"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."