Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play

everything was right

This is NOT a review about content, it is a review about the quality of the physical item itself. It is absolutely terrible, one of the worst quality physical books I own, and an absolute ripoff. The hardcover is poorly bound to the interior, causing the spine to tear easily (something that should NEVER happen to a hardcover book), and the print looks like the entire book was printed with a low-ink cartridge. Letters are barely visible in most of the book, and flaky in the rest of it. Never buying a Jossey-Bass book again, Dr. Csikszentmihaly made a terrible choice of publisher. I have chronic migraine, and reading this book is going to be terrible for my health. In the attached picture, the title is printed as a normal text should be, so you can tell that the rest of the text would be practically unrecognizable to the naked eye.

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly presents a detailed examination of motivation based on a study of a half-dozen groups of people involved in recreational pursuits: rock climbers, composers, dancers, chess players and basketball players. He chose these groups in an effort to understand more fully what motivates people to engage in activities that are extremely challenging or offer few external rewards. Although some of his conclusions may be of interest to executives and managers seeking ways to motivate employees, most readers will find this academic study too detailed. Some of the interview comments are interesting, but much of the book describes survey results, a discussion that non-statisticians may be hard put to follow. Because of this complexity and because of the book's somewhat dense prose, we [...] recommend this 25-year-old reissued classic primarily to scholars or to those who are intensely curious about the nuts-and-bolts of motivation. But any human resources professional or leadership specialist should have at least a passing familiarity with its concepts and contents.

One of the major conceits in the history of psychology is that the act of paying attention can be a portal to amazing or magical things. Pay attention to a swinging watch and you become hypnotized, focus on your belly button or a mantra and you enter a blissful meditative state, and concentrate real hard while tapping your shoes together and you just may get to Kansas. The latest wonderful mind state that occurs thanks to paying attention is 'flow'. Upon interviewing a few thousand people as they went about their ordinary lives, Dr. C. discovered that many of them reported a state of pleasure or even ecstasy when they engaged in demanding tasks that challenged them to the limits of their capabilities. The fact that mountain climbers, artists, doctors, etc. reported some real good feelings while having to rapidly shift their attention to stay on a ledge, keep inspiration, or keep a patient alive seemed to indicate once again that attention, if focused just right, can be a portal to some mighty good things. In this his first book on the topic of flow, Dr. C. waxes poetic about how flow represents a heightened sense of self, undreamed level of consciousness and so on, without grounding any of it to actual neural processes. Dr. C.'s house of metaphorical cards however collapses if attention was not the antecedent for flow, but the stuff of flow itself. The critical question that Dr. C. studiously avoids is whether attention is in itself a pleasurable or hedonic thing. Modern research in neuropsychology answers the question in the affirmative, as it is well known that when attention rapidly shifts between a host of important precepts, the neuromodulator dopamine is released that keeps us rooted, alert, promotes efficiency in thinking, and feels good to boot. Dr. C. does not concern himself to explore any of these findings, preferring instead to view attention as a portal to all those good metaphysical feelings, and not a source of those good feelings themselves. But again, if Dr. C. actually was intent on finding out what flow actually is, instead of reveling in its poetry, his book would be shorter by two thirds, and lose its representation as a model for vacuous New Age thinking, which in toto represents the intellectual con of the 20th century.

Delivery was fast! very fast!The book looked a little old but it was clean with no markings nor any tear.Thanks

Having read Csikszentmihalyi's more recent book entitled 'Creativity', I wanted to explore some of his earlier material and liked the introduction I read in the preview on Amazon. He gives a very detailed step-by-step guide to the development of his research processes and is relentlessly forthcoming with any limitations and difficulties that arose. It is one of the most demanding psychology books I have read but very rewarding: having read a book like this you begin to realise what a waste of time many of the 'pop-psychology' books are, full of assumptions and frankly glib analyses. As seems to be the case in 'mihalyi's books, there seems to be no axe to grind, just a dedication to getting to the bottom of challenging aspects of human experience with a view to relating his ideas as frankly and clearly as possible to anyone prepared to put in the time and effort to understand the complexities of the subject matter. I can only cite a single criticism; the title, which gives the impression at first glance that it is some sort of poxy self-help book. Nonetheless, 'mihalyi explains in the preface that this was the last title in a list of 25 that he submitted to the publishers and as a joke - a play on another title by B.F. Skinner.