Title: Flow: The
Psychology of Optimal Experience
Author: Csikszentmihalyi,
Mihaly
Call Number: 155.2 C958F
1990
Subjects: Happiness;
Attention
Book Description from amazon:
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's
famous investigations of "optimal experience" have revealed that what
makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness 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.
My Read:
Flow, to me, is some kind of status when a person is
fully engrossed in certain activity she truly enjoys and is good at. As the
author pointed out that such concept was mentioned in China
The part I read more than once is the chapter titled “The
Making of Meaning.” According to some psychologists there are four steps of
meaning of life:
Step One-Survival: at this
step the meaning of life is simple: it is tantamount to survival, comfort, and
pleasure (page 221).
Step Two-Conformity to conventional
norms and standards: the person expands the horizon of her/his meaning system
to embrace the values of a community-the family, the neighborhood, a religious
or ethnic group (page 221).
Step Three-The desire for
growth, improvement, the actualization of potential: the person turns inward to
find new grounds for authority and value within the self (page 221).
Step Four-An integration
with other people and with universal values: the person willingly merges his/her interests with those
of a larger whole (page 221 to page 222).
Reading the chapter I found myself recalling the
teachings I had received from the formal education in my youth. In middle
school students were taught the Chinese classic literature. One teaching was
about how a person could possibly to achieve goals in his/her lifetime. There
were four stages/standards a person could use as reference/checkpoint. It read:
修身; 齊家; 治國; 平天下.
In a person life I believe that we would have learned
enough from formal and informal education. It takes a person years to grow
enough to collect the dots and make the connection and if lucky enough, at the
right timing a person is able to realize what life is about and the meaning of
life would be obvious to her/him.
Another chapter I enjoyed reading is called “Enjoyment
and the Quality of Life.” The author pointed out the difference between
pleasure and enjoyment. Pleasure is a feeling of contentment but by itself it
doesn’t bring happiness. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot
create new order in consciousness (page 46). Enjoyment is rewarding. Enjoyment
is by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment (page 46). There are some elements
of enjoyment, according to the author and they are:
A challenging activity
that requires skills
The merging of action and
awareness
Clear goals and feedback
Concentration on the task
at hand
Control
The loss of
self-consciousness
The transformation of time
I enjoyed reading this book very much!
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