Now that I’m using Reading Refresh to keep myself up to date on books I’ve read in the past, I thought I’d share some of them as they came back up. Today is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s “Flow“. This book is also available as a free flashcard deck on Ripple Recall.
Flow is one of those books that I see referenced constantly in other books. It was mentioned in A Minute to Think and How the World Sees You, Blair Enns has mentioned him a few times, and it just seems to pop up a lot so I figured it was worth a read.
The book was written Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “MEE-hy CHICK-sent-me-HAH-yee”) and it was a solid read, though it could have been considerably shorter (it took me 9:18 to get through it). For most of you, this is a good one to get a summary of but not spend your time reading all the way through.
The idea of the book is helping you find that magical “flow” state, which is indeed a fantastic place to be. He also spends a good bit of time talking about building an ideal life, focused on ideas like this:
“People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.“
Ultimately, he has a very stoic take on things, in that you need to accept that life will happen, but you can control your response, with things such as this:
“Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them,” said Epictetus a long time ago. And the great emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: “If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now.”
Or this:
“Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.“
There were a lot of great things to follow in the book, and I’m sure you’ll see them throughout your other reading. If you want to go deeper, you can check out the full book, get a free study deck for Flow on Ripple Recall, or watch this 5-minute video overview for a bit more:
