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

This book is brilliant. It really explains when people have this sense of hapiness and why "dolce far niente" is a paradox of hapiness. Where are people more happy: at home or at work? Give them more holidays or once retired ... they'll miss the work. Dive into this book and you'll understand why.

"Flow" is a book about improving both performance and satisfaction in most pursuits.

If awareness is required for improvement, than the analysis presented in "Flow" is helpful in both regards.

The book provides a general description of the pleasant sensation described as "Flow."

Based on people's descriptions of positive experiences, the author identifies the shared characteristics of the experiences that correspond to the respective experiences being characterized as positive.

Searching for "Flow (psychology)" on Wikipedia will yield a pretty good understanding of the concepts presented in "Flow."

However, it is interesting to read how Csíkszentmihályi comes to conceptualize "Flow."

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.

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.

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....