River
In 1975, Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a book called Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play. It was the birth of the modern term ‘flow’ for a specific psychological state that has popped up in writings throughout the ages.
In the book, Csikszentmihalyi interviews several people who describe a state of ‘effortless effort’; a fulfilling experience of intense concentration during which the rest of the world seems to fall away. Many of the interviewees used the metaphor of being carried by a river or flow. There wasn’t a catchy name for it yet, so Csikszentmihalyi christened it ‘flow’. He described it like this:
… the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.
Since then, the idea has been imported into many different fields, not unlike antifragility, which was the topic of our previous journey into psychology (and in which I briefly mentioned flow at the end).
You experience ‘flow’ when nine conditions are met:
- Challenge-skill balance: the challenge of the task at hand slightly exceeds your skillset. (Slightly being the keyword.)
- Action-awareness merger: there is only the here and now, your awareness and your actions in the present become one. (AKA you’re completely absorbed by the task.)
- Goal clarity: speaks for itself. You know exactly what you’re supposed to do; there is no ambiguity.