were meant to do and you do it well. The rest is not up to
you. Wealth may come. Fame too. But those are not the
goal. Our job is to see work as a means of making us better,
not just richer, people.
The work of psychology professor Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates this. As a child,
Csikszentmihalyi witnessed how the atrocities of World War
II made it difficult for people to live meaningful lives after
the war. They had been traumatized by the war and thus had
little reason to feel happy. Was there a way for them to find
meaning and even happiness in life again? Increases in
income—once you’ve reached a certain threshold above the
poverty line—do not make people happier. “Increases in
material well-being don’t seem to affect how happy people
are,” Csikszentmihalyi said.^10
So if fame and fortune aren’t the secrets to happiness,
what is? It’s a mental state he calls “flow.” Flow is the
intersection of what you are good at and what challenges
you—where difficulty and competency meet. When your
competency exceeds the difficulty of a task, you are bored.
And when the difficulty exceeds your competency, you are
anxious. That was my problem: I was bored. So I did
whatever I could think of to make my new job more
difficult. And you know what? The boredom went away.
Later, I realized the new challenges I had stepped into gave
me a sense of purpose that was lacking.
This was the same issue facing the workers in Europe
and the United States after the war. How would they avoid a