Psychology
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
When do you feel most alive?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asked thousands of people, from rock climbers and surgeons to factory workers, to describe the times they felt best. They kept describing the same state, which he called flow. It can be learned, he argues, and it rarely turns up on the sofa.
Hear a sample · read by Laura
You're so absorbed in something difficult that nothing else seems to matter. The goal is clear, you know straight away how you're doing, and you forget yourself and the time. Many people he interviewed said it felt like being carried along by a current, which gave it its name.
When a challenge is too big for your skill, you get anxious. When it's too small, you get bored. Flow sits in the channel between. As your skill grows you have to raise the challenge to stay there, so flow keeps pushing you to get better.
This is Csikszentmihalyi's term for disorder in the mind, the worries and distractions that drag attention away from what you're trying to do. He treats attention as psychic energy, and how you spend it as how you spend your life. In flow, attention and goals finally line up.
Autotelic comes from the Greek for self and goal, and means something done for its own sake. Some people find flow almost anywhere, because they set themselves goals and watch closely for feedback. Csikszentmihalyi calls them autotelic personalities, and he thinks the rest of us can learn the habit.
Best moments
People feel most alive while working hard at something difficult that they chose to take on.
Challenge and skill
Flow comes when a task is hard enough to stretch you but not so hard it swamps you.
Clear goals
It helps to have a clear goal and to know straight away how you're doing.
Losing yourself
In flow you stop worrying about yourself, and time seems to speed up.
Autotelic
Csikszentmihalyi calls people who enjoy the doing itself, whatever the reward, autotelic.
A story from the book
Rico Medellin does the same task on an assembly line hundreds of times a day. He tries to beat his own best time on each unit, working out which moves he can speed up. A job most people would call dull has become a game he enjoys.
Hot take · true or myth?
In flow, an hour can pass in what feels like minutes.
True. Losing track of time is one of the marks of flow. Hours vanish, and in a fast, difficult move a single second can seem to stretch out.
One thing to try
Pick a task you do every week and find dull, like the ironing or clearing your inbox. Give it a clear goal and a way to keep score, as Rico does, then set the bar a little higher than comfortable. Leave your phone in another room while you do it.
Knotd has the key ideas from 250+ non-fiction books, each in a few minutes, in plain words. Flow comes with a Hot Take round to make it stick.
Get the whole book on KnotdOpen in the appWhen do you feel most alive? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asked thousands of people, from rock climbers and surgeons to factory workers, to describe the times they felt best. They kept describing the same state, which he called flow. It can be learned, he argues, and it rarely turns up on the sofa.
What flow feels like; Between anxiety and boredom; Psychic entropy; The autotelic self.
Pick a task you do every week and find dull, like the ironing or clearing your inbox. Give it a clear goal and a way to keep score, as Rico does, then set the bar a little higher than comfortable. Leave your phone in another room while you do it.
Yes. Knotd has the key ideas from Flow in a few minutes, in plain words, plus a Hot Take round to test them. It's one of 250+ non-fiction books in the app.
