Boulogne-Billancourt (France), 10:30 p.m., spring 2017:
"So what do you do for a living?
- If this question aims to get to know me better, I prefer to talk about what I do in my free time , rather than during my work time… "
© échappées libres
Over thousand years ago, Aristotle came to the unsurprising conclusion that what a person wants above all is to be happy.
In 1961, the US psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi looked for a term that described the state of feeling happy. He called it "flow".
His meaning of flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.
After interviewing over a thousand people about what made them happy, he found that all the responses had five things in common.
Happiness, or "flow", occurs when we are :
- intensely focused
- on an activity of our own choosing,
- that is neither under-challenging, nor over-challenging,
- that as a clear objective,
- and that receives immediate feedback.
References:
-"The Decision Book", written by Mikael Krogerus and Roman Tschäooeler, and published in 2011 by Profil Books Ltd
-"Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention", Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- Interview of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi by Wired magazine
Le Violon d'Ingres, Man Ray, 1924