Everyone from artists to assembly-line workers can be transported to a state of focused contentment and happiness by getting caught in the “flow”

"Dr. Csikszentmihalyi taught at Lake Forest College, outside Chicago, until 1971, when he returned to the University of Chicago. He retired in 1999, after which he moved to California and joined the faculty at Claremont Graduate University.

 

He first became interested in what he later called flow while working on his dissertation, a study of creativity among painters. When he asked, in a questionnaire, what they were thinking about while painting, he noticed that they rarely spoke about their goal, creating art. Instead they talked about the process — the challenges of the canvas, the consistency of the paint.

 

Intrigued, he later surveyed other groups and found similar responses.

“I was astonished to find that all those different people — rock climbers, basketball and hockey players, dancers, composers, chess masters — used very similar terms to describe their activities and the reasons they got so much out of them,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 1986.

 

He came up with the term “flow” in the early 1970s to describe that state of mind, around the same time he developed a new technique to study it. Rather than having people fill out questionnaires about something they did hours before, he had them wear beepers. Eight or more times a day, he would message them, asking them to describe their state of mind.

 

“It was an important move away from paper and pencil questionnaires and toward the real world,” Dr. Seligman said in an interview.

“Flow” brought to a general readership ideas that he and other psychologists had been developing for decades. Though Dr. Csikszentmihalyi was not the only person to recognize that people can fall into states of intense focus, he was the first to explain how they did so, in empirical terms.

 

Flow, he argued, was a state of mind, a level of concentration in which outside stimuli, even time itself, seem to fall away. But flow, he added, cannot be forced.

 

“People seem to concentrate best when the demands on them are a bit greater than usual, and they are able to give more than usual,” Dr. Csikszentmihalyi said in an interview with The New York Times in 1986. “If there is too little demand on them, people are bored. If there is too much for them to handle, they get anxious. Flow occurs in that delicate zone between boredom and anxiety.”

 

And while his early research was on painters and other artists, he said that flow could be achieved by anyone, from professional athletes to students to factory workers.

 

Dr. Csikszentmihalyi did not just explain “flow”; he offered a pointed critique of why so many people fail to achieve it. He cited countless studies showing that most people prefer meaningful work over mindless downtime, but argued that Americans in particular had been conditioned to hate their jobs and love passive relaxation.

 

He blamed television, above all, for the decline in hobbies, avocations and lifelong education — activities that blend aspects of work and play and, he said, offer the best opportunity for flow and, through it, happiness.

 

Some critics said his finger pointing smacked of snobbery, to which he had a response: “If holding that everyone should have a chance to get the highest quality of experience is an elitist notion, so be it,” he wrote in a guest essay for The New York Times in 1993. “It is better than resigning oneself to a life of mindless entertainment.”

 

You need enough skill in what you are doing to get into the flow (most often you get it after 10 years of experience). You also need to be challenged enough by the task at hand."