Sublime

You may remember Schopenhauer’s image of the x=y diagonal that shows how we truly navigate life. This graph conceit echoes that of the modern sociologist Mike Csikszentmihalyi. From his extensive discussions with people from all walks of life, he discovered there is a state of ‘flow’: a ‘prime state’ that brings together the chess player, the surfe

Here’s the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s take on it: ‘The popular assumption is that no skills are involved in enjoying free time, and that anybody can do it. Yet the evidence suggests the opposite: free time is more difficult to enjoy than work. Having leisure at one’s disposal does not improve the quality of life unless one knows how to

The most highly creative form of normal absorption has been called flow. Flow occurs when one’s skills perfectly match the challenge of a task, when there is a sense of pleasure or “high,” when attention is totally focused on one’s activity, a loss of self-consciousness (but not necessarily self-awareness), and an expansion of the felt sense of tim

Why are we as helpless, or more so, than our ancestors were in facing the chaos that interferes with happiness? There are at least two good explanations for this failure. In the first place, the kind of knowledge—or wisdom—one needs for emancipating consciousness is not cumulative. It cannot be condensed into a formula; it cannot be memorized and t

He was discovering that if human beings drill down in the right way, we can hit a gusher of focus inside ourselves—a long surge of attention that will flow forth and carry us through difficult tasks in a way that feels painless, and in fact pleasurable.

Achieving the zone—the right state of mind for peak performance