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The Man Who Found the Flow

By Andrew Cooper

"What is happiness?" asked psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He found it in a stateof mind beyond results and rewards and called it "the flow." A profile of MihalyCsikszentmihalyi by Andrew Cooper.

"To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame,to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life." —Walter Pater

In 1963, a young doctoral student in psychology at the University of Chicago noticed amost intriguing phenomenon. In the course of his research on the creative process, hehad spent hundreds of hours observing artists at work and interviewing them about thenature of their experience. What he was most struck by was their intense and totalinvolvement as they struggled to bring their vision to life on canvas. Immersed in theirwork and oblivious to outside obligations, the passage of time, and even their ownhunger and fatigue, the artists seemed to be seized in a kind of trance. Curiously, once apainting was finished, this highly focused state quickly dissipated and the artists simplyset aside the very thing they had labored so hard to create.

The researcher was an immigrant of Hungarian descent named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi(pronounced "CHICK-sent-me-high-ee"). After witnessing this process again and again,he realized that it was the activity itself-the work of painting-that so enthralled hissubjects and not, as he had expected, the anticipation of its outcome. Whether or not afinished painting produced significant extrinsic rewards-money, praise, fame, even asense of achievement-the act of creating was intrinsically rewarding. It was worth doing-indeed, it was done-simply for the sake of doing it.

This ran, and still runs, counter to the prevailing wisdom of the field. Most psychologicaltheories of motivation assert that we act either to assuage an unpleasant condition-hunger, say, or anxiety-or to achieve some desired end. Even activities that areenjoyable in themselves are assumed to serve some socially adaptive or biologicallypractical function: children play to discharge aggressive feelings; sex is nature's way ofgetting us to pass on our genes. Such views contain much truth, of course, but they areincomplete.

The observation that some things are autotelic-worth doing for their own sake-is hardlyearth-shattering. But the simplicity of this observation can obscure the richness of itsimplications for the understanding of who we humans are and how we may evolve. ForCsikszentmihalyi, it pointed to the deep and elusive question of the nature of happiness.What, he wondered, do people feel when they are most happy? What is their state ofmind? Why do certain activities bring enjoyment and others do not? What can we do toenhance our capacities to find enjoyment throughout the events of daily life? For almostthirty years, right up to the present day, he has devoted himself to the patient, rigorousand thorough study of such questions.

In the course of his investigations, he has identified a dimension of human experiencethat is common to people the world over, regardless of culture, gender, race, age ornationality. Elderly Korean women, Japanese teenage motorcycle gang members, Navajoshepherds, assembly line workers in Chicago, artists, athletes, surgeons-all describe theexperience in essentially the same words. Its characteristics include joy, deepconcentration, emotional buoyancy, a heightened sense of mastery, a lack ofself-consciousness, and self-transcendence. Employing an image used frequently by hissubjects, Csikszentmihalyi gave to this optimal human experience the name "flow."

According to Csikszentmihalyi, moments of flow occur when our physical or mentalcapacities are stretched to their limits in pursuit of a worthwhile goal. In fact, just aboutany activity can be made autotelic. As Csikszentmihalyi told me, "Talking to a friend,reading to a child, playing with a pet, or mowing the lawn can each produce flow,provided you find the challenge in what you are doing and then focus on doing it as bestyou can." Flow, then, is not something that happens to us; it is something we makehappen. It is not dependent on external events: it is the result of our ability to focus,

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and thus give order, to consciousness.

Based on their research into flow, Csikszentmihalyi and his associates at the psychologydepartment of the University of Chicago have over the years produced dozens of articlesfor scholarly journals. In the late 1980's, he decided to gather together two decadesworth of findings on the subject and present it in a book accessible to the lay reader.Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience was released in 1990 and was an instantsuccess, a critically acclaimed national bestseller whose popularity caught its authorentirely by surprise.

Csikszentmihalyi has become that rarity in the human sciences: a distinguishedacademic whose work has significant impact on the cultural mainstream. Newsweekreported that Flow was a favorite book of President Clinton (who, it seems, may beunclear on the distinction made in the book between pleasure and happiness). A recentarticle in the London Times discussed the favor Flow has found among British PrimeMinister Tony Blair and members of his cabinet. Winning coach Jimmy Johnson creditedFlow with helping him and his Dallas Cowboys prepare for the 1993 Superbowl.

In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi describes eight "elements of enjoyment"-the factors thatcharacterize or contribute to the flow experience. First, flow is likely to occur when oneconfronts a challenging task that requires skill. Here, there must be a balance betweenthe demands of the activity and one's ability to meet those demands. If the activity istoo easy, boredom will result; if it is too hard, it will cause anxiety.

The second element is the merging of action and awareness, in which one is so absorbedin the task at hand that the activity becomes spontaneous and one ceases to be awareof oneself as standing separate from it. Third and fourth, optimal experience is morelikely to occur when one's task has clear goals and provides immediate feedback.

Fifth is a high degree of concentration, which limits the dissipation of energy caused byextraneous concerns. The sixth element is called the paradox of control: one feels asense of control without actively trying to be in control. More precisely, it might be saidthat one ceases to worry about losing control. Seventh, preoccupation with the selfdisappears.

The final element is an altered sense of time. Hours may seem like minutes, orconversely, one may experience a sense of what sports psychologists call "elongatedtime," in which things seem to move in slow motion. Not all these elements need bepresent for flow to occur, but in the course of thousands of interviews, Csikszentmihalyiand his associates found that virtually every account included at least one of them, andoften most.

Of the eight elements, one in particular emerged as the most telling aspect of optimalexperience: the merging of action and awareness. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E.Lawrence sounded a similar theme, when he wrote that "happiness is absorption." As thethirteen-century Zen master Dogen pointed out, in those moments when the world isexperienced with the whole of one's body and mind, the senses are joined, the self isopened, and life discloses an intrinsic richness and joy in being. For Csikszentmihalyi,this complex harmony of a unified consciousness is the mode of being toward which ourown deepest inclination always points us.

The New York Times called him "a man obsessed by happiness," but for Csikszentmihalyihappiness is a far more subtle and profound state than what most people mean whenthey use the word. In describing the happiness associated with flow, Csikszentmihalyicites Aristotle's term eudaimonia, a state of being "well-favored" within oneself and inone's relation to the divine. Eudaimonia connects happiness with such characteristics asvirtue, prosperity and blessedness. Flow and eudaimonia are not identical notions, butthe link between the two is made clear in Flow's opening sentence: "Twenty-threehundred years ago Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and womenseek happiness. While happiness itself is sought for its own sake, every othergoal-health, beauty, money, or power-is valued only because we expect that it will makeus happy."

For Csikszentmihalyi, as for Aristotle, it is our human folly to mistake the means tohappiness for the thing itself. As he is the first to point out, the "discovery" of flow andits workings is not a discovery at all, "for people have been aware of it since the dawn oftime."

The enthusiasm with which his work has been received is no doubt gratifying, but forthis soft-spoken and private family man, public recognition has required someadjustment. For as his ideas grew in popularity, the man who discovered flow found hewas experiencing less of it. Popular acceptance brought with it new and unwanteddistractions from his work, the main activity in which he experienced the very thing thatwas the source of all the fuss. The humor of the situation is not lost on him, and whenhe spoke to me about it during a recent interview, he did so with a weary chuckle.

The qualities that characterize his writings are also evident in conversation: clarity,eloquence, wit and erudition that is, blessedly, unencumbered by academic smugness.In lightly accented English, he speaks with a confidence that manages to be bothunassuming and undefensive. His broad face, framed by a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, appears urbane yet slightly rugged. Deep-set eyes look out from beneath


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dark, bushy brows and a high, strong forehead. Although Csikszentmihalyi's writingsmake only sparing use of biographical details, the creases on his well-worn face speak ofa life much-traveled.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was born in 1934 in the Adriatic harbor town of Fiume, a townthat has seen much instability in this century. The young Mihaly's father served as theHungarian consul in the city, which was then Italian (and is today Croatian). After theSecond World War, the elder Csikszentmihalyi was appointed Hungarian ambassador toItaly and the family moved to Rome. In 1948, following the communist take-over ofHungary, he was fired from the ambassadorship.

Rather than return to Hungary, the family opened a restaurant in Rome. Now anadolescent, Mihaly attended school and spent evenings helping his father at therestaurant. Following high school, he worked as a photojournalist, a travel agent, and,foreshadowing his later work, tried his hand as a painter.

But all the while, his main focus was on trying to understand the strangeness of humannature as he had witnessed it during and after the war. "I saw so many people justdisintegrate from the loss of status, income, and other extrinsic sources of meaning orsupport," he says, "and yet I also met some, just a few, who had a kind of innerstrength that allowed them to take their misfortunes in stride."

Eventually he stumbled on the writings of Carl Jung, which convinced him that the fieldof psychology might be the best place to look for answers to the questions that besethim. Unfortunately, it was not the practice of European colleges in the fifties to teachpsychology as a separate discipline. Rather, it was offered in isolated courses taughtwithin departments of medicine or philosophy. So Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi decided hewould pursue his studies in the United States.

Around this time, he encountered a new stimulus to his questioning. FollowingKhruschev's denunciation of Stalin in 1956, Csikszentmihalyi met a number of formerprisoners recently released from the gulags. Among them were a small number "whospoke with a sort of nostalgia about living in conditions that, by most any standard, wereof the most horrible type." These people were able not only to keep their sanity but toachieve a kind of serenity. "The very oppressiveness of their situation," he says, "forcedthem to question what was really valuable and meaningful in their lives, and somehow,in that process, they came to find a measure of inner peace."

Years later, Csikszentmihalyi came to see that his findings on flow went a long waytoward explaining what it was that allowed some people to enrich their lives in the midstof the most wretched circumstances. Such people, he found, have a highly developed"autotelic self." They could transform their experience, and thus find enjoyment in it, byfocusing their attention on the tasks of the present moment.

Csikszentmihalyi was accepted at the University of Chicago, but shortly before he was toleave for the U.S., the family encountered another setback. One of the restaurant'semployees had swindled them and they were without funds to help Mihaly pay for hiseducation. And so in 1956, at the age of 22, Mihaly arrived in Chicago with little Englishand next to no money-a dollar-twenty-five to be exact.

The next two years were tough. Days were devoted to study; nights were spent workingas an auditor at a downtown hotel. But more difficult was the disappointment he feltabout the content of his studies. There was no Jung or Freud or Ferenczi; instead, therewere rats and mazes and the blunt tools of behaviorism. Nevertheless, Csikszentmihalyipersevered, and by his junior year things were looking up. A scholarship relieved muchof the financial pressure, and he hooked up with several professors in the departmentwhose interests matched his own. With their encouragement, he decided to pursue adoctorate.

One professor in the psychology department was especially interested in the study ofcreativity, and it was under his tutelage that Csikszentmihalyi undertook his dissertationon the subject. The intense involvement of his research subjects in their work resonatedwith his own experiences while rock climbing, playing chess or painting.

But another resonant chord was struck as well. The instability he had experienced andthe suffering he had witnessed predisposed Csikszentmihalyi to regard happiness as avirtue to be cultivated and treasured, for clearly "the universe was not designed with thecomfort of human beings in mind." While there was at the time no shortage of workbeing done on creativity, only one person, Abraham Maslow, was seriously studyingstates of deep enjoyment. As Csikszentmihalyi freely acknowledges, he benefited greatlyfrom Maslow's study of peak experience. "But," he says, "Maslow regarded peakexperience as a kind of epiphany that happens spontaneously. I wanted to find out howoptimal states of being occur and what people can do to bring them about."

At first, Csikszentmihalyi's research attracted the interest of only a small group ofgraduate students, who assisted him in administering interviews and questionnaires.Needing a more rigorous and systematic means of gathering data, the team developedthe Experience Sampling Method, in which research subjects wear an electronic pagingdevice that is activated at random intervals throughout the day. At the sound of thepager, a subject writes down what he or she is doing, feeling and thinking at thatmoment.


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Following the introduction of the ESM, interest in Csikszentmihalyi's work began toincrease dramatically. More and more students signed up to join his research team. Flowincreasingly gained attention in professional circles, and colleagues at other institutionsbegan to study the experience in their own research projects. "People," he says, "lovegizmos."

Csikszentmihalyi's work is perhaps best understood as an attempt to find throughscience a basis for a life well lived. Toward this end, he seeks to affirm and to integratethe wisdom of the past with "our most trustworthy mirror of reality"-that is, withscientific knowledge. He is trying, one might say, to work out a response to the problemof modernity posed by T. S. Eliot in "The Rock": to find the knowledge that is lost ininformation, and to find the wisdom that is lost in knowledge. Science has beenespecially successful at generating knowledge about the workings of matter; itssuccesses have been far more modest when it comes to understanding the realm ofhuman experience, where, more often than not, it has been a source of that informationthat obscures knowledge and of that knowledge that conceals wisdom. Seen in thiscontext, Csikszentmihalyi's work is all the more impressive for its intent, its originality,and its quality.

Because they have emerged from and been subjected to empirical scrutiny,Csikszentmihalyi's ideas speak with the power and authority that belong to sciencealone. But simply passing muster with the standards of science is in and of itself nogreat accomplishment. His work is significant because it tells us valuable things aboutimportant questions. Using the tools of science, Csikszentmihalyi abstracted an essentialand defining human experience-flow-from the countless activities that elicited it. Inaddition, he discerned the conditions, internal and external, that are most likely to giverise to the experience and the factors that obstruct it. Further, he interprets his findingsin such a way as to address convincingly the place of flow in matters of meaning, valueand purpose in human affairs.

Today, the study of the applications and implications of flow has spread worldwide, andmajor research programs exist in Germany, Canada, Italy, Japan and Australia. Study ofthe subject is not confined to the field of psychology. Flow is being used by sociologists,for example, to better understand alienation and by anthropologists to shed light on theeffects of ritual and religious experience.

Csikszentmihalyi is, of course, devoted to his work and pleased with its success. But healso notes a certain absurdity in the whole enterprise. "It's kind of ironic," he says, "thatso many people need the trappings of scientific methodology before they'll pay attentionto what they already know in their gut. When people hear about flow, they say, 'Ohyeah, I know that!' But unless you can quantify and measure something, it's not seen tohave much significance." After a pause, he adds wryly, "Anyway, I have a lot of funcrunching the numbers."

As with any worthy scientific endeavor, as work on flow proceeded, new questions andavenues for research arose. In time, Csikszentmihalyi found that a comprehensiveunderstanding of optimal experience required that empirical research be supplementedby knowledge from fields other than psychology: philosophy, religion, literature, andother branches of science. The apparent ease with which he reaches across disciplinesand weaves together diverse strands of knowledge into an integrated whole enhancesthe effectiveness of his ideas and the appeal of his writing.

Among the dour puritans of academia, moving beyond the boundaries of one's particulardiscipline is most often deeply frowned upon. But for Csikszentmihalyi, doing so seemsto be a natural outgrowth of a personal inclination to seek understanding of the worldfrom a variety of perspectives. "It saddens me," he says, "to see people who are great atone thing but have no interest in anything else." About himself, he adds, "I am myselfuncomfortable being pigeonholed in one professional category-such as psychologist-asthough that designation exhausted my being." In applying science to questions that aretraditionally taken up within the humanities, while drawing upon the humanities toelucidate the findings of science, Csikszentmihalyi found himself assuming the role of anacademic outsider, a role for which his earlier life had prepared him well.

Among the questions to arise from the research on flow, two were particularlysignificant. The first was moral. Optimal experience is morally neutral. In applying hisskills to the challenges of his work, a burglar is likely to experience flow, as is a conartist or an assassin. Adolph Eichmann, writes Csikszentmihalyi, "probably experiencedflow as he shuffled the intricate schedules of trains, making certain that the scarcerolling stock was available where needed, and that the bodies were transported at theleast expense. He never seemed to ask whether what he was asked to do was right orwrong. As long as he followed orders, his consciousness was in harmony."

The second problem follows readily from the first. It is a problem of meaning. One mightattain excellence in a particular field, and thus experience a high degree of flow, yet behopelessly inept or boorish in every other way. Ernest Hemingway once called Ty Cobb"the greatest of all ballplayers-and an absolute shit." For optimal experience to extendthroughout one's life, one must, according to Csikszentmihalyi, "have faith in a systemof meanings that gives purpose to one's being."


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It was in response to these two problems that Csikszentmihalyi turned to the idea ofevolutionary complexity. Complexity, he believes, can serve as the foundation for aviable faith at a time when the traditional cosmologies no longer can. Although he beganto explore this proposition in Flow, it was not until the publication of The Evolving Self: APsychology for the Third Millennium that he described it fully.

"The thesis of this book," he writes, "is that becoming an active, conscious part of theevolutionary process is the best way to give meaning to our lives at the present point intime, and to enjoy each moment along the way. Understanding how evolution works,and what role we may play in it, provides a direction and purpose that otherwise islacking in this secular, desacralized culture."

Csikszentmihalyi subscribes to the view that evolution proceeds in the direction ofincreasing complexity, that is, toward continuous differentiation and integration. Therealization of complexity, therefore, is the benchmark for measuring evolutionarysuccess. "Differentiation" refers to the degree to which a system is composed of partsthat differ in structure or function from one another. "Integration" refers to the extent towhich the different parts communicate and enhance one another's goals. A system thatis more differentiated and integrated than another is said to be more complex. Forexample, a person is differentiated to the extent that they have many different interests,abilities and goals; they are integrated to the extent that harmony exists betweenvarious goals, thought, feelings and action.

Both these tendencies are evident in optimal experience. Finding newchallenges,developing new skills, opening oneself to novel experiences-these are alldifferentiating functions. The incorporation of skills and experiences into the wholenessof one's being brings order to consciousness and harmony to actions; that is, it enhancesintegration. In this way, the enjoyment that flow brings is the manifestation of ourevolutionary predilection for complexity.

The movement toward complexity is not inevitable, however. "The course of evolution,"Csikszentmihalyi writes, "appears to be exceedingly erratic, full of false starts andtemporary reversals." The development of complex structures, whether biological,psychological or social, takes place against the backdrop of entropy-the tendency ofsystems to decay and dissolve into randomness.

It is precisely because complexity is so tenuous that its cultivation and sustainment canserve as a meaningful basis for ethical action. For Csikszentmihalyi, this means that theethics of flow require that it not be pursued solely as an isolated, individual event but assomething that enhances complexity throughout one's relations with the larger world.The idea that through flow one can become an active participant in the great unfoldingdrama of evolution recalls Aristotle's notion of eudaimonia, of being well-favored not justwithin oneself but also in one's relation with the divine.

With The Evolving Self, Csikszentmihalyi joins the tradition of "grand theorists"-thosethinkers who attempt to work out a comprehensive understanding of human nature andhuman goals that is grounded in the very structure of life. As grand theories go,Csikszentmihalyi's manages to be bold without being arrogant. It is both broad andflexible. Still, for all its merits, it is not able to outrun the problems that inevitably accrueto grand theories.

Chief among these problems is that in attempting to subsume so much under a singlescheme, grand theories give short shrift to much of the rich detail of human knowledge.Important distinctions get blurred or lost altogether as symbols, ideas, and practices areremoved from the organic context in which they are rooted and recut to fit the designsof a new one. While viewing yoga, say, or Zen Buddhism through the conceptual lens offlow and complexity can be valuable, it is still a far cry from understanding them fromwithin their native framework. This calls to mind a Haitian saying: when theanthropologists arrive, the gods depart.

To my surprise, when I mention this perspective to Csikszentmihalyi, he is not at alluncomfortable with it. We have, he says, various ways of relating to the world thatpredate systematic reason, and they are part of our heritage. "Just because science isdominant," he says, "to dismiss all forms of knowledge that went before would behubris. It would be like kicking out the ladder upon which we have climbed." If science isto help us live fuller and better lives, the knowledge accumulated through scientificendeavor must, in his view, be integrated with the wisdom of the past.

America's most eminent evolutionist, Stephen Jay Gould, rejects the view that evolutionpossesses a sensible directionality toward complexity, dismissing such theories as "spin-doctored" views designed to bolster our sense of human importance. Csikszentmihalyi,of course, disagrees, but he is not adamant; the argument, he says, is not resolvable atthis point, and may never be. Complexity seems to him to be a good interpretation ofwhat we know, but accepting it is a choice. And even should one accept it, one shouldhold the idea with a kind of playful provisionality. In this regard, complexity is a kind offaith.

So if we set aside arguments about competing theories of evolution, the power of theidea remains, for we are story-telling creatures and evolution is our creation story. Inplacing flow within the context of evolution, Csikszentmihalyi is following a traditiongoing back to prehistory of linking certain aspects of human experience to the larger


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designs of the cosmos. Thus the story of who we are and the story of what the universeis are bound together.

In "The Rock" Eliot asks, "Where is the Life we have lost in living?" This is a questionthat human faith and wisdom must address. Discovery of that secret life requires whatAristotle called "the virtuous activity of the soul." For this, flow is the ground and thefruition.

The Man Who Found the Flow, Andrew Cooper, Shambhala Sun, September 1998.

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