Flow
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's famous investigations of "optimal experience" have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work, Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness and greatly improve the quality of our lives.
Stats for nerds
68recommend
148mentions
120people
2007–2026years
59% recommend39% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Flow Theory - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- It isn’t just paying attention. It’s a Goldilocks zone of difficulty of task and feasibility of it.
The researcher responsible for the term and idea wrote a book saying as much. https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-...
It’s great that making eggs is easy enough for you that it isn’t engaging, but that isn’t the case for everyone (I need to try to fry eggs over easy. I’m not a good cook) You can also trick your mind into entering this state with a wide variety of tasks.
- Do yourself a favor and don't buy any books by Cal Newport. They're glorified blog posts with a bunch of overblown common sense rebranded with marketable terminology. Read Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi if you want something similar that has more substance.
- > Read Flow by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
This is the book every productivity self-help book published in the last 20+ years reference. Including the one I self-published many moons ago.
Mihaly is the only person who has done actual research and experiments on the subject. He basically worked on this his entire career from the mid 1960's onwards. Everything else is derivative.
While you're there, do yourself another favor and read up on Fogg's Behavior Model. That's the other academic research that all the famous productivity books base their suggestions upon.
The derivative pre-chewed content is fine, but get the underlying steak. It's worth it. The returns will compound your whole life/career.
- Here's an old album of the style meter I use [1]. I recommend a soothing blue & green for hobbies, I use red for client work. 20 Hours is the allocation for all skill learning. The tokens are part of a much larger whole as I've unified fun, skills, work, mental health and financial planning into a single system. I have programs that do most of it, but keeping it as a marker/paper UI is critical if you struggle with mental health or motivation, so that you can easily bootstrap yourself.
I extended the 20 hour practice idea from Josh Kaufman [2]
I highly recommend Sam Harris (Waking Up), Alan Watts, Laozi for mindfulness / meditation, as well as Iain McGilchrist (The Master & His Emissary), Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow) and David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest) for metaphorical inspiration. Learning to play at life in any moment helps to eliminate tedium & boredom from your vocabulary.
[1] https://imgur.com/a/pMudls5 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY
- 1. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Remarkable book that gave me a coherent framework to think about life. The title simply does not do it enough justice, it's not just about the "flow" state, it's about his mental framework for how to organize your life with flow as the centerpiece of your experience.
I've used the copy on my desk so much, dipping in and out I now remember most of the chapters, sub-sections and so on. I'm starting to feel I'm using this book the same way many religious people use their Bibles, Gita etc..maybe I'll eventually memorize large parts of it.
2. Why we do what we do by Edward Deci
It's an older book about human motivation and how it works, it changed the way I think about how to get myself or other people to act meaningfully and I'd say that touched almost all aspects of my behavior.
