Chapter 3 of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow is titled Enjoyment and The Quality of Life. This chapter resonates strongly with me. I have always struggled with the idea that lounging around or mindlessly working is enjoyable. Thinking about those scenarios the word tedious comes to mind. Between my senior year of high school and going away to university I worked in a tire factory. The overall process is quite interesting, however, as the low person on the shift (usually 11 pm to 7 am – dog shift) I did not get the interesting jobs. One of the jobs I had was sorting “green” (uncurled) tires by type into pallets so they could then be taken to the molds. It was mind-numbing work. The person next to me on the line, a PhD in psychology just back from a tour of duty in Vietnam gave me advice. “Make it a game. A game that requires you to think and be present. Something you could strive to win every night.”  It made the work enjoyable. It is a piece of advice that has stayed with me since 1974. Chapter 3 explains why a crazy (and looking back, he probably was suffering from PTSD) guy in a factory had such an impact on my life. 

The author starts the chapter by suggesting we have two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is making the conditions around us match our goals. Crafting the world to be what we want. The second is to adapt how we experience and perceive external conditions so they “better fit our goals.” The second strategy is the, manage our consciousness concept introduced in Chapter 2. 

Choosing the first path boils down to putting all your effort into manipulating outcomes such as wealth, status, and power. Trying to make the world fit you means you can’t focus on the higher-level needs such as self-actualization, transcendence, or virtue. The second path is more in line with the Stoic concept of acceptance of the current moment, embracing both the joys and challenges of life with equanimity. While Stoics don’t eschew wealth, status, and the like, they value them less than virtue, wisdom, and other higher-order principles. A focus on equanimity positions people so that optimal experiences are possible. 

Csikszentmihalyi suggests eight conditions for making optimal experiences possible: 

  1. Confront a challenging task that we have a chance of completing successfully.
  2. Concentrate on what we’re doing.
  3. Ensure the task undertaken has clear goals (which makes concentration possible).
  4. Seek and accept immediate feedback.
  5. Focus on the task to the exclusion of everyday worries and frustrations. 
  6. Exercise a sense of control over your actions.
  7. Subvert the concern for the self to the work at hand.
  8. Quite your obsession with the clock (This is known as Deep Time see Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks).

I suspect that every reader of this blog probably has had one or two optimal or flow experiences. Those times when you were so wrapped in a problem or consumed with a piece of work then realize what seemed to be minutes was in reality hours. The problem is that the conditions for an optimal experience rarely happen by accident, our goal then is to find a way to create the right environment.

In short, optimal experience occurs when a person goes beyond what they are programmed to do, leading to “something unexpected, perhaps something even unimagined”. Confronting the task requires appropriate skills and the application of psychic energy is a prerequisite for growth. Combining scenarios where the eight conditions are true is a precondition for growth and flow. 

The eight conditions are not a recipe but are a good reference for engineering scenarios conducive to optimal experiences and therefore enjoyment. This means we need to learn to set goals that help us grow (goals set by others for you don’t work) even if those goals are a game (tire sorting) or dynamically set. Then control our consciousness so that we revel in working toward the goal. All the while actively seeking and accepting fast feedback.  

Note: Flow was published 10 years before the Agile Manifesto, and many of the ideas and concepts in the book have influenced the path of Agile and Lean Methods. 

Buy a copy and read along – https://amzn.to/4b5kPmb 

Week 1: Preface and Logistics – https://bit.ly/3WLjFHU 

Week 2: Happiness – https://bit.ly/4dUSpNg Week 3: Consciousness – https://bit.ly/4bEu3pN