Sublime

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi from the University of Chicago. He wrote the 1990 book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

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

As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote: It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself (rather than for ulterior motives), that we learn to become more than what we were.

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.

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

Decades of research stemming from Csikszentmihalyi’s original ESM experiments validate that the act of going deep orders the consciousness in a way that makes life worthwhile. Csikszentmihalyi even goes so far as to argue that modern companies should embrace this reality, suggesting that “jobs should be redesigned so that they resemble as closely a

Mihaly Csikzentmihaly, the legendary University of Chicago psychologist and author of Flow, has written that “work requiring great skills that is done freely refines the complexity of the self ”—but

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has discovered in his research that one of the simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book—and, like other forms of flow, it is being choked off in our culture of constant distraction. I thought a lot about this. For many of us, reading a book is the deepest form of focus we