Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (P.S.)

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (P.S.)

By: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.0 out of 5

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's famous investigations of "optimal experience" have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work, Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness and greatly improve the quality of our lives.

Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics

Release Date: 2008-07-01

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Incredibly insightful - Amazon already did a good job summarizing Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, so I will instead focus on evaluating its content.

The book is set up in a way where the first few chapters concentrate on defining and analyzing the intricate relationship between human consciousness and happiness. Once this is firmly established, Csikszentmihalyi goes on to introduce the concept of flow, its physiology and its conditions. All subsequent chapters then examine flow in various aspects of our lives and the last chapter focuses on the philosophical implications of the concept and whether it relates to finding "meaning in life".

It has been said in science that any researcher should have the ability to explain their theory clearly and concisely to a layman. I felt that Csikszentmihalyi's style of writing is very true to this statement, as he puts in a particular effort to make his book accessible and very easy to read for just about anyone. I would even say that he is overly simple to a fault - using a philosophically-conversational tone at the expense of a slightly more rigid "literature review" style that predominates more modern pop sci books. Despite this, the author is still capable of conveying a decent amount of science and methodology behind his discovery and analysis of the optimal experience model.

To me, the most powerful chapters were really the first five where, as I discussed earlier, Csikszentmihalyi really puts the meat on the bones of his theory of flow and masterfully connects everything together. Some passages just made so much sense that I had to put the book down and seriously contemplate about what is being said and how it relates to my entire understanding of life. To use the author's own language it put me in a very deep and enjoyable "flow of thought".

The book does have a small blemish in the fact that it gets a bit repetitive when it goes into listing the occurrence of flow in everyday settings. I don't have anything against the discussion of applicability of the theory, it just seems that sections containing very similar messages could have been condensed. Perhaps 240 pages (not including notes and references) is a bit much for this type of format and ideally it should have been closer to 200 pages. However, I want to emphasize that this small fault does not in any way make the book a "drag" and some people may find this "extra" information rather useful.

To conclude, I found Csikszentmihalyi's lifelong research, his findings and the overall message of his work extremely compelling and powerful. The theory of flow does an excellent job describing many aspects of our lives and most importantly sheds light on the conditions of happy and meaningful existence. I would honestly recommend this book to anyone. It is rather short and very readable and guaranteed to make you analyze your life and the life of your friends and family through the lens of the theory of flow.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Thought-Provoking - I thought this was going to be a book about how to increase concentration and performance on complex tasks, but it turned out to be more about assessing yourself and your circumstances and becoming better adjusted - the pursuit of happiness. Writing style has changed so much recently that the book feels like it was written in 1970 not 1990, but you have to try to ignore that and connect with the author's empathy to get the most out of it.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
profound - This book is quite amazing! As many books of this nature it tells us information that we are already aware of.However this book gives you some "answers" which is a miracle in and of itself! It's the kind of book you wish to reference for the rest of your life....

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
A Wild Ride in Psychology - I haven't had many experiences like it: reading Flow is like banging a wildebeest on speed. I'm sorry, I wasn't clear there: the wildebeest is the one who's on speed. You're on heroin. And wooo baby, that is one of the wildest rides you can take because wildebeests are such gorgeous creatures but even getting near one is pure Colombian danger. So once you're up in that wildebeest and that sweet `n' savory musk hits your brain, and all you can do is close your eyes and feel that king of the jungle pride wash over you, a warm feeling fills your stomach and melts up your face and you feel at once completely powerful and utterly peaceful, and you think wow, buttbanging this savannah cow is allowing you to see God. But no, that's actually more of the heroin kicking in.

It's like being brainbanged by an angel. A beautiful, big busted angel with whatever eye and hair color you like, but I'm sorry women and gays, it's a girl angel for everyone, stop complaining and for a second step back and have the humility to see that most people never get to share an intimate moment with any angel at all, and be grateful, because she's going all out, scissoring your frontal lobe and motorboating your cerebellum, eating out all your cortex folds with the fervor of an athletic latina coed who's eight smirnoffs in and having the time of her life and you don't know how the two of you ended up on top of each other on the upstairs couch, writhing and semi conscious and with tongues of purposeful passion and who really cares how it started let's just finish it let's just OHHHHHHHHHH I HOPE OUR SORORITY PRESIDENT DOESN'T SMELL ALL THE JALEPENO POPPERS AND SNIFF HER WAY IN HERE

And as you just close your eyes and thank your lucky nuts that you found this book, and that you were brainbanged by a metaphorical angel and dickbanged by a metaphorical gnu butt, you have one final realization. And then that, too, recedes into the second wave of heroin.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Find satisfaction in your experience - The title is a bit misleading, as flow does not describe "optimal experience", but simply genuine experience where the subject is just one with the experience. It is true that this is also some kind of "optimal way" to experience life, but by no means can one so easily optimize it. So now, the book won't help you get into those kind of experiences. However, it gives some insight into how simple it is to get into that, when you really love what you do and forget about everybody else when you do it.

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