Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning (35 page)

“A lot of pieces…”
The quote is from a study of how fine-art museum curators describe the aesthetic experience (Csikszentmihalyi & Robinson, in press, p. 51).

Professor Maier-Leibnitz
described his ingenious way of keeping track of time by tapping his fingers in a personal communication (1986).

The importance of
microflow
activities was examined in
Beyond Boredom and Anxiety
(Csikszentmihalyi 1975, pp. 140–78). Those studies showed that if people were asked to do without their usual routines, such as tapping their fingers, doodling, whistling, or joking with friends, within a matter of hours they would become irritable. Frequently they would report loss of control and disruption of behavior after only a day of microflow deprivation. Few people were able or willing to do without these small routines for more than 24 hours.

The balanced
ratio between challenges and skills
was recognized from the very beginning as one of the central conditions of the flow experience (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi 1975, pp. 49–54). The original model assumed that enjoyment would occur along the entire diagonal, that is, when challenges and skills were both very low, as well as when they were both very high. Empirical research findings later led to a modification of the model. People did not enjoy situations in which their skills and the outside challenges were both lower than their accustomed levels. The new model predicts flow only when challenges and skills are relatively in balance, and above the individual’s mean level—and this prediction is confirmed by the studies conducted with the Experience Sampling Method (Carli 1986, Csikszentmihalyi & Nakamura 1989, Massimini, Csikszentmihalyi, & Carli 1987). In addition, these studies have shown that the condition of anxiety (high challenge, low skills) is relatively rare in everyday life, and it is experienced as much more negative than the condition of boredom (low challenge, high skills).

“Your concentration…,”“You are so involved…,”
and
“…the concentration…”
are from Csikszentmihalyi (1975, p. 39).
“Her reading…”
is from Allison and Duncan (1988, p. 129). The relationship between focused attention and enjoyment was clearly perceived four centuries ago by Montaigne (1580 [1958], p. 853): “I enjoy…[life] twice as much as others, for the measure of enjoyment depends on the greater or lesser attention that we lend it.”

“The mystique of rock climbing…”
is from Csikszentmihalyi (1975, pp. 47–48).

“I find special satisfaction…”
is from Delle Fave & Massimini (1988, p. 197).
“I…experienced a sense of satisfaction…”
is from Hiscock (1968, p. 45), and
“Each time…”
is from Moitessier (1971, p. 159); the last two are cited in Macbeth (1988, p. 228).

Painting.
The distinction between more and less original artists is that the former start painting with a general and often vague idea of what they want to accomplish, while the latter tend to start with a clearly visualized picture in mind. Thus original artists must discover as they go along what it is that they will do, using feedback from the developing work to suggest new approaches. The less original artists end up painting the picture in their heads, which has no chance to grow and develop. But to be successful in his open-ended process of creation, the original artist must have well-internalized criteria for what is good art, so that he can choose or discard the right elements in the developing painting (Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi 1976).

Surgery
as a flow experience is described in Csikszentmihalyi (1975, 1985b).

Exceptional sensitivities.
The commonsense impression that different children have a facility for developing different talents, some having an affinity for physical movement, others for music, or languages, or for getting along with other people, has recently been formalized in a theory of “multiple intelligences” by Howard Gardner (1983). Gardner and his collaborators at Harvard are now at work developing a comprehensive testing battery for each of the seven major dimensions of intelligence he has identified.

The importance of
feedback for the blind
is reported in Massimini, Csikszentmihalyi, & Delle Fave (1988, pp. 79–80).

“It is as if…”
is from Csikszentmihalyi (1975, p. 40).

“The court…”
and
“Kids my age…”
are from Csikszentmihalyi (1975, pp. 40–41);
“When you’re [climbing]…”
is from ibid., p. 81, and
“I get a feeling…”
from ibid., p. 41.
“But no matter how many…”
is from Crealock (1951, pp. 99–100), quoted in Macbeth (1988, pp. 221–22). The quotation from Edwin Moses is in Johnson (1988, p. 6).

“A strong relaxation…”
and
“…I have a general feeling…”
are from Csikszentmihalyi (1975, pp. 44, 45).

The attraction of risk
and danger has been extensively studied by Marvin Zuckerman (1979), who identified the “sensation seeking” personality trait. A more popular treatment of the subject is the recent book by Ralph Keyes (1985).

One of the earliest psychological studies of
gambling
is the one by Kusyszyn (1977). That games of chance have developed from the divinatory aspects of religious ceremonials has been argued by Culin (1906, pp. 32, 37, 43), David (1962), and Huizinga (1939 [1970]).

Morphy and Fischer.
The similarity between the careers of these two chess champions who lived a century apart is indeed striking. Paul Charles Morphy (1837–84) became a chess master in his early teens; when he was 22 years old he traveled to Europe, where he beat everyone who dared to play against him. After he returned to New York potential competitors thought he was too good, and were afraid to play him even at favorable odds. Deprived of his only source of flow, Morphy became a recluse displaying eccentric and paranoid behavior. For parallels with Bobby Fischer’s career, see Waitzkin (1988). There are two lines of explanation for such coincidences. One is that people with fragile psychic organization are disproportionately attracted to chess. The other is that chess, at highly competitive levels, requires a complete commitment of psychic energy and can become addictive. When a player becomes a champion, and exhausts all the challenges of the activity into which so much of his attention has been invested, he runs a serious risk of becoming disoriented because the goal that has given order to his consciousness is no longer meaningful.

Gambling among American Indians
is described by Culin (1906), Cushing (1896), and Kohl (1860). Carver (1796, p. 238) describes Iroquois playing until they have lost everything they owned, including their moccasins, and then walking back to their home camp in snow three feet deep. An observer of the Tarahumara in Mexico reported that “he…may go on playing [stick-dice] for a fortnight to a month, until he has lost everything he has in the world except his wife and children; he draws the line at that” (Lumholtz 1902 [1987], p. 278).

Surgeons
who claim that performing operations can be “addictive” are quoted in Csikszentmihalyi (1975, pp. 138–39).

“It’s a Zen feeling…”
is from ibid., p. 87.

“So one forgets oneself…”
is from Moitessier (1971, p. 52) cited in Macbeth (1988, p. 22).
“I understand something…”
is from Sato (1988, p. 113).

For the
sense of self-transcendence
while involved in rock climbing see Robinson (1969); while involved in chess, see Steiner (1974).

The
danger of losing self
as a result of “transcendent” experience has been extensively written about. One of the earliest treatments of this possibility is by Le Bon (1895 [1960]), whose work influenced that of McDougall (1920) and Freud (1921). Some recent studies dealing with the relationship of self-awareness and behavior are by Diener (1979), Wicklund (1979), and Scheier & Carver (1980). In terms of our model of complexity a deindividuated person who loses his or her self in a group is
integrated
, but not
differentiated
. Such a person yields the control of consciousness to the group, and may easily engage in dangerous behavior. To benefit from transcendence one must also have a strongly differentiated, or individuated self. Describing the dialectical relationship between the
I,
or the active part of the self, and the
me,
or the reflected self-concept, was the very influential contribution of George Herbert Mead (1934 [1970]).

“Two things happen…”
is from Csikszentmihalyi (1975, p. 116).

The essential connection between something like happiness, enjoyment, and even virtue, on the one hand, and
intrinsic or autotelic rewards
on the other has been generally recognized by thinkers in a variety of cultural traditions. It is essential to the Taoist concept of
Yu
, or right living (e.g., the basic writings of Chuang Tzu, translated by Watson 1964); to the Aristotelian concept of virtue (MacIntyre 1984); and to the Hindu attitude toward life that infuses the
Bhagavad Gita
.

The generalizations about people being
dissatisfied with work
and with
leisure time
are based on our studies with the Experience Sampling Method (e.g., Csikszentmihalyi & Graef 1979, 1980; Graef, Csikszentmihalyi, & Gianinno, 1983; Csikszentmihalyi & LeFevre 1987, 1989; and LeFevre 1988). The conclusions are based on the momentary responses adult workers wrote down whenever they were paged at random times on their jobs. When workers respond to large-scale surveys, however, they often tend to give much more favorable global responses. A compilation of 15 studies of job satisfaction carried out between 1972 and 1978 concluded that 3 percent of U.S. workers are “very dissatisfied” with their jobs, 9 percent are “somewhat dissatisfied,” 36 percent are “somewhat satisfied,” and 52 percent are “very satisfied” (Argyle 1987, pp. 31–63). A more recent national survey conducted by Robert Half International and reported in the
Chicago Tribune
(Oct. 18, 1987, sect. 8) arrives at much less rosy results. According to this study, 24 percent of the U.S. work force, or one worker in four, is quite dissatisfied with his or her job. Our methods of measuring satisfaction may be too stringent, whereas the survey methods are likely to give results that are too optimistic. It should be easy to find out whether a group of people are “satisfied” or “dissatisfied” with work. In reality, because satisfaction is such a relative concept, it is very difficult to give an objective answer to this simple question. It is rather like whether one should say “half full” or “half empty” when asked to describe a glass with water halfway up (or down) the container. In a recent book by two outstanding German social scientists, the authors came to diametrically opposed conclusions about German workers’ attitudes toward work, one claiming they loved it, the other that they hated it, even though they were both arguing from the same exhaustive and detailed survey data base (Noelle-Neumann & Strumpel 1984). The counterintuitive finding that people tend to rate work as more satisfying than leisure has been noticed by several investigators (e.g., Andrews & Withey 1976, Robinson 1977). For example, Veroff, Douvan, & Kulka (1981) report that 49 percent of employed men claim work is more satisfying for them than leisure, whereas only 19 percent say that leisure is more satisfying than work.

The dangers of addiction to flow
have been dealt with in more detail by Csikszentmihalyi (1985b).
Crime as flow.
A description of how juvenile delinquency can provide flow experiences is given in Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1978).

The
Oppenheimer
quote is from Weyden (1984).

“Water can be both good and bad…”
This fragment from Democritus was cited by de Santillana (1961 [1970], p. 157).

CHAPTER 4

Play.
After Huizinga’s
Homo Ludens
, which first appeared in 1939, perhaps the most seminal book about play and playfulness has been Roger Caillois’s
Les Jeux et les Hommes
(1958).

Mimicry.
An excellent example of how a ritual disguise can help one to step out of ordinary experience is given by Monti (1969, pp. 9–15), in his discussion of the use of West African ceremonial masks:

“From a psychological point of view the origin of the mask can also be explained by the more atavistic
aspiration of the human being to escape from himself in order to be enriched by the experience of different existences
—a desire which obviously cannot be fulfilled on the physical level—and in order to increase its own power by identifying with universal, divine, or demonic forces, whichever they may be. It is a desire to break out of the human constriction of individuals shaped in a specific and immutable mould and closed in a birth-death cycle which leaves no possibility of
consciously chosen existential adventures
” (italics added).

Flow and discovery.
When asked to rank 16 very different activities as being more or less similar to flow, the groups of highly skilled rock climbers, composers of music, chess players, and so on studied by Csikszentmihalyi (1975, p. 29) listed the item “Designing or discovering something new” as being the most similar to their flow activity.

Flow and growth.
The issue of how flow experiences lead to growth of the self are discussed in Deci & Ryan (1985) and Csikszentmihalyi (1982b, 1985a). Anne Wells (1988) has shown that women who spend more time in flow have a more positive self-concept.

Flow and ritual.
The anthropologist Victor Turner (1974) saw the ubiquity of the ritual processes in preliterate societies as an indication that they were socially sanctioned opportunities to experience flow. Religious rituals in general are usually conducive to the flow experience (see Carrington 1977; Csikszentmihalyi 1987; I. Csikszentmihalyi 1988; and Wilson 1985 and in press). A good introduction to the historical relationship between the sacred and the secular dimensions of leisure can be found in John R. Kelly’s textbook
Leisure
(1982, pp. 53–68).