Sketchplanations - Simplifying complex ideas in sketches

As Csikszentmihalyi asserts in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, flow is “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.”

Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.

When you enter a state of flow you achieve the perfect balance between challenge and skill. If what you’re doing is too easy, you’ll get bored. If it’s too hard, you’ll feel anxious. It’s got to be just right. The perfect balance between challenge and skill.

So, to find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities. Once you have created these conditions, and you hit flow, you can recognize it because it’s a distinctive mental state. You feel you are purely present in the moment. You experience a loss of self-c

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done more than anyone else to study this state of effortless attending, and the name he proposed for it, flow, has become part of the language. People who experience flow describe it as “a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themse

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of the seminal book Flow, describes this state as effortless

Mihaly’s studies identified many aspects of flow, but it seemed to me—as I read over them in detail—that if you want to get there, what you need to know boils down to three core components. The first thing you need to do is to choose a clearly defined goal. I want to paint this canvas; I want to run up this hill; I want to teach my child how to swi