Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [96]
The view that work undertaken as a flow activity is the best way to fulfill human potentialities has been proposed often enough in the past, by various religious and philosophical systems. To people imbued with the Christian worldview of the Middle Ages it made sense to say that peeling potatoes was just as important as building a cathedral, provided they were both done for the greater glory of God. For Karl Marx, men and women constructed their being through productive activities; there is no “human nature,” he held, except that which we create through work. Work not only transforms the environment by building bridges across rivers and cultivating barren plains; it also transforms the worker from an animal guided by instincts into a conscious, goal-directed, skillful person.
One of the most interesting examples of how the phenomenon of flow appeared to thinkers of earlier times is the concept of Yu referred to about 2,300 years ago in the writings of the Taoist scholar Chuang Tzu. Yu is a synonym for the right way of following the path, or Tao: it has been translated into English as “wandering”; as “walking without touching the ground”; or as “swimming,”“flying,” and “flowing.” Chuang Tzu believed that to Yu was the proper way to live—without concern for external rewards, spontaneously, with total commitment—in short, as a total autotelic experience.
As an example of how to live by Yu—or how to flow—Chuang Tzu presents, in the Inner Chapters of the work which has come down to us bearing his name, a parable of a humble worker. This character is Ting, a cook whose task was to butcher the meat at the court of Lord Hui of Wei. Schoolchildren in Hong Kong and Taiwan still have to memorize Chuang Tzu’s description: “Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. At every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee—zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.”
Lord Wen-hui was fascinated by how much flow (or Yu) his cook found in his work, and so he complimented Ting on his great skill. But Ting denied that it was a matter of skill: “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill.” Then he described how he had achieved his superb performance: a sort of mystical, intuitive understanding of the anatomy of the ox, which allowed him to slice it to pieces with what appeared to be automatic ease: “Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants.”
Ting’s explanation may seem to imply that Yu and flow are the result of different kinds of processes. In fact, some critics have emphasized the differences: while flow is the result of a conscious attempt to master challenges, Yu occurs when the individual gives up conscious mastery. In this sense they see flow as an example of the “Western” search for optimal experience, which according to them is based on changing objective conditions (e.g., by confronting challenges with skills), whereas Yu is an example of the “Eastern” approach, which disregards objective conditions entirely in favor of spiritual playfulness and the transcendence of actuality.
But how is a person to achieve this transcendental experience and spiritual playfulness? In the same parable, Chuang Tzu offers a valuable insight to answer this question, an insight that has given rise to diametrically opposite interpretations. In Watson’s translation, it reads as follows: “However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move my knife with the greatest of subtlety, until—flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around