Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [179]
Unselfconscious self-assurance. For the development of this concept see Logan (1985, 1988).
“Each individual crystal…” This quote from Chouinard was reported in Robinson (1969, p. 6).
“My cockpit is small…” is from Lindbergh (1953, pp. 227–28).
Discovering new goals. That a complex self emerges out of various experiences in the world, just as a creative painting emerges out of the interaction between the artist and his materials, has been argued in Csikszentmihalyi (1985a) and Csikszentmihalyi & Beattie (1979).
Artists’ discovery. The process of problem finding, or discovery, in art is described in a variety of papers starting with Csikszentmihalyi (1965) and ending with Csikszentmihalyi & Getzels (1989). See also Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi (1976). Very briefly, our findings show that art students who in 1964 painted in the manner described here (i.e., who approached the canvas without a clearly worked out image of the finished painting) were 18 years later significantly more successful—by the standards of the artistic community—than their peers who worked out the finished product in their minds beforehand. Other characteristics, such as technical competence, did not differentiate the two groups.
Setting realistic goals. It has been reported that adults who commit themselves to very long-term goals, with few short-term rewards, are less satisfied with their lives than people who have easier, short-term goals (Bee 1987, p. 373). On the other hand, the flow model suggests that having too-easy goals would be equally dissatisfying. Neither extreme allows a person to enjoy life fully.
CHAPTER 10
Hannah Arendt describes the difference between meaning systems built on eternity and immortality in her The Human Condition (1958).
Sorokin worked out his classification of cultures in the four volumes of his Social and Cultural Dynamics, which appeared in 1937. (An abridged single volume with the same title was published in 1962.) Sorokin’s work has been forgotten almost completely by sociologists, perhaps because of his old-fashioned idealism, perhaps because in the crucial decades of the 1950s and 1960s it was overshadowed by that of his much more theoretically astute colleague at Harvard, Talcott Parsons. It is likely that with time this enormously wide-ranging and methodologically innovative scholar will receive the recognition he deserves.
Sequences in the development of the self. Very similar theories of stages of development that alternate between attention focused on the self and attention focused primarily on the social environment were developed by Erikson (1950), who believed that adults had to develop a sense of Identity, then Intimacy, then Generativity, and finally reach a stage of Integrity; by Maslow (1954), whose hierarchy of needs led from physiological safety needs to self-actualization through love and belongingness; by Kohlberg (1984), who claimed that moral development started from a sense of right and wrong based on self-interest and ended with ethics based on universal principles; and by Loevinger (1976), who saw ego development proceed from impulsive self-protective action to a sense of integration with the environment. Helen Bee (1987, especially chapters 10 and 13) gives a good summary of these and other “spiraling” models of development.
Vita activa and vita contemplative. These Aristotelian terms are extensively used by Thomas Aquinas in his analysis of the good life, and by Hannah Arendt (1958).
A description of how the Jesuit rules helped create order in the consciousness of those who followed them is given in Isabella Csikszentmihalyi (1986, 1988) and Marco Toscano (1986).
Emergence of consciousness. A stab in the direction of speculating about how consciousness emerged in human beings was made by Jaynes (1977), who ascribes it to the connection between the left and right cerebral hemispheres, which