Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [28]
Flow helps to integrate the self because in that state of deep concentration consciousness is unusually well ordered. Thoughts, intentions, feelings, and all the senses are focused on the same goal. Experience is in harmony. And when the flow episode is over, one feels more “together” than before, not only internally but also with respect to other people and to the world in general. In the words of the climber whom we quoted earlier: “[There’s] no place that more draws the best from human beings…[than] a mountaineering situation. Nobody hassles you to put your mind and body under tremendous stress to get to the top…. Your comrades are there, but you all feel the same way anyway, you’re all in it together. Who can you trust more in the twentieth century than these people? People after the same self-discipline as yourself, following the deeper commitment…. A bond like that with other people is in itself an ecstasy.”
A self that is only differentiated—not integrated—may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centered egotism. By the same token, a person whose self is based exclusively on integration will be connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to reflect complexity.
The self becomes complex as a result of experiencing flow. Paradoxically, it is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were. When we choose a goal and invest ourselves in it to the limits of our concentration, whatever we do will be enjoyable. And once we have tasted this joy, we will redouble our efforts to taste it again. This is the way the self grows. It is the way Rico was able to draw so much out of his ostensibly boring job on the assembly line, or R. from his poetry. It is the way E. overcame her disease to become an influential scholar and a powerful executive. Flow is important both because it makes the present instant more enjoyable, and because it builds the self-confidence that allows us to develop skills and make significant contributions to humankind.
The rest of this volume will explore more thoroughly what we know about optimal experiences: how they feel and under what conditions they occur. Even though there is no easy shortcut to flow, it is possible, if one understands how it works, to transform life—to create more harmony in it and to liberate the psychic energy that otherwise would be wasted in boredom or worry.
3
ENJOYMENT AND THE QUALITY OF LIFE
THERE ARE TWO MAIN STRATEGIES we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better. For instance, feeling secure is an important component of happiness. The sense of security can be improved by buying a gun, installing strong locks on the front door, moving to a safer neighborhood, exerting political pressure on city hall for more police protection, or helping the community to become more conscious of the importance of civil order. All these different responses are aimed at bringing conditions in the environment more in line with our goals. The other method by which we can feel more secure involves modifying what we mean by security. If one does not expect perfect safety, recognizes that risks are inevitable, and succeeds in enjoying a less than ideally predictable world, the threat of insecurity will not have as great a chance of marring happiness.
Neither of these strategies is effective when used alone. Changing external conditions might seem to work at first, but if a person is not in control of his consciousness, the old fears or desires will soon return, reviving previous anxieties. One cannot create a complete sense of