Finding Optimal Focus, and Happiness, At Work
The former chairman of the psychology department at the University of Chicago, Csikszentmihalyi has said that 1945 was a defining year in his life. He was ten years old, and the Hungarian society he knew has been destroyed during World War II. He saw adults who he respected become psychologically paralyzed by their war experience; while others who lost everything picked themselves up and rebuilt their lives. He has spent his entire adult life studying human creativity, happiness and meaning.
Csikszentmihalyi has studied artists, chess players, musicians and athletes about the quality of their experience, and dubbed it “flow.” It includes a high level of concentration; rapid feedback on how well the task is being performed; and the sensation of being sufficiently challenged by the activity but not overwhelmed. Under those conditions, the person achieves optimal experience, forgets the self, moves outside time and everyday reality and becomes part of something greater. Through this experience, we grow and evolve, and find happiness.
Flow is hard work. When it comes to happiness, Csikszentmihalyi distinguishes between enjoyment and long-term pleasure. His notion seems to parallel Aristotle’s view of happiness as “eudemonia” – happiness not as a feeling, but as an activity — a life crafted over a long period of time by struggling to achieving meaningful goals. It’s an old-fashioned notion in a world of instant gratification, get-rich-quick schemes and temporary fashion.
Part of achieving flow is structural – examining each step of your work and figuring out what to simplify or delegate so you spend the most time on flow-producing activities. In his book, Creativity, Csikszentmihalyi also advises workers to be mindful of scheduling creative tasks when their energies are the highest. I am a morning person; my best work happens between 8:30am and 2pm. During that time, I should be interviewing and writing – and wait until after 2pm to do less inspiring tasks, like paying bills, answering emails, doing bookkeeping, or organizing my desk.
The other important aspect of flow – and being engaged at work – is that the motivation comes from intrinsic, not extrinsic rewards. The work itself is the reward. I recently got a call from a headhunter who wanted to gauge my interest in a job on Wall Street. It wasn’t up my alley, but just out of curiosity, I asked the salary range. The high end of the offer was roughly double what I make now. I couldn’t help fantasizing about how that kind of money would change my material circumstances (I could finally trade in my 1996 minivan for the sporty Mazda CX-9 I’ve been coveting). But I also knew I couldn’t trade my situation — work I love to do, total control over my schedule, a reasonable work-life balance — for a commute and a job that would be highly compensated but less rewarding and engaging, and that would require me to spend much less time with my family.
In “Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” Csikszentmihalyi writes: “The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own powers. This is not to say that we should abandon every goal endorsed by society; rather, it means that, in addition to or instead of the goals others use to bribe us with, we develop a set of our own.”
Finally, I spoke to Csikszentmihalyi about the difficulty of achieving flow when you work in a dysfunctional setting. He replied that it’s possible to stay engaged in even the worst environment. In a study of survivors of Nazi concentration camps and Russian gulags, Csikszentmihalyi found “they were able to direct their attention to the kinds of things they knew how to do — whether it was singing, remembering Bible verses, or doing mathematical problems — that took them away from actual situation in which they had to live,” he told me.
Obviously, those horrors don’t compare to a bad work situation, but the study reminds us that “if you can’t take control at work, you can do a lot with the mind to escape the material conditions,” Csikszentmihalyi says.
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