Brian Johnson explores psychological complexity as a sign of healthy people, using a family visit to a Toronto FC game as a jumping-off point. He cites Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's definition of complexity as containing contradictory extremes, Abraham Maslow on self-actualizing individuals resolving dichotomies, and Walt Whitman to show why embracing multiple, even opposing sides of yourself matters.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another heroic one. In our last plus one we chatted about the Team Johnson adventure to the Toronto FC game in Houston. It was awesome. I mentioned the fact that Emerson got to connect with some of his favorite players while Eleanor got some goalie gloves that are nearly bigger than her. I didn't mention the fact that the kids were wearing Toronto FC jerseys with Johnson and number one on the back. We got those as gifts from TFC's awesome and thoughtful goalkeeper Shawn Johnson. He and I met when I did some work with the team earlier in the year and hit it off. Thanks Sean. Now before I tell you about another fun micro moment of awesome with the refs after the game, I want to spend another minute or three on the theme of our last plus one. As you may recall, I celebrated one of the TFC players who was one of the most aggressive tough guys on the field during the games, who was also one of the nicest guys ever before the game. Now psychologists say this is one of the hallmarks of healthy human beings. Two of my all time favorite thinkers come to mind, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Abraham Maslow. As you know, if you've been following along, Csikszentmihalyi is the guy who came up with the word to describe that state of peak performance we now call flow. Check out the notes on his classic book called Flow. We got it linked in the plus one. Of course, as it turns out, Mihaly also wrote another great book called Creativity. In that book he says, and I quote, are there then no traits that distinguish creative people? If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be complexity. By this I mean that they show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes. Instead of being an individual, each of them is a multitude. Like the color white that includes all the hues of the spectrum, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves. He continues by saying, these qualities are present in all of us, but usually we are trained to develop only one pull of of the dialectic. We might grow up cultivating the aggressive competitive side of our nature and disdain or repress the nurturing, cooperative side. A creative individual is more likely to be both aggressive and cooperative either at the same time or at different times, depending on the situation. Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire but usually atrophy because we think one or the other pole is good, whereas the other extreme is bad. Then there's Maslow. In his classic textbook called Motivation and Personality. Check out those notes. He describes the 19 qualities of the self actualizing individual. One of those 19 characteristics is what he calls a resolution of dichotomies, such that essentially they can embody the complexity that Csikszentmihalyi was talking about. And that's today's plus one. Think about how you're showing up and see if you might want to be able to push the edges on the full range of your humanity. Here's to embracing all of your complexity today. Little PS Walt Whitman said the same thing. You might want to have this wisdom in mind today as well. He once said, Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am vast. I have multitudes.
