1 What Flow Is
“The problem of meaning will be resolved as the individual’s purpose merges with the universal flow.”
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
What, exactly, is flow? Consider an activity you enjoy. You are working toward clear goals and receiving immediate feedback. There are many opportunities for decisive action. Action and awareness merge. You concentrate on the task at hand to the exclusion of all information except that which is necessary to the activity. You experience a sense of control. You are unaware of your own consciousness. Time has no meaning, or it is distorted. For example, it slows down, speeds up, or you experience no awareness of time passing. You do the activity for the sake of the doing.
This feeling is called flow.
The term flow came out of the rigorous research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who originally referred to the concept as “optimal experience.”9 Flow is a technical term describing those exceptional...