Sublime

Csíkszentmihályi specializes in “optimizing” human experience. The optimal organization man is fitter, happier, more productive, and less expensive. The optimal worker complains less. He or she obeys more. The optimal worker costs the employer less in health-care expenditures.

helping clients find their optimal levels of stress. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1991) refers to this as “flow” and says that this enjoyable state occurs when demands are just beyond what people believe they can attain:

Happiness, or “flow,” occurs when we are: • intensely focused on an activity • of our own choosing, that is • neither underchallenging (boreout) nor overchallenging (burnout), that has • a clear objective, and that receives • immediate feedback.

your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction.

Thus Flow will explore what is involved in reaching these aims. How is consciousness controlled? How is it ordered so as to make experience enjoyable? How is complexity achieved? And, last, how can meaning be created?

Because we are used to thinking that creativity begins and ends with the person, it is easy to miss the fact that the greatest spur to it may come from changes outside the individual.

Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experienc

Sixth, there should be what Csikszentmihalyi called the ‘paradox of control’. You should be at the absolute outside edge of your ability, so that you’re only just, not quite, but yes, just about hanging on in there. As

“being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”