Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Have you ever felt in your zone? You know, that point where you’re focused beyond belief, time seems to freeze, and your concentration is aimed like a laser towards the task in front of you. The zone shows up mysteriously in all sorts of places: you could have been kayaking through the rapids, or solving a difficult coding problem, or baking hand-made sourdough. Regardless, it felt damn good.
It‘s fantastic when we get in our zone. It’s one of those feelings that we crave. The zone gives us a sense of purpose where our skills are paying off. We want to feel like we’re in sync with ourselves, in control, yet ironically this sensation feels difficult to control, showing up randomly and slipping away in seconds.
Hungarian psychologist with an unpronounceable last name Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied this feeling for twenty-five years and dubbed it “flow.” He then wrote a book about his research, also called Flow. Mihaly discovered (forgive me, I’m going to call him Mihaly so I don’t have to keep copy-pasting his last name) that every person who experienced a “flow state” described their experiences in the same way. Every single one. Throughout the book Mihaly outlines the concept of flow, and reveals what can lead to a flow state.
What is “flow” exactly? As Mihaly states in the introduction, it’s a process of “joy, creativity, total involvement in life.” It’s tricky to verbalize, but we’ve all felt it at some moment. It’s the feeling that we are the masters of our own lives, sailing downstream instead of getting thrown around by tidal waves. As Mihaly describes it:
We have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.
I picked up this book because it kept coming up on lists of “books you have to read.” And they were right. This might be one of the most life-altering books I’ve read in the past year. It’s one of those books that immediately makes you rethink your approach to life, especially if you feel aimless, like your life is on autopilot. Here were the biggest takeaways for me personally:
1. Flow is all about creating challenges and improving your skills
The Shushwap tribes in British Columbia had a problem they never expected. As Mihaly explains, in these tribes people were well-fed thanks to a rich supply of salmon and game in the area. Villages were equipped with intricate technologies that helped them get as many resources from the environment as they wanted. Hunters knew this land like the back of their hands, and finding food and shelter was no issue.
The problem? Their world had become too predictable. There was no challenge because the hunters knew every path, every river. Finding food was easy. They were getting bored.
The elders of the village gathered and made a strange, ingenious decision; they decided the entire village would pack up their things every 30 years and move somewhere else. Yes, the entire village. They would take the village and push it somewhere else.
The tribe was able to find challenge again once the village had moved. They had new rivers to figure out, new forests to explore, and new tactics to learn. This also had the pleasant side effect of giving the previous area time to recover from years of hunting.
The elders realized in their wisdom that making a challenge (like moving to a new area) forced people to improve their skills, which is exciting. To help explain, Mihaly uses this nice diagram:
Let’s say you want to learn basketball (this example works for really any skill, from web design to League of Legends). When you first start playing (point A1 on the diagram) the only challenge you face is getting the ball in the hoop. You have no skills, but also little challenge, and so you’re likely to enjoy your rapid improvement. At this point, you’re probably in flow.
But after a while your skills get better. Shooting free throws will get boring (A2). Either that, or you end up meeting a much more experienced player who shows you that basketball is much harder than just lobbing free throws. At this point you might feel anxiety over how badly you’re doing (A3).
This point of anxiety is critical, because this is where you have a choice. On one hand, you can reduce your challenges by making the game easier or playing easier opponents. This would probably bring you back to A2, boredom. Or the anxiety can cause you to quit entirely, which would just take you off the graph altogether. Keep in mind, 90 percent of people choose one of these two options. They either never give themselves real challenges, or they quit.
However, there is a third option, the hardest one, and that is to increase your skills. This choice is rough. You will feel exhausted. You will lose. A lot. But Mihaly concludes that eventually your skills will match the challenges you face and you will reach A4, a flow state. The point where your challenges are perfectly matched with your skills. This is the point we want to reach. The Shushwap tribes faced boredom, so they created challenges. Professional athletes face challenges (losing games) so they increase their skills until they can match their rivals.
Creating challenges is one of the most effective ways to add meaning to your life. Moreover, challenges can be forged out of any corner of your life. Cooking a new dish every week instead of cup ramen. Meeting a new person every week. Starting a YouTube channel. A big part of how I got a reading habit in the first place was from a challenge; in 2017, I told myself that I was going to read 100 books in the year. I didn’t end up reaching it (I read somewhere around 55) but I probably would have given up entirely if not for that goalpost in front of me. And in the process, my skills increased as I learned to manage my time and stay focused enough to finish books. The importance of challenges was one of the most thought-provoking parts of Flow for me personally, and probably the part I’ll tinker with the most in time. No matter where they come from, challenges are deceptively simple ways to enhance your life.
2. Break yourself away from normal patterns
Explaining basketball to an alien would suck. In my opinion they’d have trouble understanding that we play basketball against each other even though there aren’t really any consequences if you lose. Unlike a war, where territory changes and people die based on who wins, if you lose a game of basketball nothing happens to you afterwards (…usually).
Also, like most games, in basketball you purposely limit yourself. The goal is to get your ball into the other team’s hoop. Except, you can’t wait too long to do it, or else it’s a shot clock violation. Also, you can’t just run across the court holding the ball, you have to dribble it. And don’t even think of doing something like getting a ten-foot ladder so you can reach the hoop more easily. If the goal was to only to get the ball in the hoop at all costs, these limitations would make no sense.
However, the point is that games do not follow the normal rules of life. In fact, in Flow Mihaly asserts that games are enjoyable precisely because they are so distinct from real life. A game takes us out of the stress of our daily lives. It’s escapism. In our daily routines, we can get caught in bad weather, or get stuck in traffic, or have a loved one pass away, but when we’re playing a game normal rules and circumstances are thrown out the window. What Mihaly points out in Flow is that we can get that same joy that we get from playing games in our normal lives, by purposely creating circumstances that aren’t normal.
For example, this explains enclothed cognition, the idea that your clothes influence how you think. Mihaly mentions that baseball players wear bright, eye-catching uniforms not only to distinguish between the teams but because it puts the player in “baseball mode.” It signals to your brain that you’re about to play some baseball. Surgeons outfits are like this too. So are lab coats, and leotards. They all put you in a state of mind that you’re about to do something that fits with your costume. It makes you fully present and a master of your environment.
In addition to taking you out of normal life, enjoyable activities give you a sense that you are in control. We even mentioned earlier that flow is the sense of exhilaration when we feel “in control of our actions.” This is different than actually being in control. As Mihaly explains, in the real world “a dancer can fall and break her leg; a chess player can lose and never become a champion,” but when they are in that state of flow and intense focus it‘s like those real world consequences dissolve. It’s like parts of a puzzle are all falling into place, even though in the actual world we still have taxes to file and so on.
Thinking about taxes and other boring things made me consider that getting into a flow state means eliminating boredom. Boredom is often the real drain on life. Sadness, rage, and envy are all negative emotions, but at the very least they are remarkable. Think about any TV show you stopped watching midway through. Was it because the main character was consumed with rage? Or was it because you were bored?
On the other hand, when our usual patterns are broken, we’re no longer on autopilot, and you’re much less likely to be bored since you’re in a new scenario. We signal to our brains that it’s time to be present. Take different routes to work. Order something different on a menu. As Tim Urban, the creator of Wait But Why suggests, even simply forcing yourself to think about new thoughts, like that your legs are just two glorified sticks, can get your brain more present. This is part of how we enter flow; by creating circumstances and habits different than how we normally live, and devising new ways of living in the process.
3. Pay attention to EVERYTHING
Sometimes I daydream without realizing it. It’s not getting lost in your thoughts, but more like being so preoccupied with a thought that you ignore the details of your life: the tastes, sights, and sounds in each moment. In other words, I fail to pay attention. Which sucks, because not paying attention means we notice less and less of the very things in our lives that make it worth living.
For example, I often walk outside of my house in Santa Cruz and see these huge pecan trees in the distance, towering over my whole neighborhood. It’s easy to forget about these trees, filing them as a backdrop for your life among the sky and houses you’ll never visit. But every now and then it actually hits me just how tall these trees actually are, over fifty feet. It might sound dumb, but it’s exciting to acknowledge that you live in the world with a gigantic tree like that. There’s a realization that I would never be able to climb that high, that the view from the top of that tree probably covers half of the city, and that this is a living thing with these sprawling leaf structures and hundreds of tiny branches. Paying attention to even this one tree, you get a little more in touch with the strange, bewildering world you live in. There’s an old story of a Zen Buddhist master who was asked how to explain the wonder of reality, and simply responded, “look at the cypress tree over there.” I hope that he meant the tree was filled with wonder, and wasn’t just saying that as a distraction to run away from the people with the annoying questions.
The magic in a moment reveals itself when we make the effort to notice it. Music is much more enjoyable to listen to when we notice all the instruments separately, and how they all contribute to the emotion of a song. As Mihaly points out, “Listening to recorded music for days on end may or may not be more enjoyable than hearing an hour-long live concert that one had been looking forward to for weeks. It is not the hearing that improves life, it is the listening.”
When we pay attention, we start to recognize all of the details in ou surroundings. With great music or great meals, we start to notice why they’re so impressive in the first place. I have friends who are trained jazz musicians that get tingly listening to A Love Supreme, because they’ve learned the musical structures and understand why Coltrane’s playing is so profound. In cooking shows, chefs seem to describe food in a foreign language. They’ll gush over a dish’s “notes of maple” or its “chestnut bite” or its “earthy timbre.” These phrases sound like the names of scented candles, but really these chefs are trained to notice flavor in ways most people don’t. They’ve learned through practice to pay enormous attention to details that would normally slip by.
Going off of this, the expert in any given field is really the person who cares so much about their craft that they’re willing to notice layers and layers of complexity that most people don’t. Needless to say, these people are so filled with love and focus on their craft that they enter a state of flow. For example, making soy sauce is complicated. It takes months, and it’s a process that doesn’t cross our minds because we can buy bottles of soy sauce with ease. Yet when Yasuo Yamamoto makes traditionally-brewed soy sauce, by hand, using ancient wooden barrels over 6 feet tall, it’s obvious how much he cares about making soy sauce. He knows what makes a good soy sauce, and has learned to care about every last detail of the process, down to the size of the barrels, down to the exact time to start making new batches of soy sauce (evidently November, because of the cool air). Yamamoto is one of countless examples of experts who care about their craft deeply, so much that they almost certainly reach the state of focus that we call flow.
Paying attention and entering flow are like sisters, and doing one almost implies doing the other. Of course, there are downsides of paying that much attention; legend says that the great mathematician Archimedes was so focused on a math problem he didn’t hear a guard who came in and demanded to know who he was. The confused guard then killed Archimedes. Even though getting killed by a guard because of a math problem is not a great way to go, it’s probably fair to say Archimedes was in flow. To get a rich life, notice the strange beauty that lurks in the world. Like Archimedes, or Yasuo Yamamoto, or John Coltrane, we’ll notice the rich details of life that were in front of us the entire time.
4. Change your intention
Imagine that you heard biking is the best thing in the world. Every billionaire you can think of bikes, and you always hear about all the health benefits of biking. Needing the rewards of biking, like a muscular body and the approval of billionaires you’ve never met, you buy a bicycle and start riding it.
How long do you think you’ll keep biking? How many months, or days?
If you’re biking because you feel obligated to do it, you won’t enjoy it for long. If you bike for the rewards (or conversely to avoid the consequences of not biking, like being called lazy) you’ll quickly hate being on the bike, because you never wanted to bike in the first place; you wanted the rewards.
Biking should be for the sake of biking. We all have goals, like biking a certain distance, but people who love to bike don’t love it because of their personal distance record. Going long distances and having fit bodies are pleasant side effects of the real reason they love to bike: that they simply love to bike.
It helps to check where our motivation is coming from. Often, how well we do in something depends on our intentions. For example, it’s been shown that people are more likely to stick with a diet when they say “I don’t eat that” versus “I can’t eat that.” One is extrinsic (I can’t eat it, because then that will break the diet I’m doing), while the other is intrinsic (I don’t eat it, because that’s just how I live). When we do something we should remember to ask why we wanted to do it in the first place, and whether that reason comes from our own deepest values or from getting a reward.
You can practice guitar to win friends, or for the sake of music. You can start a blog to make lots of money, or for the sake of ideas. You can improve your memory to try and impress people, or for the sake of remembering what’s worth remembering. One purpose will motivate you for years, and the other for a few frustrated days.
Mihaly mentions a village in Italy where the townspeople are incredibly happy and incredibly hard-working. They have a grueling work schedule, 18-hour days of shearing sheep, milking cows, hauling rocks up hills, and farming crops with almost no breaks in between. Yet if you ask them how much they “work” in a given day, they’ll give you a puzzled look and say that they don’t really “work” at all. What’s happening here?
Well, they view their work as simply living life. We tend to have this negative view of work as something that’s imposed on us, as something we need to oppose and take vacations from. But to the village folk, their work is their life, and they see no need to separate the two and to view work as a shackle, hindering their life. They put as much effort into shearing the sheep as entertaining their guests. Their work is not easier, but it’s their intention around work that sets them apart.
Bad intentions are present everywhere. People who use their memory to boast have the wrong intention because they’re using memory to believe that they are better than other people. In regards to workaholics, Mihaly puts it beautifully by stating that “Workaholics are people who only through doing work can feel good about themselves.”
Flow: Make Life Interesting
Getting into a flow state and gaining control of our lives depends on changing how we view the activities in front of us. Flow demands that we pay attention to our surroundings deeply, and view our lives as a stream of chances and places to grow. Flow wants us to challenge ourselves, and to tap into a well of ideas and abilities we possess.
I loved this book. Flow is a book that makes you realize life is exciting. I’m not a master of flow by any means (or even an apprentice, I’m more like a white belt), but I’m glad this book made me more clearly understand that the opportunity to grow and enjoy life is everywhere, in front of our eyes, and if we understand flow, we might have the courage to reach out and grasp it.
Other books that complement Flow
I hope you enjoyed reading this! I enjoyed reading Flow. If you want other books that go along with Flow’s main ideas, here were some that came to mind:
- Chapter 7 of Flow is all about jobs, and getting fulfillment from work. It reminded me of key concepts from Drive by Dan Pink . Drive is a solid book about how we get motivated, with one of Pink’s main claims that we need automation, mastery, and purpose from our work.
- I liked The Happiness of Pursuit by Chris Guillebeau, which is almost like a catalog of strange challenges, or “life quests,” that people come up with, like visiting every nation in the world or learning the entire MIT Computer Science curriculum in a year. It came to mind when reading the part of Flow on creating challenges.
- Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning comes up a couple times in Flow. In general, a lot of people like it. It’s a memoir of Frankl, a psychologist, and his time in a WW2 concentration camp and how prisoners still found meaning in their lives. I thought it was alright; it’s probably a book I have to revisit.
- The idea of flow seems connected to the Zen practice of mindfulness, which is going to have to wait for another post, but it made me think of The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh. In particular, I think Thich Nhat Hanh gives a good introduction to mindfulness in that book.
