Flow

About the book

Book author: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The book is about the “Flow” phenomenon - the feeling you get when you are absorbed with a task to the point that you no longer “think” and your perception of time is different – complete immersion. Humans crave this feeling, and I am no exception. It’s an excellent journey into what this phenomenon is, and that you should structure your life to get more of it. It’s also littered with gold nuggets from various philosophers and how all of them kind of describe the sensation. Some even go so far as claiming that acting out the core of yourself is finding “God”.

Mihaly seems to be the main scientific pioneer behind the study of Flow.

Reflection and takeaways

I love flow feeling. I have read so many tangentially related books to this one. I thought this book was one I didn’t need to read because I knew about the phenomenon, but I was wrong.

I’ve struggled, like many others, to define what “flow” is, but I have experienced it and chased it for most of my life. It is a magic feeling. To me, it’s most pronounced today when doing grappling. Grappling is both very physical, which is of course good for flow, but also very mental, because you have to solve the live puzzle of not only your opponent trying to get out of your holds, but he also to choke you out, which you don’t want. It is therefore maximally engaging for your body and your mind. I guess that is why so many people love it, but to get to that level where you can “flow roll”, you really need to give it a few years of practice.

I’m no musician, but I am sure the same feeling is true of when you are really good at guitar and just start improvising.

Even programming is a gigantic source of flow – it’s actually what got me into it. The best part about programming flow is that it is rarely “too difficult” – you can always work around a particular problem (unless it is physical, like this network switch only handles 10gbps) with some clever and hacky solution. It’s very rare for me to run into complete halts, unless when I am working with frameworks or really poor code. I love the “programming flow” way more than “math flow”, because “math flow” can grind to a halt when you don’t remember how particular standard limits / derivatives look like. Programming? No problem, just invent your own way, discover problems and iterate until happy enough.

Some of my favourite takeaways:

Flow has a golden channel: it is achieved when the task is not too difficult to halt progress, and not too easy to bore you out. Writing these book reviews, for example.

Flow is very healthy for the human mind. The people who have the most amount of flow in their lives, are the most happy.

You should listen when your mind gives you flow: this is a really good signal that you are doing something you enjoy and find meaningful. The opposite is of course also true: if you hate your work and can’t focus, then maybe you should quit. You should structure your life so that you achieve the maximum amount of flow possible.

All the scorecards that really matter are internal, so I’d wager that living a life full of flow while being “unsuccessful and poor” is still much better than “rich, bored and miserable”.

What I find the most intriguing is that a lot of the stuff I have read, Mihaly seems to have read too: stoics, Jung, Nietzsche, Frankl, Dostoevsky et cetera. There seems to be a core message behind these figures that Mihail helped me to understand even better with his perspective, and he also introduced me to others.

Why did I pick it

I’ve come across it in various places at least once a month for 10 years. It was due time.

Verdict

4.¹⁄₅.

I don’t know what would have made this book better, except more updated science. But this book really is the pioneering work.