Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [168]
The logical consequence of reducing motivation to a search for pleasure that is instigated by a few basic genetically programmed desires, however, is a failure to account for much of the behavior that differentiates humans from other animal species. To illustrate this, it is useful to examine the role of enjoyment in an evolutionary perspective.
Life is shaped as much by the future as it is by the past. The first fish to leave the sea for dry land were not programmed to do so, but exploited unused potentials in their makeup to take advantage of the opportunities of an entirely new environment. The monkeys who use sticks to fish for ants at the mouth of anthills are not following a destiny carved in their genes, but are experimenting with possibilities that in the future may lead to the conscious use of tools, and hence to what we call progress. And certainly human history can only be understood as the action of people striving to realize indistinct dreams. It is not a question of teleology—the belief that our actions are the unfolding of a preordained destiny—because teleology is also a mechanistic concept. The goals we pursue are not determined in advance or built into our makeup. They are discovered in the process of enjoying the extension of our skills in novel settings, in new environments.
Enjoyment seems to be the mechanism that natural selection has provided to ensure that we will evolve and become more complex. (This argument has been made in Csikszentmihalyi and Massimini [1985]; I. Csikszentmihalyi [1988]; and M. Csikszentmihalyi [1988]. The evolutionary implications of flow were also perceived by Crook [1980].) Just as pleasure from eating makes us want to eat more, and pleasure from physical love makes us want to have sex, both of which we need to do in order to survive and reproduce, enjoyment motivates us to do things that push us beyond the present and into the future. It makes no sense to assume that only the pursuit of pleasure is the source of “natural” desires, and any other motivation must be its pale derivative. The rewards of reaching new goals are just as genuine as the rewards of satisfying old needs.
The study of the relationship between happiness and energy consumption was reported in Graef, Gianinno, & Csikszentmihalyi (1981).
The U.S. dancers’ quotations are from Csikszentmihalyi (1975, p. 104). The Italian dancer’s is from Delle Fave & Massimini (1988, p. 212).
The cultivation of sexuality. An excellent historical review of Western ideas about love, and of the behaviors that accompanied it, is given in the three volumes of The Nature of Love by Irving Singer (1981). A compendium of contemporary psychologists’ views on love was collected by Kenneth Pope (1980). A very recent statement on the subject is by the Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg (1988), who expands the classical description of love as eros or as agape to three components: intimacy, passion, and commitment. Liza Dalby (1983), an American anthropologist who spent a few years training as a geisha in Kyoto, gives a good description of the refinements involved in the Far Eastern approach to sexuality. For the lack of romance in antiquity, see Veyne (1987, esp. pp. 202–5).
The way in which the rules of the Jesuit order developed by Saint Ignatius of Loyola helped organize life as a unified activity, potentially suited to provide flow experience for those who followed them, is described in I. Csikszentmihalyi (1986, 1988) and Toscano (1986).
A brief introduction to Patanjali’s Yoga can be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1985, vol. 12, p. 846). Eliade (1969) provides a more thorough immersion in the subject.
Some of the most powerful contemporary insights on the psychology of aesthetics are in the works of Arnheim (1954, 1971, 1982) and Gombrich (1954, 1979), who stress the role of order (or negative entropy) in art. For more psychoanalytically oriented approaches, see the three volumes edited by Mary Gedo, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Art (1986, 1987, 1988).
“There is that wonderful…” is from Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson