Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [24]
At this point, almost all the components needed to understand how consciousness can be controlled are in place. We have seen that experience depends on the way we invest psychic energy—on the structure of attention. This, in turn, is related to goals and intentions. These processes are connected to each other by the self, or the dynamic mental representation we have of the entire system of our goals. These are the pieces that must be maneuvered if we wish to improve things. Of course, existence can also be improved by outside events, like winning a million dollars in the lottery, marrying the right man or woman, or helping to change an unjust social system. But even these marvelous events must take their place in consciousness, and be connected in positive ways to our self, before they can affect the quality of life.
The structure of consciousness is beginning to emerge, but so far we have a rather static picture, one that has sketched out the various elements, but not the processes through which they interact. We need now consider what follows whenever attention brings a new bit of information into awareness. Only then will we be ready to get a thorough sense of how experience can be controlled, and hence changed for the better.
DISORDER IN CONSCIOUSNESS: PSYCHIC ENTROPY
One of the main forces that affects consciousness adversely is psychic disorder—that is, information that conflicts with existing intentions, or distracts us from carrying them out. We give this condition many names, depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, or jealousy. All these varieties of disorder force attention to be diverted to undesirable objects, leaving us no longer free to use it according to our preferences. Psychic energy becomes unwieldy and ineffective.
Consciousness can become disordered in many ways. For instance, in a factory that produces audiovisual equipment, Julio Martinez—one of the people we studied with the Experience Sampling Method—is feeling listless on his job. As the movie projectors pass in front of him on the assembly line, he is distracted and can hardly keep up the rhythm of moves necessary for soldering the connections that are his responsibility. Usually he can do his part of the job with time to spare and then relax for a while to exchange a few jokes before the next unit stops at his station. But today he is struggling, and occasionally he slows down the entire line. When the man at the next station kids him about it, Julio snaps back irritably. From morning to quitting time tension keeps building, and it spills over to his relationship with his co-workers.
Julio’s problem is simple, almost trivial, but it has been weighing heavily on his mind. One evening a few days earlier he noticed on arriving home from work that one of his tires was quite low. Next morning the rim of the wheel was almost touching the ground. Julio would not receive his paycheck till the end of the following week, and he was certain he would not have enough money until then to have the tire patched up, let alone buy a new one. Credit was something he had not yet learned to use. The factory was out in the suburbs, about twenty miles from where he lived, and he simply had to reach it by 8:00 A.M. The only solution Julio could think of was to drive gingerly to the service station in the morning, fill the tire with air, and then drive to work as quickly as possible. After work the tire was low again, so he inflated it at a gas station near the factory and drove home.
On the morning in question, he had been doing this for three days, hoping the procedure would work until the next paycheck. But today, by the time he made it to the factory, he could hardly steer the car because the wheel with the bum tire was so