PKB

One of the most insightful books I’ve read the past few years is Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (His last name is pronounced “chicks-send-me-high”, or so I’ve read.)

Back in 2004, at my last job, we hired an amazing design firm to help us develop the messaging for the product I marketed before Firefox. Their co-founder gifted my marketing team with copies of Flow because she and her team felt the ideas expressed there were core to why people loved our product. They hoped the central notions of flow that Csikszentmihalyi articulated would be translated into the messaging we created. (Jury’s out on whether we succeeded on that front. Eh, probably not so much.)

Csikszentmihalyi tells you what it takes to be happy as a human. I can’t be any more clear about what I took away from the book than that.

Rather than try to distill his work into deep-fried bluggets (term of art; contraction of “blog nuggets”), let me point you to what some other people have had to say.

• Diego Rodriguez
  
• Caterina Fake
• Wikipedia
• Wired

No particular reason for sharing this. I seem to be latching on to other people’s reactions to the concept of flow lately. Lots of alignment for me in the concept with my own spiritual practice.

I’ll leave you with a bit of transcript goodness from one of Csikszentmihalyi’s lectures in Australia.

Flow is at root: “How to live life as a work of art, rather than as a chaotic response to external events…”