Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play

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Summary: A Good Read!
Review: Mihaly Csikszentmihaly presents a detailed examination of motivation based on a study of a half-dozen groups of people involved in recreational pursuits: rock climbers, composers, dancers, chess players and basketball players. He chose these groups in an effort to understand more fully what motivates people to engage in activities that are extremely challenging or offer few external rewards. Although some of his conclusions may be of interest to executives and managers seeking ways to motivate employees, most readers will find this academic study too detailed. Some of the interview comments are interesting, but much of the book describes survey results, a discussion that non-statisticians may be hard put to follow. Because of this complexity and because of the book's somewhat dense prose, we [...] recommend this 25-year-old reissued classic primarily to scholars or to those who are intensely curious about the nuts-and-bolts of motivation. But any human resources professional or leadership specialist should have at least a passing familiarity with its concepts and contents.


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Summary: When good observations meet bad metaphors.
Review: One of the major conceits in the history of psychology is that the act of paying attention can be a portal to amazing or magical things. Pay attention to a swinging watch and you become hypnotized, focus on your belly button or a mantra and you enter a blissful meditative state, and concentrate real hard while tapping your shoes together and you just may get to Kansas. The latest wonderful mind state that occurs thanks to paying attention is 'flow'. Upon interviewing a few thousand people as they went about their ordinary lives, Dr. C. discovered that many of them reported a state of pleasure or even ecstasy when they engaged in demanding tasks that challenged them to the limits of their capabilities. The fact that mountain climbers, artists, doctors, etc. reported some real good feelings while having to rapidly shift their attention to stay on a ledge, keep inspiration, or keep a patient alive seemed to indicate once again that attention, if focused just right, can be a portal to some mighty good things. In this his first book on the topic of flow, Dr. C. waxes poetic about how flow represents a heightened sense of self, undreamed level of consciousness and so on, without grounding any of it to actual neural processes. Dr. C.'s house of metaphorical cards however collapses if attention was not the antecedent for flow, but the stuff of flow itself. The critical question that Dr. C. studiously avoids is whether attention is in itself a pleasurable or hedonic thing. Modern research in neuropsychology answers the question in the affirmative, as it is well known that when attention rapidly shifts between a host of important precepts, the neuromodulator dopamine is released that keeps us rooted, alert, promotes efficiency in thinking, and feels good to boot. Dr. C. does not concern himself to explore any of these findings, preferring instead to view attention as a portal to all those good metaphysical feelings, and not a source of those good feelings themselves. But again, if Dr. C. actually was intent on finding out what flow actually is, instead of reveling in its poetry, his book would be shorter by two thirds, and lose its representation as a model for vacuous New Age thinking, which in toto represents the intellectual con of the 20th century.

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Summary: THE FLOW NETWORK
Review: Take steps towards enhancing the quality of your life - explore FlowNet and exchange ideas and experiences associated with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow theory @ http://www.flownetwork.com