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Product Details
Series: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics; 1st edition (July 1, 2008)
Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:
1- "This book summarizes, for a general audience, decades of research on the positive aspects of human experience—joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life I call flow...This book tries instead to present general principles. along with concrete examples of how some people have used these principles, to transform boring and meaningless lives into ones fill of enjoyment."
2- "What I "discovered" was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. 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."
3- "From their accounts of what it felt like to do what they were doing, I developed a theory of optimal experience based on the concept of flow—the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it."
4- "The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment. If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one's shoulders.Read more ›
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Some books are like a pint of beer. You guzzle it down in something of a hurry before it warms up, and before it's all done you're looking forward to the next, cold one. Others are like a really good dessert wine. You spend time sniffing it, taking in the floral notes, before you take the first hesitant sip. This book is the latter.
It took me a good long while to read it. This is the 35th book I've read in 2014, and it took me all of June and most of July to get through it. This is not because it is a bad book or badly written. It is because each page is filled with possibility; each concept, each story/ parable told makes you go off into a reverie of thought and memory.
At its core, the book is about "Flow" or that state of consciousness that one achieves when engaged in an "enjoyable" activity. Something difficult, but doable, with a clear goal, and that requires a specific set of skills to perform a specific set of actions to get there. This might be running a 5k, or bringing up a child, or deciding to rid the world of cancer - you decide! According to the author, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, as human beings we have an infinite variety of flow experiences available to us - various avenues that he delves into in some detail, that open up based on the possibilities of our body, our minds, our work/ workplaces, our families, communities, and so on. This is something I think we can all empathize with and was certainly a feeling that is familiar to me.
Then the author goes on to make a strong assertion - that to feel flow is to be happy. Nay, to be happy is to be in flow. The assertion is an ambitious one, but quite convincing. Most of what I consider to be happiness can indeed be defined as flow activities or their outcomes.Read more ›
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My takeaway from reading the book, Flow by Michaly Csikzentmihalyi is that happiness can be achieved by changing consciousness in which you bring order to tasks that you do (sometimes daily) and can bring enjoyment to your life, hence happiness and it called flow.
It sounds simple but it is rather complex. The book is written by an intellectual and at times its seem for intellectuals. You have to pay attention otherwise you'd be like me when I had to re-read the paragraph for it to make it sense.
The premise is that for you to be happy-you have to overcome challenges and use your skills to do it. Flow and happiness are by-product of the task. But there is a delicate balance between the complexity of the challenge and the complexity of your skill. It have to be aligned. If one is greater then the other, then you will need to increase and improve your skills or lower the challenge. Only then, will flow exist. The author gives a few examples of this: a tribe in New Zealand moves every seven years as to give the tribe new trails, new enemies, new challenge for the happiness of the group. And he give examples of a culture that every year destroys a monument and re-builds it trying to make it better and more beautiful.
To achieve flow , there are clear rules that must be followed: The task must have clear goals and actions needed to overcome the obstacles. Immediate feedback is needed to see what you doing is working or not working. The challenge and the skills must be aligned but it has to stretch the person, it has be hard enough to do but not too hard where he will give up. Once the goal is met, a new goal needs to be set.Read more ›
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This item: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
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