Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [64]
In one of our studies we addressed the following question: Are people happier when they use more material resources in their leisure activities? Or are they happier when they invest more of themselves? We tried to answer these questions with the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), the procedure I developed at the University of Chicago to study the quality of experience. As described earlier, this method consists in giving people electronic pagers, or beepers, and a booklet of response sheets. A radio transmitter is programmed to send signals about eight times a day, at random intervals, for a week. Each time the pager signals, respondents fill out a page of the booklet, indicating where they are and what they are doing and with whom, and rating their state of mind on a variety of dimensions, such as a seven-point scale ranging from “very happy” to “very sad.”
What we found was that when people were pursuing leisure activities that were expensive in terms of the outside resources required—activities that demanded expensive equipment, or electricity, or other forms of energy measured in BTUs, such as power boating, driving, or watching television—they were significantly less happy than when involved in inexpensive leisure. People were happiest when they were just talking to one another, when they gardened, knitted, or were involved in a hobby; all of these activities require few material resources, but they demand a relatively high investment of psychic energy. Leisure that uses up external resources, however, often requires less attention, and as a consequence it generally provides less memorable rewards.
THE JOYS OF MOVEMENT
Sports and fitness are not the only media of physical experience that use the body as a source of enjoyment, for in fact a broad range of activities rely on rhythmic or harmonious movements to generate flow. Among these dance is probably the oldest and the most significant, both for its universal appeal and because of its potential complexity. From the most isolated New Guinea tribe to the polished troupes of the Bolshoi Ballet, the response of the body to music is widely practiced as a way of improving the quality of experience.
Older people may consider dancing at clubs a bizarre and senseless ritual, but many teenagers find it an important source of enjoyment. Here is how some of the dancers describe the sensation of moving on the floor: “Once I get into it, then I just float along, having fun, just feeling myself move around.”“I get sort of a physical high from it…. I get very sweaty, very feverish or sort of ecstatic when everything is going really well.”“You move about and try to express yourself in terms of those motions. That’s where it’s at. It’s a body language kind of communicative medium, in a way…. When it’s going good, I’m really expressing myself well in terms of the music and in terms of the people that are out there.”
The enjoyment of dancing is often so intense that people will give up many other options for its sake. Here is a typical statement from one of the dancers interviewed by Professor Massimini’s group in Milan, Italy: “From the very first I wanted