Thursday, August 2, 2018

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Book Report)


Flow, as described in the book, is the state of being so engrossed in what you are doing that nothing else matters. The author explains that most people’s utmost state of happiness occurred unconsciously when they pushed themselves to their greatest limit and succeeded. The state of flow is created when there is complete immersion in an activity without fear of judgement or anticipation of an external reward. Flow creates a purpose and that purpose creates a stronger, more confident self. The book explains that when a person learns to control their internal reaction to external factors, they will no longer suffer psychological harm unless they allow it since pleasure and pain exists only in your own consciousness. The book teaches how to bring order to your own mind by unifying one's action into a flow experience.

As an avid reader, I found this book hard to read. Not because I did not understand the concept, but because the author failed to capture my attention. In my opinion, the book was very wordy without actually providing good and interesting examples of the concept of flow. I found myself drifting off, ironically, quite the opposite of flow as described in the book. The fact that I could not immerse myself in this book was disappointing since I can personally attest to experiencing "flow" when reading a good book. This was not one of those times. Needless to say, the overall premise of the book was quite enlightening and I am sure many people experience "flow" doing a variety of activities, such as chores and homework, but they just attribute it to a "just got to get it done" mentality.

No comments:

Post a Comment