Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.”

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.

Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful. But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery—or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life—that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.

“No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.” How we feel about ourselves, the joy we

The roots of the discontent are internal, and each person must untangle them personally, with his or her own power.

“We are always getting to live,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson used to say, “but never living.”

The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own powers.

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there.

“Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them,”

And it is an energy under our control, to do with as we please; hence, attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.

Resting in the evening while passively absorbing information from the media, with alcohol or drugs to dull the mind overexcited by the demands of work, is pleasantly relaxing.

Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once

cruelty is a universal source of enjoyment for people who have not developed more sophisticated skills.

It would be senseless, however, to ignore a source of energy because it can be misused. If mankind had tried to ban fire because it could be used to burn things down, we would not have grown to be very different from the great apes.

There are natives of New Guinea who spend more time looking in the jungle for the colorful feathers they use for decoration in their ritual dances than they spend looking for food. And this is by no means a rare example: art, play, and ritual probably occupy more time and energy in most cultures than work.

But because flow activities are freely chosen and more intimately related to the sources of what is ultimately meaningful, they are perhaps more precise indicators of who we are.