Choose and clearly define your goals – from the smallest task to finding your life’s authentic purpose.

You must manage your life so challenges are both meaningful and balanced with your capacity to act. The secret? You must find the boundary between apathy and anxiety.

Anxiety – disquiet when things are too hard, unclear or caused by chronic dissatisfaction.

Apathy – boredom when things are too easy or not meaningful and.

The Making of Meaning – Finding universal flow and finding peace through meaning.Ĭsikszentmihalyi gets straight to the problem: instead of flowing by default, we mostly fluctuate between two extremes:.

Cheating Chaos – Mastering our response to stress and turning adversity to our advantage and.

Enjoying Solitude and Other People – Flowing on our own and in our relationships.

Work as Flow – Transforming work into a flow-inducing activity.

The Flow of Thought – Developing flow through symbolic skills (e.g., poetry, philosophy, math).

The Body in Flow – Developing flow through physical and sensory skills (e.g., sport, music, yoga).

The Conditions of Flow – Examining flow in games, sports, art and hobbies.

Enjoyment and the Quality of Life – Exploring the optimal state of inner experience.

The Anatomy of Consciousness – Examining how consciousness works and is controlled.

Happiness Revisited – Introducing flow and an overview of the book.

How? Csikszentmihalyi leads us through his life’s work and thinking over 10 life-altering chapters: Something we can get better and better at, no matter what we’re doing, who we’re with or what life throws our way. In fact, it’s a state we experience surprisingly often, at work, at home and at play.īut flow isn’t just something that happens to us, it’s something we can engineer. If you’ve felt hours fly by like moments, held a lover in your arms or marvelled at a sunrise you’ve experienced flow. Happiness is flow: a state of optimal experience a state of joy, creativity and total involvement in which problems seem to disappear and there is an exhilarating feeling of self-transcendence and control. IN A NUTSHELL: “The best moments … occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile.” SYNOPSIS: A bottom-up guide to finding success, growth and happiness through flow – an optimal experience of being, characterised by total absorption and joy in the present moment – by psychology professor, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. TYPE: Non-fiction (science, philosophy), theory. The Art of Living will never share your email.

Flow by mihaly csikszentmihalyi