be unhappy at the same time. Dr. Ruut Veenhoven at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, has recently published a Databook of Happiness which summarizes 245 surveys conducted in 32 countries between 1911 and 1975 (Veenhoven 1984); a second volume is in preparation. The Archimedes Foundation of Toronto, Canada, has also set as its task the keeping track of investigations of human happiness and well-being; its first directory appeared in 1988. The Psychology of Happiness, by the Oxford social psychologist Michael Argyle, was published in 1987. Another comprehensive collection of ideas and research in this area is the volume by Strack, Argyle, & Schwartz (1990).
Undreamed-of material luxuries. Good recent accounts of the conditions of everyday life in past centuries can be found in a series under the general editorship of Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, entitled A History of Private Life. The first volume, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, edited by Paul Veyne, was published here in 1987. Another magisterial series on the same topic is Fernand Braudel’s The Structures of Everyday Life, whose first volume appeared in English in 1981. For the changes in home furnishings, see also Le Roy Ladurie (1979) and Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton (1981).
Flow. My work on optimal experience began with my doctoral dissertation, which involved a study of how young artists went about creating a painting. Some of the results were reported in the book The Creative Vision (Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi 1976). Since then several dozen scholarly articles have appeared on the subject. The first book that described the flow experience directly was Beyond Boredom and Anxiety (Csikszentmihalyi 1975). The latest summary of the academic research on the flow experience was collected in the edited volume Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness (Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi 1988).
Experience Sampling Method. I first used this technique in a study of adult workers in 1976; the first publication concerned a study of adolescents (Csikszentmihalyi, Larson, & Prescott 1977). Detailed descriptions of the method are available in Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1984, 1987).
Applications of the flow concept. These are described in the first chapter of Optimal Experience