The Book of Decision

Fifty Models of Strategic Thinking

Author Name: Michael Krugers, Roman Chapler

Nearly two thousand years ago, Aristotle reached the unsurprising conclusion that what humans desire above all else is happiness. In 1961, American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote: “While humans pursue happiness for its own sake, we consider any other goal—whether health, beauty, money, or power—valuable only because we expect its attainment to bring us happiness.” Csikszentmihalyi searched for a term to describe the emotional state represented by happiness, and he called it “flow.” But when are we in “flow”?
After Csikszentmihalyi interviewed a thousand people and asked them what made them happy, he found that there were five common denominators between their answers, which are that happiness or “flow state” occurs when we are
In a state of intense concentration on a particular activity
In a situation we chose, that is, we
We are not facing a challenge that is below our capabilities (we feel bored by it), nor facing a challenge that is above our capabilities (we feel exhausted by it), and this means that we have
Clear goal, we receive it
Instant feedback
Csikszentmihalyi discovered that people in a state of "flow" not only experience a profound sense of contentment, but also lose track of time and completely forget themselves as they become immersed in what they are doing. Musicians, sports champions, actors, doctors, and artists all say they are happiest when immersed in an exhausting activity, a view that often contradicts the popular view that equates happiness with relaxation.