Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not passive, receptive, relaxing times--although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves. Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. The swimmer's muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue--yet these could have been the best moments of his life. Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful. But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery--or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life--that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.People often report that during these flow experiences, they are so engrossed in the task at hand that they lose self-consciousness and awareness of anything outside of the task including their sense of time; in many cases hours go by in a flash. These flow experiences often occur when people choose to become fully engaged in a challenging task that has clear goals and feedback. This is depicted in the figure above as the area labeled flow where there is a good fit between a person's knowledge/skills and the challenges of the task, i.e., There is enough challenge to require a person's full engagement and effort. When the challenges are greater than the knowledge/skills, the task becomes overwhelming and anxiety provoking. When the challenges are less than the knowledge/skills, the task becomes boring. Thus, as knowledge/skills develop, greater challenges need to be sought out in order to achieve flow.
The wonderful news is that you can take steps to structure your tasks in order to achieve flow. For an academic example, you might find that you are overwhelmed when trying to understand difficult material or when working on a difficult assignment (i.e., you find yourself in the red zone in the figure above). In this situation, you can seek out help and guidance from your professors, tutors, friends, Darshini, and myself to move down into the flow zone. If, on the other hand, you find that you are bored and down in the gray zone, then you can take steps to increase your challenges. You can seek more information and pursue greater challenges on your own or by working with your professors and others so that you can rise up into the flow zone. Here is my favorite example of this from the book.
Another one of our respondents, a worker named Rico Madellin, gets this feeling quite often in his job...The task he has to perform on each unit that passes in front of his station should take forty-three seconds to perform--the same exact operation almost six hundred times in a working day. Most people would grow tired of such work very soon. But Rico has been at this job for over five years, and he still enjoys it. The reason is that he approaches his task in the same way an Olympic athlete approaches his event: How can I beat my record? Like the runner who trains for years to shave a few seconds off his best performance on the track, Rico has trained himself to better his time on the assembly line. With the painstaking care of a surgeon, he has worked out a private routine for how to use his tools, how to do his moves. After five years, his best average for a day has been twenty-eight seconds per unit. In part he tries to improve his performance to earn a bonus and the respect of his supervisors. But most often he does not even let on to others that he is ahead and lets his success pass unnoticed. It is enough to know that he can do it, because when he is working at top performance the experience is so enthralling that it is almost painful for him to slow down. 'It's better than anything else,' Rico says. 'It's a whole lot better than watching TV.'So, how have you experienced flow? What was it like? Did time speed up or slow down? How have you structured your work in order to achieve more flow? Please post a comment and share.
