Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [161]
“It’s exhilarating…” The quote is from Csikszentmihalyi (1975), p. 95.
Complexity. Complexity is a function of how well the information in a person’s consciousness is differentiated and integrated. A complex person is one who is able to access precise, discrete information, and yet is able to relate the various pieces to each other; for example, a person whose desires, emotions, thoughts, values, and actions are strongly individuated yet do not contradict each other. See, for instance, Csikszentmihalyi (1970), Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi (1988), and Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1984). The notion of complexity used here is related to the same concept as used by some evolutionary biologists (e.g., Dobzhansky 1962, 1967), and it has been influenced by the poetic insights of Teilhard de Chardin (1965). A very promising definition of complexity in physical systems, defined as “thermodynamic depth,” was being worked on by Heinz Pagels (1988) before his recent untimely death. By his definition, the complexity of a system is the difference between the amount of information needed to describe the system in its present state and the amount needed to describe all the states it might have been in at the point at which it changed from the last previous state. Applying this to the psychology of the self, one might say that a complex person was one whose behavior and ideas could not be easily explained, and whose development was not obviously predictable.
“[There’s] no place…” The quote is from Csikszentmihalyi 1975, p. 94.
CHAPTER 3
For research on the relationship between happiness and wealth, see Diener, Horwitz, & Emmons (1985), Bradburn (1969), and Campbell, Converse, & Rodgers (1976).
Pleasure and enjoyment. Aristotle’s entire Nicomachean Ethics deals with this issue, especially book 3, chapter 11, and book 7. See also Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi (1988, pp. 24–25).
Children’s pleasure in activity. Early German psychologists posited the existence of Funktionlust, or the pleasure derived from using one’s body in such activities as running, hitting, swinging, and so on (Groos 1901, Buhler 1930). Later Jean Piaget (1952) declared that one of the sensory-motor stages of an infant’s physical development was characterized by the “pleasure of being the cause.” In the U.S., Murphy (1947) posited the existence of sensory and activity drives to account for the feeling of pleasure that sight, sound, or muscle sense occasionally gives. These insights were incorporated into a theory of optimal stimulation or optimal arousal mainly through the work of Hebb (1955) and Berlyne (1960), who assumed pleasure was the consequence of an optimal balance between the incoming stimulation and the nervous system’s ability to assimilate it. The extension of these basically neurological explanations for why one finds pleasure in action was provided by White (1959), deCharms (1968), and Deci & Ryan (1985), who looked at the same phenomenon but from the point of view of the self, or conscious organism. Their explanations hinge on the fact that action provides pleasure because it gives the person a feeling of competence, efficacy, or autonomy.
Learning in adulthood. The importance of learning in later life has received much needed attention lately. For some of the basic ideas in this field see Mortimer Adler’s early statement (Adler 1956), Tough (1978), and Gross (1982).
Interviews. Most of the interviews mentioned here were collected in the course of studies reported in Csikszentmihalyi (1975) and Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi (1988). Over 600 additional interviews were collected by Professor Fausto Massimini and his collaborators in Europe, Asia, and the southwestern United States.
Ecstasy. Extensive case studies of ecstatic religious experiences were collected by Marghanita Laski (1962). Abraham Maslow (1971), who coined the term “peak experience” to describe such events, played a very important