40 ■ FLOW
than watching TV.” Rico knows that very soon he will reach the limit
beyond which he will no longer be able to improve his performance at
his job. So twice a week he takes evening courses in electronics. When
he has his diploma he will seek a more complex job, one that presumably
he will confront with the same enthusiasm he has shown so far.
For Pam Davis it is much easier to achieve this harmonious,
effortless state when she works. As a young lawyer in a small partnership,
she is fortunate to be involved in complex, challenging cases. She spends
hours in the library, chasing down references and outlining possible
courses of action for the senior partners of the firm to follow. Often her
concentration is so intense that she forgets to have lunch, and by the
time she realizes that she is hungry it is dark outside. While she is
immersed in her job every piece of information fits: even when she is
temporarily frustrated, she knows what causes the frustration, and she
believes that eventually the obstacle can be overcome.
These examples illustrate what we mean by optimal experience.
They are situations in which attention can be freely invested to achieve
a person’s goals, because there is no disorder to straighten out, no threat
for the self to defend against. We have called this state the flow experience,
because this is the term many of the people we interviewed had used in
their descriptions of how it felt to be in top form: “It was like floating,”
“I was carried on by the flow.” It is the opposite of psychic entropy—in
fact, it is sometimes called negentropy—and those who attain it develop
a stronger, more confident self, because more of their psychic energy
has been invested successfully in goals they themselves had chosen to
pursue.
When a person is able to organize his or her consciousness so as
to experience flow as often as possible, the quality of life is inevitably
going to improve, because, as in the case of Rico and Pam, even the
usually boring routines of work become purposeful and enjoyable. In
flow we are in control of our psychic energy, and everything we do adds
order to consciousness. One of our respondents, a well-known West
Coast rock climber, explains concisely the tie between the avocation
that gives him a profound sense of flow and the rest of his life: “It’s
exhilarating to come closer and closer to self-discipline. You make your
body go and everything hurts; then you look back in awe at the self, at
what you’ve done, it just blows your mind. It leads to ecstasy, to self-
fulfillment. If you win these battles enough, that battle against yourself,
at least for a moment, it becomes easier to win the battles in the world.”
The “battle” is not really against the self, but against the entropy
that brings disorder to consciousness. It is really a battle for the self; it