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Flow
Revised and updated, 2002
By Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi
Published by Rider, London
Page: 303
If you want to see happiness personified, spend half an hour talking to Baikuntha Manandhar about the joy of running. Watch how his eyes light up, how his face radiates with a smile, and how infectiously enthusiastic he gets when describing his participation in the Montreal or the LA Olympics. You can imagine him—eyes closed, wiping the glistening sweat off his face and enjoying the roar of the crowd as he nears the finishing line. For Manandhar, the only thing better than talking about running is running itself: setting the goals to run, throwing himself the activity, investing all his psychic energy into the process, and then enjoying running for its own sake are what that make Manandhar genuinely happy.
Is there a psychology behind Manandhar’s happiness?
All right, before we get further, let’s accept that when one hears the word psychology, one tends to assume that it’s got to do with—not happiness but—unhappiness and misery. But there is something called positive psychology, now gaining grounds in Western academia. It’s about how one can play up one’s strengths to lead a happier, more fulfilling life. Indeed, in a conversation with edge.org, a site devoted to cutting-edge scientific ideas, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman says that 50 years and 20-billion dollar worth of scientific research by academic psychologists has been able to make “14 major mental illnesses treatable” now—turning many “miserable people less miserable.” Given this remarkable decrease in the “tonnage of suffering in the world”, Seligman sees no reason why academic psychology cannot also help “increase the tonnage of happiness” at workplaces, among family members and in communities.
To be sure, the happiness that Seligman talks is not about “smiling a lot and giggling.” Nor is it about “raw feelings, thrills and orgasms.” Citing Aristotle, Seligman defines happiness as when “one has a good conversation, when one contemplates well...[when one feels] completely at home [with what one is doing]; [when one’s] self-consciousness is blocked...[and when one is in flow] with the music of [life].”
At first brush, such a definition of happiness, as in living a life in flow, sounds schmaltzy, the kind of stuff associated not with scientists but with poets. But it also happens to accurately summarise the hard-nosed conclusions of peer-reviewed research conducted over a period of two decades by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi (pronunciation: me.high chick.sent.me.high) at the University of Chicago. In 1990, Csikzentmihalyi published his findings in a paperback called Flow, which so resonated with the public that it went on to be translated into 14 languages, and its ideas found applications in fields ranging “from the manufacture of Nissan and Volvo to the design of art museums...from the rehab of juvenile delinquents to the training of business executives.” This 303-page book under review, written in a language that is easy to follow, is a revised and updated 2002 edition.
Based on cross-country, multi-team and multi-year research on happiness, Csikzentmihalyi argues that life’s optimal experiences are based on the state of flow. It’s the state that’s between energy-depleting states of anxiety and boredom. That is to say, most of the time, we are either anxious that we might not meet the challenges of our work or bored that the work we do is not challenging enough. In either case, we are unhappy. The flow approach takes the higher way.
It’s “the state in which people”—corporate strategists, dancers, writers, marathon runners, rock musicians, meditation teachers, surgeons, or even the disabled—”are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it, for the sheer sake of doing it.” A flow experience stretches us just to the point where we are focused to enjoyably meet a challenge and strengthen our skills. It thus keeps us engaged to the task at hand by steering us clear of states of either anxiety or boredom. In other words, by consciously injecting a dose of purpose into what we do, flow helps us transform even routine activities into enjoyable, therefore happier, experiences—regardless of whether we are working as a teller at a bank, preparing for a meeting with shareholders or selling products to customers.
What’s the relevance of all this to busy Nepali managers? Plenty. Nepali managers worry about keeping workers motivated to finish the tasks at hand. Their understanding of how flow works to raise individual happiness (and correspondingly, productivity) may help them re-configure work in such a way that it induces numerous “flow states” at their factories and offices. This way, the managers may start hearing their workers rave about work the way, say, Baikuntha Manandhar gushes about running marathons.
(Ashutosh Tiwari enjoys getting into the flow of things by watching plays and learning to cook fish in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he is currently based.)
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