Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [163]
Painting. The distinction between more and less original artists is that the former start painting with a general and often vague idea of what they want to accomplish, while the latter tend to start with a clearly visualized picture in mind. Thus original artists must discover as they go along what it is that they will do, using feedback from the developing work to suggest new approaches. The less original artists end up painting the picture in their heads, which has no chance to grow and develop. But to be successful in his open-ended process of creation, the original artist must have well-internalized criteria for what is good art, so that he can choose or discard the right elements in the developing painting (Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi 1976).
Surgery as a flow experience is described in Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1985b).
Exceptional sensitivities. The commonsense impression that different children have a facility for developing different talents, some having an affinity for physical movement, others for music, or languages, or for getting along with other people, has recently been formalized in a theory of “multiple intelligences” by Howard Gardner (1983). Gardner and his collaborators at Harvard are now at work developing a comprehensive testing battery for each of the seven major dimensions of intelligence he has identified.
The importance of feedback for the blind is reported in Massimini, Csikszentmihalyi, & Delle Fave (1988, pp. 79–80).
“It is as if…” is from Csikszentmihalyi (1975, p. 40).
“The court…” and “Kids my age…” are from Csikszentmihalyi (1975, pp. 40–41); “When you’re [climbing]…” is from ibid., p. 81, and “I get a feeling…” from ibid., p. 41. “But no matter how many…” is from Crealock (1951, pp. 99–100), quoted in Macbeth (1988, pp. 221–22). The quotation from Edwin Moses is in Johnson (1988, p. 6).
“A strong relaxation…” and “…I have a general feeling…” are from Csikszentmihalyi (1975, pp. 44, 45).
The attraction of risk and danger has been extensively studied by Marvin Zuckerman (1979), who identified the “sensation seeking” personality trait. A more popular treatment of the subject is the recent book by Ralph Keyes (1985).
One of the earliest psychological studies of gambling is the one by Kusyszyn (1977). That games of chance have developed from the divinatory aspects of religious ceremonials has been argued by Culin (1906, pp. 32, 37, 43), David (1962), and Huizinga (1939 [1970]).
Morphy and Fischer. The similarity between the careers of these two chess champions who lived a century apart is indeed striking. Paul Charles Morphy (1837–84) became a chess master in his early teens; when he was 22 years old he traveled to Europe, where he beat everyone who dared to play against him. After he returned to New York potential competitors thought he was too good, and were afraid to play him even at favorable odds. Deprived of his only source of flow, Morphy became a recluse displaying eccentric and paranoid behavior. For parallels with Bobby Fischer’s career, see Waitzkin (1988). There are two lines of explanation for such coincidences. One is that people with fragile psychic organization are disproportionately attracted to chess. The other is that chess, at highly competitive levels, requires a complete commitment of psychic energy and can become addictive. When a player becomes a champion, and exhausts all the challenges of the activity into which so much of his attention has been invested, he runs a serious risk of becoming disoriented because the goal that has given order to his consciousness is no longer meaningful.
Gambling among American Indians is described by Culin (1906), Cushing (1896), and Kohl (1860). Carver (1796, p. 238) describes Iroquois playing until they have lost everything they owned, including their moccasins, and then walking back to their home camp in snow three feet deep. An observer of the Tarahumara in Mexico reported that “he…may go on playing