Flow – Psychology of Optimal Experience

ALSO BY MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI Beyond Boredom and Anxiety The Creative Vision^ with Jacob W. Getzels The Meaning of Things with ...

The Psychology of Optimal Experience MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS, New York Grand Rapids, Philadelphia, ...

flow. Copyright © 1990 by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this ...

For Isabella, and Mark and Christopher ...

CONTENTS PREFACE XI ...

Viii ■ CONTENTS 8 ENJOYING SOLITUDE AND OTHER PEOPLE ...

Introduction 1 HAPPINESS REVISITED Overview The Roots of Discontent The Shields of Culture Reclaiming Experience Paths of Liber ...

PREFACE This book summarizes, for a general audience, decades of research on the positive aspects of human experience—joy, creat ...

Xii ■ PREFACE extensive notes at the end of the volume. They are not keyed to specific references, but to the page number in the ...

...

HAPPINESS REVISITED INTRODUCTION Twenty-three hundred years ago Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women ...

2 ■ FLOW Is this because it is the destiny of mankind to remain unfulfilled, each person always wanting more than he or she can ...

happiness revisited ■ 3 cannot decide—at least so far—how tall we will grow, how smart we will get. We can choose neither parent ...

4 ■ FLOW of his life. Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful. But in the long run opt ...

HAPPINESS REVISITED ■ 5 the Medical School, the University of Milan, Italy. The concept of flow has been found useful by psychol ...

6 ■ FLOW is to present examples of how life can be made more enjoyable, ordered in the framework of a theory, for readers to ref ...

HAPPINESS REVISITED ■ 7 fore it is crucial that one learn to transform jobs into flow-producing activities (chapter 7), and to t ...

8 ■ FLOW help shield us from chaos. They help us believe that we are in control of what is happening and give reasons for being ...

HAPPINESS REVISITED ■ 9 to our needs, and thus they are random in contrast with the order we attempt to establish through our go ...

10 ■ FLOW spreading around South American cities, in the drought-stricken re­ gions of Africa, among the millions of Asians who ...