Staff Leadership Book Pick of the Month: Flow

Have you seen the 1961 movie “The Absent-Minded Professor”? In the film, a professor is so involved in his scientific work that he forgets to attend his own wedding. Now, I doubt you have ever been that absent-minded, but I bet you have been so thoroughly focused on a task that hours seemed to pass by in minutes. Many people call this “being absent-minded,” but Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it “flow” and wrote a book with that very term as the title.

He is the father of this concept. In a 2004 Ted Talk, he defines flow as:

“A focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of clarity. You know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other; you get immediate feedback. You know that what you need to do is possible to do, even though difficult, and sense of time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger. And once the conditions are present, what you are doing becomes worth doing for its own sake.”

In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi states people can make themselves happy or miserable, regardless of what is going on around them, just by changing the content of their consciousness. His book provides insights on how to enter and maintain flow at work and in everyday life, based on years of research in positive psychology.

To make reading it more user-friendly, there are not footnotes and references on every page. However, for those interested in the more technical side of flow, there are extensive notes and specific references for each chapter in the back.

Csikszentmihalyi states Flow is not a “how-to find happiness” book because individuals must determine what a joyful life is for themselves. This book describes the theory of flow and gives examples of how people have used these principles to find flow in their lives.

So, if you want to learn how to find flow more often, then losing yourself in this book will help.

And as far as the professor is concerned, maybe he is not so absent-minded after all. Maybe he was just in flow.