The field of positive psychology is relatively new—built on the work of Carl Jung, Fritz Perls, and Carl Rogers, among others.16 However, these early leaders focused on helping mentally nonfunctioning people back to a point of functioning in the world. Positive psychology grew out of the desire of people such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Martin Seligman to focus on how to make healthy people happier, rather than focusing on the pathologies of unhealthy people and neglecting the positive side of life. Out of this work came the quantification of flow.
During the 1970s, a number of researchers began looking at intrinsic motivation and specifically “the quality of subjective experience.”17 In his initial study, Csikszentmihalyi and some of his students studied 200 people who were very good at what they did. These people included athletes, chess masters, and music composers. The participants were asked to describe activities when these...