A state of flow - Austin Kleon
Thursday, October 21, 2021
The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has died.
Earlier this year my 8-year-old said, “When you’re making video games, you have to find that perfect balance between easy and hard?” And I told him he’d basically summarized Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, and drew him the diagram above to explain.
Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience was a big influence on me when I read it back in 2007. There’s a passage in that book about crossword puzzles that I thought could also be describing my newspaper blackout poems:
There is much to be said in favor of this popular pastime, which in its best form resembles the ancient riddle contests. It is inexpensive and portable, its challenges can be finely graduated so that both novices and experts can enjoy it, and its solution produces a sense of pleasing order that gives one a satisfying feeling of accomplishment. It provides opportunities to experience a mild state of flow to many people who are stranded in airport lounges, who travel on commuter trains, or who are simply whiling away Sunday mornings.
Csikszentmihalyi then goes on to talk explicitly about poetry and writing:
What’s important is to find at least a line, or a verse, that starts to sing. Sometimes even one word is enough to open a window on a new view of the world, to start the mind on an inner journey….
He also wrote about the joys of being an amateur:
Not so long ago, it was acceptable to be an amateur poet….Nowadays if one does not make some money (however pitifully little) out of writing, it’s considered to be a waste of time. It is taken as downright shameful for a man past twenty to indulge in versification unless he receives a check to show for it.
(I wrote more on the subject in Show Your Work!)
Csikszentmihalyi’s TED talk, “Flow, the secret to happiness”
Csikszentmihalyi also wrote a book called Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention and he made an interesting list of “paradoxical traits” of creative people:
- Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.
RIP.
Filed Under: Miscellany Tagged: flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychology