Read Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning Online
Authors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Tags: #Self-Help
The Latin motto of the modern Olympic games—
Altius, citius, fortius
—is a good, if incomplete summary of how the body can experience flow. It encompasses the rationale of all sports, which is to do something better than it has ever been done before. The purest form of athletics, and sports in general, is to break through the limitations of what the body can accomplish.
However unimportant an athletic goal may appear to the outsider, it becomes a serious affair when performed with the intent of demonstrating a perfection of skill. Throwing things, for instance, is a rather trivial ability; even small babies are quite good at it, as the toys surrounding any infant’s crib testify. But how far a person can throw an object of a certain weight becomes a matter of legend. The Greeks invented the discus, and the great discus throwers of antiquity were immortalized by the best sculptors; the Swiss gathered on holidays in mountain meadows to see who could toss the trunk of a tree farthest; the Scots did the same with gigantic rocks. In baseball nowadays pitchers become rich and famous because they can throw balls with speed and precision, and basketball players because they can sink them into hoops. Some athletes throw javelins; others are bowlers, shot-putters, or hammer throwers; some throw boomerangs or cast fishing lines. Each of these variations on the basic capacity to throw offers almost unlimited opportunities for enjoyment.
Altius
—higher—is the first word of the Olympic motto, and soaring above the ground is another universally recognized challenge. To break the bonds of gravity is one of the oldest dreams of mankind. The myth of Icarus, who had wings fashioned so he could reach the sun, has been long held to be a parable of the aims—noble and misguided at the same time—of civilization itself. To jump higher, to climb the loftiest peaks, to fly far above the earth, are among the most enjoyable activities people can do. Yet some savants have recently invented a special psychic infirmity, the so-called “Icarus complex,” to account for this desire to be released from the pull of gravity. Like all explanations that try to reduce enjoyment to a defensive ploy against repressed anxieties, this one misses the point. Of course, in some sense all purposeful action can be regarded as a defense against the threats of chaos. But in that respect it is more worthwhile to consider acts that bring enjoyment as signs of health, not of disease.
Flow experiences based on the use of physical skills do not occur only in the context of outstanding athletic feats. Olympians do not have an exclusive gift in finding enjoyment in pushing performance beyond existing boundaries. Every person, no matter how unfit he or she is, can rise a little higher, go a little faster, and grow to be a little stronger. The joy of surpassing the limits of the body is open to all.
Even the simplest physical act becomes enjoyable when it is transformed so as to produce flow. The essential steps in this process are: (a) to set an overall goal, and as many subgoals as are realistically feasible; (b) to find ways of measuring progress in terms of the goals chosen; (c) to keep concentrating on what one is doing, and to keep making finer and finer distinctions in the challenges involved in the activity; (d) to develop the skills necessary to interact with the opportunities available; and (e) to keep raising the stakes if the activity becomes boring.
A good example of this method is the act of walking, which is as simple a use of the body as one can imagine, yet which can become a complex flow activity, almost an art form. A great number of different goals might be set for a walk. For instance, the choice of the itinerary: where one wishes to go, and by what route. Within the overall route, one might select places to stop, or certain landmarks to see. Another goal may be to develop a personal style, a way to move the body easily and efficiently. An economy of motion that maximizes physical well-being is another obvious goal. For measuring progress, the feedback may include how fast and how easily the intended distance was covered; how many interesting sights one has seen; and how many new ideas or feelings were entertained along the way.
The challenges of the activity are what force us to concentrate. The challenges of a walk will vary greatly, depending on the environment. For those who live in large cities, flat sidewalks and right-angle layouts make the physical act of walking easy. Walking on a mountain trail is another thing altogether: for a skilled hiker each step presents a different challenge to be resolved with a choice of the most efficient foothold that will give the best leverage, simultaneously taking into account the momentum and the center of gravity of the body and the various surfaces—dirt, rocks, roots, grass, branches—on which the foot can land. On a difficult trail an experienced hiker walks with economy of motion and lightness, and the constant adjustment of her steps to the terrain reveals a highly sophisticated process of selecting the best solution to a changing series of complex equations involving mass, velocity, and friction. Of course these calculations are usually automatic, and give the impression of being entirely intuitive, almost instinctive; but if the walker does not process the right information about the terrain, and fails to make the appropriate adjustments in her gait, she will stumble or will soon grow tired. So while this kind of walking might be entirely unselfconscious, it is in fact a highly intense activity that requires concentrated attention.
In the city the terrain itself is not challenging, but there are other opportunities for developing skills. The social stimulation of the crowds, the historical and architectural references of the urban milieu can add enormous variety to a walk. There are store windows to see, people to observe, patterns of human interaction to reflect on. Some walkers specialize in choosing the shortest routes, others the most interesting ones; some pride themselves in walking the same route with chronometric precision, others like to mix and match their itinerary. In winter some aim to walk as long as possible on the sunny stretches of the sidewalk, and to walk as much in the shade as possible in the summer. There are those who time their crossings exactly for when the traffic lights change to green. Of course these chances for enjoyment must be cultivated; they don’t just happen automatically to those who do not control their itinerary. Unless one sets goals and develops skills, walking is just featureless drudgery.
Walking is the most trivial physical activity imaginable, yet it can be profoundly enjoyable if a person sets goals and takes control of the process. On the other hand, the hundreds of sophisticated forms of sport and body culture currently available—ranging from racquetball to Yoga, from bicycling to martial arts—may not be enjoyable at all if one approaches them with the attitude that one
must
take part in them because they are fashionable, or simply because they are good for one’s health. Many people get caught up in a treadmill of physical activity over which they end up having little control, feeling duty bound to exercise but not having any fun doing it. They have made the usual mistake of confounding form and substance, and assume that concrete actions and events are the only “reality” that determines what they experience. For such individuals, joining a fancy health club should be almost a guarantee that they will enjoy themselves. However, enjoyment, as we have seen, does not depend on
what
you do, but rather on
how
you do it.
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.
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 to become a professional ballerina. It has been hard: little money, lots of traveling, and my mother always complains about my work. But love of the dance has always sustained me. It is now part of my life, a part of me that I could not live without.” In this group of sixty professional dancers of marriageable age, only three were married, and only one had a child; pregnancy was seen as too great an interference with a career.
But just as with athletics, one certainly need not become a professional to enjoy controlling the expressive potentials of the body. Dilettante dancers can have just as much fun, without sacrificing every other goal for the sake of feeling themselves moving harmoniously.
And there are other forms of expression that use the body as an instrument: miming and acting, for instance. The popularity of charades as a parlor game is due to the fact that it allows people to shed for a time their customary identity, and act out different roles. Even the most silly and clumsy impersonation can provide an enjoyable relief from the limitations of everyday patterns of behavior, a glimpse into alternative modes of being.
When people think of enjoyment, usually one of the first things that comes to mind is sex. This is not surprising, because sexuality is certainly one of the most universally rewarding experiences, surpassed in its power to motivate perhaps only by the need to survive, to drink, and to eat. The urge to have sex is so powerful that it can drain psychic energy away from other necessary goals. Therefore every culture has to invest great efforts in rechanneling and restraining it, and many complex social institutions exist only in order to regulate this urge. The saying that “love makes the world go round” is a polite reference to the fact that most of our deeds are impelled, either directly or indirectly, by sexual needs. We wash, dress, and comb our hair to be attractive, many of us go to work so as to afford keeping a partner and a household, we struggle for status and power in part so as to be admired and loved.
But is sex always enjoyable? By now the reader might be able to guess that the answer depends on what happens in the consciousness of those involved. The same sexual act can be experienced as painful, revolting, frightening, neutral, pleasant, pleasurable, enjoyable, or ecstatic—depending on how it is linked to a person’s goals. A rape may not be distinguishable physically from a loving encounter, but their psychological effects are worlds apart.
It is safe to say that sexual stimulation in and of itself is generally pleasurable. That we are genetically programmed to derive pleasure from sexuality is evolution’s rather clever way of guaranteeing that individuals will engage in activities likely to lead to procreation, thus ensuring the survival of the species. To take pleasure in sex one needs only to be healthy and willing; no special skills are required, and soon after the first experiences, few new physical challenges arise again. But like other pleasures, unless it is transformed into an enjoyable activity, sex easily becomes boring with time. It turns from a genuinely positive experience into either a meaningless ritual or an addictive dependence. Fortunately there are many ways to make sex enjoyable.
Eroticism is one form of cultivating sexuality that focuses on the development of physical skills. In a sense, eroticism is to sex as sport is to physical activity. The
Kama Sutra
and
The Joy of Sex
are two examples of manuals that aim to foster eroticism by providing suggestions and goals to help make sexual activity more varied, more interesting and challenging. Most cultures have elaborate systems of erotic training and performance, often overlaid with religious meanings. Early fertility rites, the Dionysian mysteries of Greece, and the recurring connection between prostitution and female priesthood are just a few forms of this phenomenon. It is as if in the early stages of religion, cultures coopted the obvious attraction of sexuality and used it as a basis on which to build more complex ideas and patterns of behavior.
But the real cultivation of sexuality begins only when psychological dimensions are added to the purely physical. According to historians, the art of love was a recent development in the West. With rare exceptions, there was very little romance in the sexual practices of the Greeks and the Romans. The wooing, the sharing of feelings between lovers, the promises and the courtship rituals that now seem to be such indispensable attributes of intimate relations were only invented in the late Middle Ages by the troubadours who plied the castles of southern France, and then, as the “sweet new style,” they were adopted by the affluent classes in the rest of Europe. Romance—the rituals of wooing first developed in the Romance region of southern France—provides an entire new range of challenges to lovers. For those who learn the skills necessary to meet them, it becomes not only pleasurable, but enjoyable as well.
A similar refinement of sexuality took place in other civilizations, and roughly in the same not-too-distant past. The Japanese created extremely sophisticated professionals of love, expecting their geishas to be accomplished musicians, dancers, actresses, as well as appreciative of poetry and art. Chinese and Indian courtesans and Turkish odalisques were equally skillful. Regrettably this professionalism, while developing the potential complexity of sex to great heights, did little to improve directly the quality of experience for most people. Historically, romance seems to have been restricted to youth and to those who had the time and the money to indulge in it; the vast majority in any culture appear to have had a very humdrum sex life. “Decent” people the world over do not spend too much energy on the task of sexual reproduction, or on the practices that have been built on it. Romance resembles sports in this respect as well: instead of doing it personally, most people are content to hear about it or watch a few experts perform it.
A third dimension of sexuality begins to emerge when in addition to physical pleasure and the enjoyment of a romantic relationship the lover feels genuine care for his partner. There are then new challenges one discovers: to enjoy the partner as a unique person, to understand her, and to help her fulfill her goals. With the emergence of this third dimension sexuality becomes a very complex process, one that can go on providing flow experiences all through life.
At first it is very easy to obtain pleasure from sex, and even to enjoy it. Any fool can fall in love when young. The first date, the first kiss, the first intercourse all present heady new challenges that keep the young person in flow for weeks on end. But for many this ecstatic state occurs only once; after the “first love” all later relationships are no longer as exciting. It is especially difficult to keep enjoying sex with the same partner over a period of years. It is probably true that humans, like the majority of mammalian species, are not monogamous by nature. It is impossible for partners not to grow bored unless they work to discover new challenges in each other’s company, and learn appropriate skills for enriching the relationship. Initially physical challenges alone are enough to sustain flow, but unless romance and genuine care also develop, the relationship will grow stale.
How to keep love fresh? The answer is the same as it is for any other activity. To be enjoyable, a relationship must become more complex. To become more complex, the partners must discover new potentialities in themselves and in each other. To discover these, they must invest attention in each other—so that they can learn what thoughts and feelings, what dreams reside in their partner’s mind. This in itself is a never-ending process, a lifetime’s task. After one begins to really know another person, then many joint adventures become possible: traveling together, reading the same books, raising children, making and realizing plans all become more enjoyable and more meaningful. The specific details are unimportant. Each person must find out which ones are relevant to his or her own situation. What is important is the general principle: that sexuality, like any other aspect of life, can be made enjoyable if we are willing to take control of it, and cultivate it in the direction of greater complexity.