Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [165]
The dangers of addiction to flow have been dealt with in more detail by Csikszentmihalyi (1985b).
Crime as flow. A description of how juvenile delinquency can provide flow experiences is given in Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1978).
The Oppenheimer quote is from Weyden (1984).
“Water can be both good and bad…” This fragment from Democritus was cited by de Santillana (1961 [1970], p. 157).
CHAPTER 4
Play. After Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, which first appeared in 1939, perhaps the most seminal book about play and playfulness has been Roger Caillois’s Les Jeux et les Hommes (1958).
Mimicry. An excellent example of how a ritual disguise can help one to step out of ordinary experience is given by Monti (1969, pp. 9–15), in his discussion of the use of West African ceremonial masks:
“From a psychological point of view the origin of the mask can also be explained by the more atavistic aspiration of the human being to escape from himself in order to be enriched by the experience of different existences—a desire which obviously cannot be fulfilled on the physical level—and in order to increase its own power by identifying with universal, divine, or demonic forces, whichever they may be. It is a desire to break out of the human constriction of individuals shaped in a specific and immutable mould and closed in a birth-death cycle which leaves no possibility of consciously chosen existential adventures” (italics added).
Flow and discovery. When asked to rank 16 very different activities as being more or less similar to flow, the groups of highly skilled rock climbers, composers of music, chess players, and so on studied by Csikszentmihalyi (1975, p. 29) listed the item “Designing or discovering something new” as being the most similar to their flow activity.
Flow and growth. The issue of how flow experiences lead to growth of the self are discussed in Deci & Ryan (1985) and Csikszentmihalyi (1982b, 1985a). Anne Wells (1988) has shown that women who spend more time in flow have a more positive self-concept.
Flow and ritual. The anthropologist Victor Turner (1974) saw the ubiquity of the ritual processes in preliterate societies as an indication that they were socially sanctioned opportunities to experience flow. Religious rituals in general are usually conducive to the flow experience (see Carrington 1977; Csikszentmihalyi 1987; I. Csikszentmihalyi 1988; and Wilson 1985 and in press). A good introduction to the historical relationship between the sacred and the secular dimensions of leisure can be found in John R. Kelly’s textbook Leisure (1982, pp. 53–68).
Flow and art. A description of how passive visual aesthetic experiences can produce flow is given in Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson (in press). The religious significance of Mayan ball games is described in Blom (1932) and Gilpin (1948). Pok-ta-pok, as this game similar to basketball was called, took place in a stone courtyard, and the aim was for one team to throw the ball through the opponents’ stone hoop placed about 28 feet above the playing field—without touching it with their hands. Father Diego Duran, an early Spanish missionary, gives a vivid description: “…It was a game of much recreation to them and enjoyment among which were some who played it with such dexterity and skill that they during one hour succeeded in not stopping the flight of the ball from one end to the other without missing a single hit with their buttocks, not being allowed to reach it with hands nor feet, nor with the calf of their legs, nor with their arms…” (quoted in Blom 1932). Apparently such games sometimes ended in human sacrifices or the killing of the members of the losing team (Pina Chan 1969).