According to the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced ‘chick-sent-me-hi’), the biggest difference between climbing and, say, football, is that most climbers are completely immersed in the process (climbing the wall) rather than the end result (winning the game). The pioneer of the study of ‘flow’ – that state in which we’re so immersed in a task that the rest of the world seems to melt away – Csikszentmihalyi first developed his theories while watching climbers in the Alps as a teenager. Csikszentmihalyi argued that if we can we learn to focus on the process,
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