Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [172]
Remembering the personal past. In part under the influence of Erikson’s psychobiographical accounts of the lives of Hitler, Gorki, Luther, and Gandhi (1950, 1958, 1969), a concern for “personal narrative” has become prominent in life-span developmental psychology (see Cohler 1982; Freeman 1989; Gergen & Gergen 1983, 1984; McAdams 1985; Robinson 1988; Sarbin 1986; and Schafer 1980). This perspective claims that knowing how a person sees his or her own past is one of the best ways to predict what he or she will do in the future.
Every home a museum. Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton (1981) studied over 300 members of three-generational families around Chicago, who were asked in their homes to show interviewers their favorite objects, and to explain the reasons for cherishing them.
The four quotations from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) are from pages 24, 38, 38, and 36, respectively. One of the most exciting promises of flow theory is that it may help explain why certain ideas, practices, and products are adopted, while others are ignored or forgotten—since at this point the histories of ideas, institutions, and cultures work almost exclusively within a paradigm informed by economic determinism. In addition, it might be revealing to consider how history is directed by the enjoyment people derive or anticipate from different courses of action. A beginning in that direction is Isabella Csikszentmihalyi’s analysis of the reasons for the success of the Jesuit order in the 16th and 17th centuries (1988).
Breakthroughs. It would go against the central message of this book to claim that the flow experience is “good for you” in the sense that it helps people achieve scientific or any other kind of success. It needs to be stressed again and again that what counts is the quality of experience flow provides, and that this is more important for achieving happiness than riches or fame. At the same time, it would be disingenuous to ignore the fact that successful people tend to enjoy what they do to an unusual extent. This may indicate that people who enjoy what they are doing will do a good job of it (although, as we know, correlation does not imply causation). A long time ago, Maurice Schlick (1934) pointed out how important enjoyment was in sustaining scientific creativity. In an interesting recent study, B. Eugene Griessman interviewed a potpourri of high achievers ranging from Francis H. C. Crick, the codiscoverer of the double helix, to Hank Aaron, Julie Andrews, and Ted Turner. Fifteen of these celebrities completed a questionnaire in which they rated the importance of thirty-three personal characteristics, such as creativity, competence, and breadth of knowledge, in terms of helping them achieve success. The item most strongly endorsed (for an average of 9.86 on a 10-point scale) was enjoyment of work (Griessman 1987, pp. 294–95).
Another indication of how flow may be linked to success is suggested by the work of Larson (1985, 1988). In a study of high school juniors writing a month-long assignment, he found that the students who were bored wrote essays expert English teachers found boring, students who were anxious wrote disconnected essays that were confusing to read, whereas students who enjoyed the writing task created essays that were enjoyable to read—this controlling for differences in intelligence or ability among the students. The obvious suggestion is that a person who experiences flow in an activity will end up with a product that others will find more valuable.
The interview with the wife of Susumu Tonegawa appeared in USA Today (Oct. 13, 1987, p. 2A).
The amazing variety of things adults learn in their free time is described in the investigations of Allen Tough (1978); see also Gross (1982). One