![The wind rises flowstate](https://loka.nahovitsyn.com/63.jpg)
When Csikszentmihalyi tried to understand exactly how people felt when they most enjoyed themselves – when they had optimal experiences – he found that many of them described these moments with the word flow. He continues: “…in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery-or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life-that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.” Or it is the feeling a father has when his child for the first time responds to his smile.” It is what a painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape in front of the astonished creator. Likewise, you could feel miserable despite being rich, famous, and otherwise “successful.”Ĭsikszentmihalyi uses the term optimal experience to describe momentary episodes of enjoyment: “It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair, when the boat lunges through the waves like a colt-sails, hull, wind, and sea humming a harmony that vibrates in the sailor’s veins. You could, theoretically, feel ecstatic despite your external world crashing down. It’s a state of consciousness, and our state of consciousness is not the direct result of what’s happening but how we’re interpreting it. It’s about what we’re experiencing in consciousness.īeing happy means we’re experiencing something enjoyable. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.”Īgain: we are not happy because of what’s “out there,” but because of what’s going on “in here.” It’s not about the external things it’s about our inner experience of them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. It is not something that money can buy or power command. “It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. “What I ‘discovered’ was that happiness is not something that happens,” he writes in the introduction. It’s not about what happens “out there” in the world, but how we respond to it and how we experience it “in here,” in consciousness.
#The wind rises flowstate how to
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is a 1990 book on happiness and how to obtain it.Īccording to Csikszentmihalyi, happiness is achieved not through external means (e.g., money, fame, influence, or material riches) but by controlling consciousness – by controlling our inner, moment-to-moment experience of life.
![The wind rises flowstate](https://loka.nahovitsyn.com/63.jpg)