Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Posted on February 22nd, 2005
The main takeaways I got from this book are: a stronger sense of flow, and how it's presence or absence shapes day-to-day notions of productivity; the concept of autotelic personalities; the risk of too much leisure being just as much a problem as too much work.
One of the main ways that the idea of flow is presented is as a combination of high challenge coupled with high skill. When paired together, those two ingredients create the ideal situation for working towards a goal or completing a task. Once you're able to achieve that flow consistently, you move closer toward being autotelic:
An autotelic person needs few material possessions and little entertainment, comfort, power, or fame because so much of what he or she does is already rewarding. Because such persons experience flow in work, in family life, when interacting with people, when eating, and even when alone with nothing to do, they are less dependent on the external rewards that keep others motivated to go on with a life composed of dull and meaningless routines. They are more autonomous and independent, because they cannot be as easily manipulated with threats or rewards from the outside. At the same time, they are more involved with everything around them because they are fully immersed in the current of life
Here's another winner of a quote:
To control attention means to control experience, and therefore the quality of life. Information reaches consciousness only when we attend to it. Attention acts as a filter between outside events and our experience of them. How much stress we experience depends more on how well we control attention, than on what happens to us. The effect of physical pain, of a monetary loss, of a social snub depends on how much attention we pay to it, how much room we allow for it in consciousness. The more psychic energy we invest in a painful event, the more real it becomes, and the more entropy it introduces in consciousness. To deny, repress, or misinterpret such events is no solution either, because the information will keep smoldering int eh recesses of the mind, draining away psychic energy to keep it from spreading. It is better to look suffering straight in the eye, acknowledge and respect its presence, and then get busy as soon as possible focusing on things we choose to focus on.