Flow: The psychology of optimal experience Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) New York: Harper Perennial
1.	Definition
	a.	Flow is the process of total involvement with life. It is the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter.
2.	Introduction
	a.	Aristotle concluded 2300 years ago that more than anything else men and women seek happiness. Csikszentmihalyi asserts that little has changed over the centuries. We do not understand happiness any better than Aristotle. People often end up feeling that their lives have been wasted.
3.	Happiness is not something that happens.
	a.	It is not the result of good fortune.
	b.	It is not something that money can buy.
	c.	It does not depend upon outside events.
	d.	Happiness is a condition that must be prepared for. It must be cultivated and defended privately by each person.
	e.	People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.
	f.	Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. J. S. Mill, for example, said to ask yourself whether you are happy and you will cease to be happy. It is being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness. We don't find happiness trying to look for it directly.
	g.	Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarized it this way in the preface to his book Man's Search for Meaning: Don't aim at success. The more you aim at success and make it the target the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued. It must be ensured as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.
	h.	Instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, when we feel in control, masters of our own fate, we experience a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished. That is what Csikszentmihalyi means by an optimal experience. Optimal experience occurs during terrible times as well as great times. People who have survived concentration camps report optimal experiences in the camps. People who have survived near fatal physical dangers report optimal experiences.
	i.	Optimal experiences do not occur when we are passive, receptive, relaxing. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to the limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Thus, optimal experience is something we make happen. For a swimmer, it could be trying to beat her own record. For a violinist, it could be mastering an intricate musical passage. Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. The swimmer's muscles might have ached during her most memorable race. Her lungs might have felt like exploding and she may have been dizzy with fatigue. Yet these could have been the best moments of her life.
	j.	In the long run, optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery, a sense of participation in the determining content of life.
4.	Methodology
	a.	The first studies were interviews with a few hundred experts--artists, athletes, musicians, chess masters, surgeons, etc. These are people who spend a great deal of time in those activities that they preferred. From these first studies the following definition developed: The state in which people are so involved that nothing else seems to matter.
	b.	The next batch of studies interviewed thousands of people from all walks of life. Csikszentmihalyi determined that optimal experiences were described in the same way by men and women, young people and old, regardless of cultural differences from Korea, Thailand, India, teenagers in Tokyo, Navajo shepherds, farmers in the Italian Alps, and workers on the assembly line in Chicago.
	c.	After many interviews, the method evolved into the "Experience Sampling Method." People would wear an electronic paging device for a week and write down how they felt and what they were thinking about whenever the pager signaled. The pager activated eight times a day. By 1990 over 100,000 such cross sections of experience were collected from different parts of the world.
5.	Pleasure and enjoyment
	a.	Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever information in consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met.
	b.	Enjoyable events occur when a person has not only met some prior expectation or satisfied a need or desire, but went beyond what was expected or imagined before. Enjoyment is characterized by forward movement--a sense of novelty and a sense of accomplishment.
	c.	The first surprise to researchers was how similar very different activities were experienced when they were going very well--swimmer crossing the English Channel and the chess player in a tournament.
	d.	The second surprise was that regardless of culture, social class, age, gender, respondents described enjoyment very much the same way. Optimal experience and the psychological conditions that make it possible, seem to be the same the world over.
	e.	The phenomenology of enjoyment has eight (8) major components
		1.	The experience occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing.
		2.	We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing.
		3.	The task undertaken has clear goals. Concentration is usually possible because of these clear goals.
		4.	The task provides immediate feedback.
		5.	One acts with a deep and effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life.
		6.	Enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions.
		7.	Concern for self disappears, yet the self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over.
		8.	The sense of the duration of time is altered. Hours pass by in minutes. Minutes can stretch out to seem like hours.
	f.	The combination of these elements cause a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.
6.	The conditions of flow.
	a.	In the researchers' studies, they found that every flow activity, whether it involved competition or chance, provided the following experience:
		1.	A sense of discovery.
		2.	Creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality.
		3.	Pushed a person to higher levels of performance.
7.	Applications of flow
	a.	The body in flow
		1.	Physical movement activities.
		2.	Sexuality.
		3.	yoga and the martial arts.
		4.	Visual arts.
		5.	Music.
		6.	The joys of tasting.
	b.	The flow of thought
		1.	Reading is the most often mentioned flow activity around the world.
		2.	Thinking.
		3.	Play with words.
		4.	Lifelong learning.
	c.	Work as flow.
	d.	If you and I can transform tasks into flow, what a rewarding life?