Go with the flow
Don’t ask me to pronounce Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s name but he has written an excellent book about creativity. It’s more accurate to say that he wrote an excellent book about creative people. Creativity in common usage is too vague a word to have real meaning. Does it mean inventiveness, productivity, aptitude for difficult-to-quantify skills? Does «creativity» mean the same thing to a particle physicist that it does to a dancer?
Csíkszentmihályi cast a fairly wide net when selecting his research subjects, surveying notable persons from the sciences, philosophy, literature, the arts. He used their responses to find common elements, themes, attitudes and tendencies. From that he made observations about the creative process and the kinds of environments and stimuli people use to get into what Csíkszentmihályi calls «flow», the state of continuous focused activity with a characteristic failure to observe the passage of time.
Csíkszentmihályi avoids mystifying creativity or putting creative individuals on any pedastal, but also avoids cheapening the achievements of his subjects (or anyone who does important work) by attributing their successes to their environments, a fault that many books (Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers for example) tend toward.
Instead he makes extraordinary achievement sound human and very difficult. It is not the result of supernatural gifts nor is it an accident of birth. These things may or may not set the stage, but it’s still hard work, determination, and luck that bring success for creative people, just like it does for everyone else. Of course, Csíkszentmihályi points out that the world or at least the specific field one works in has to be ready to accept the achievement or else it fails.
There’s no quick fix in this book or easy path. This is not a how-to book for unlocking personal creativity. Despite thisor perhaps because of itit is an excellent resource for someone who wants to improve creative output and effectiveness. It is an inspirational, informative, practical and rational look at the potential human beings have for greatness.
For a taste of Csíkszentmihályi’s ideas watch his TED talk on flow.
Pronunciation
According to Wikipedia, it is pronounced “cheek-sent-me-high-ee”.
He “discovered” flow in 1990, but athletes have been said to be “in the zone” since at least the 60’s. (That is as far back as I can remember the term. The condition, of course, has probably existed forever.) He has certainly studied the phenomena and probably understands it better than most, but it isn’t a new concept.
And why, if we can only process 120 bits per second, do MP3’s sound better at bit rates above 128 KILOBITS per second? (Just joking.)
Dad
I’m not sure that being in
I’m not sure that being in the athletic «zone» is the same thing as flow, but I’m not sure it’s not either. I’ve experienced the loss of the sense of the passage of time while running and I’ve also experienced a heightened sense of focus while motorcyclingan experience of feeling that I won’t do anything wrong, that all the pieces are falling into place. The latter is different from a sense of invulnerabilityit’s not that I believed I couldn’t do anything wrong, just that I wouldn’t, that there was no need to fear mistakes, just pay attention and relax into it.
The timeless sense while running is very much like what happens with me at the drawing board. And it could very well be that they are the same mental state but with different kinds of activitieslosing a sense of the passage of time on a motorcycle is difficult because so much of it involves timing decisions. So the aspects I associate from that mental state are different? I don’t know.
Both of these may simply be different aspects of flow. In any event, you’re right that Csikszentmihalyi didn’t invent flow. It sounds to me a lot like the «effortless effort» or «doing without doing» (wei wu wei) that comes up repeatedly in Taoist literature going back twenty-five hundred years. Columbus discovered America, but it’s not like the continents weren’t here for millions of years beforehand.
Flowin’
Great to make more people aware of his guy and the concept of flow. As I remember Csíkszentmihályi says flow happens when you are totally engaged in some task that takes all your attention. It’s got to be hard enough to really get you focused. You forget about time and other distractions. I think it could apply to a machinist working on a challenging job on a lathe, or a good cook cooking, as much as to a painter or a writer, but it happens when tasks aren’t routine or done by rote. Most of us have probably been there at times. It feels great.
I haven’t finished Outliers, but I don’t think his perspective is really opposed to Csíkszentmihályi’s. It’s more about discovering the social conditions that allow people to develop “flowability” on a high level.
Thanks Ralph I don’t think
Thanks Ralph
I don’t think that Csíkszentmihályi’s perspective is opposed to Gladwell’s either, but they are certainly not the same. Gladwell’s focus is much more about external circumstances. Csíkszentmihályi covers these as well, but he brings it back to this central idea of flow which is a state that anyone can experience.
The thing that jumped out to me about what you wrote is the idea that the task has to be challenging. I think that’s true. I certainly find it difficult to do things that don’t present any challenge. I think there’s another aspect, which is that it has to be a task that isn’t too far outside of one’s competency. Banging my head against a problem I don’t know how to begin to solve doesn’t resemble flow.
There seems to be a pretty delicate balance between having enough experience with a field to attack a problem and having so much experience with it that the problem isn’t a problem any more. Of course, that might just be me.