Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Flow will examine the process of achieving happiness through control over one’s inner life. We shall begin by considering how consciousness works, and how it is controlled

In some creative activities, where goals are not clearly set in advance, a person must develop a strong personal sense of what she intends to do.

What these respondents are actually describing is the possibility, rather than the actuality, of control. The ballet dancer may fall, break her leg, and never make the perfect turn, and the chess player may be defeated and never become a champion. But at least in principle, in the world of flow perfection is attainable.

A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening “outside,” just by changing the contents of consciousness.

The self is no ordinary piece of information, however. In fact, it contains everything else that has passed through consciousness: all the memories, actions, desires, pleasures, and pains are included in it. And more than anything else, the self represents the hierarchy of goals that we have built up, bit by bit, over the years. The self of the pol

On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like. This is what we mean by optimal experience. It

differences. The flow experience was not just a peculiarity of affluent, industrialized elites. It was reported in essentially the same words by old women from Korea, by adults in Thailand and India, by teenagers in Tokyo, by Navajo shepherds, by farmers in the Italian Alps, and by workers on the assembly line in Chicago.

optimal experience, and the psychological conditions that make it possible, seem to be the same the world over.

With consciousness, we can deliberately weigh what the senses tell us, and respond accordingly.

To achieve control over what happens in the mind, one can draw upon an almost infinite range of opportunities for enjoyment—for instance, through the use of physical and sensory skills ranging from athletics to music to Yoga (chapter 5), or through the development of symbolic skills such as poetry, philosophy, or mathematics (chapter 6).