Finding Flow
About the book
Book author: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Finding Flow is the follow-up to Flow. This book deals more with practical advice on how to achieve the flow state, and why you might want to do so.
Reflection and takeaways
One point is made clearly – our ancestors have studied “flow” and how to live a good life for as long as recorded history exists (actually even before then through stories, but I can’t ever prove that), but without tools or words from the modern era. To not read our ancestor’s best stories and philosophers is naivity.
Loneliness combined with boredom makes it hard to concentrate on something; there is no need for it. That’s not good and leads to a void that is filled with negative emotion. Commonly reported is: low feeling of happiness, negative motivation, low concentration, feelings of apathy and a whole truckload of other negative emotion. It’s worse for people with the lowest resources and no university degree. Pathological condition are invisible when in group settings, they only show when you are alone.
The moral of this point is definitely: don’t be alone and bored. I find that interesting. I’m an extrovert, yet I’ve never had a problem with being alone and bored. There is a definite distinction between being alone and feeling lonely. I rarely feel lonely when alone.
On Work
Frans Lizst and Manfried Egen would not have produced what they produced without nature. Frans was very impressed by Lake Como. Bohr, Heisenberg, Chandrasekhar, Bethe with others write in their biographies that if they had not done hikes in the mountains and stared at the stars there wouldn’t be much of their scientific career
A Sailor said this: “The modern civilization has brought forth radio, TV, nightclubs and lots of engineered pleasures to tickle our senses and help us escape the obvious boredom of Earth, the Sun, the wind and the stars. Sailing returns to these ancient realities”.
I love hiking and I definitely understand where they come from. I wish this wasn’t forgotten. Work can definitely be an amazing source of happiness and flow, but it has to come from within.
It is possible to make it so that work is as stimulating as your leisure time. Just ask nobel prize recipients! They almost all claim that they did not work for a single day.
Evidence says leisure is harder to enjoy than work. You have to know what to make of it, and that does not come automatically.
This is actually a good point. When I did my first exit, it took some time for me to deprogram the conditioning and norm to feel “guilty” for not working. However, powering through that unlocks enjoying every day for what it is, and planning the day for the day that you want to have.
“Active” leisure is exclusively better for flow than “passive” leisure, but usually comes with a starting cost. For example, doing a sport requires packing exercise clothes and going to somewhere else. Thats why passive activities like TV wins – its so easy, yet produces no flow.
This is all true, and I’ll think about it. I don’t want the TV to win; and I think YouTube and the algorithm is even more addictive than TV.
I think all of the above points summarize the same thing, and it really is the TL;DR of the book: immerse yourself in everything that you do. Even doing the dishes is fun when you immerse yourself in it. And it’s true, we just forgot how to do it. But then you’ll be engaged in everything.
Why did I pick it
Read the first book, and wanted to learn more.
Verdict
3.9 / 5. It could have been a lot shorter.