thanks to Valley Fiber Life for pointing me to this nice piece summing up Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on what is common in those wonderful moments of flow:
4. Concentration on the task at hand; irrelevant stimuli disappear from consciousness, worries and concerns are temporarily suspended.
5. A sense of potential control.
6. Loss of self-consciousness, transcendence of ego boundaries, a sense of growth and of being part of some greater entity.
7. Altered sense of time, which usually seems to pass faster.
8. Experience becomes autotelic: If several of the previous conditions are present, what one does becomes autotelic, or worth doing for its own sake.
The Evolving Self – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 178-179
I’m curious about #5 since I think when you feel part of what you’re doing control isn’t really such an issue or elusive target but I thought #8 especially was spot on.
What were numbers 1, 2, and 3? I wonder if “potential control” has to do with the reduction in anxiety and increase in the belief in likelihood of success or completion.
maybe – I tried to think about it but I couldn’t really get anywhere with the idea of control.