Remembering Csikszentmihalyi 1: Steven Kotler On The Impact, Underrated Books & Legendary Tales Of The Godfather of Flow | Flow Research Collective Radio

In a sense, the pursuit of happiness and meaning, purpose, like the way it gets framed out from a practical perspective sounds selfish. What it does to the human being along the way actually isn't completely unselfish, right? It sort of turns you into the person deserving of that meaning and that purpose in a sense, which I think is interesting. It's a process of becoming.

Hey there. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur, and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches. You'll go through our whole curriculum. You'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up. And I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So, that's getmoreflow.com.

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Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Ryan Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Rhian Dorriss here with the Flow Research Collective. And today is the first of a really special series that we're doing here on Flow Research Collective Radio in honor of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who is the godfather of flow and who we at the Flow Research Collective are forever indebted to for coining the term flow, for doing all of the foundational research, and for setting us up as an organization to bring Csikszentmihalyi's incredible research to the world in practical ways. So we wanted to dedicate this 3-part series to Csikszentmihalyi's incredible life and incredible work and really have it be a piece through which we can remember and honor and appreciate Csikszentmihalyi and all he has done for us, for psychology, and for the world at large. Now, this first episode is going to be with Stephen. And in this episode, we talk about the impact that Csikszentmihalyi's work had on Stephen Kotler's life and how Stephen first read Csikszentmihalyi's work back in the early 2000s, and it got Stephen on the path of Flow Research Collective that has led to this organization and where we are right now. We also talk about the fun interactions that Stephen and Csikszentmihalyi had over the years. Stephen has some really amazing stories. And we talk about the most underemphasized and underappreciated aspects of Csikszentmihalyi's work. And Stephen goes into those in depth and covers the most highly recommended books that are underread of Csikszentmihalyi's, so that if you want to go deeper on his work and life, you can do so too with some clear takeaways. So enjoy this special episode. It's the first in a 3-part series. Stay tuned for the second 2 episodes, one of whom is going to be with Marc Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's son. And then the third episode is going to be with 3 of Csikszentmihalyi's grad students as well, and they'll be remembering him too. So this is a really special series. This is the first of 3 parts with Stephen Kotler. I hope you enjoy. Stephen, I wanted to start off with an outreach that you did after the very sad news of Csikszentmihalyi's passing a few weeks ago. And one of the things you said was, while Csikszentmihalyi is best known for his contribution to flow science, he also helped rewrite the rule book on creativity, education, adult development, emotional intelligence, and more. So I actually wanted to start not with flow, but with all of his other contributions. And I would love for you to give a breakdown of what you see Chick Samihai's most underemphasized contribution being?

I think the place to start is maybe where he started. When he came into this work, it was really Husserl's writing who lit him up. He was interested in psychology, but when he moved into psychology and got past Carl Jung and Freud and realized that it was being dominated by guys like B.F. Skinner and behaviorism, and there was very little wiggle room. He's sort of back up into philosophy again and, you know, read Heidegger and was influenced by Heidegger a little bit, was really influenced by Husserl, and had often said— and I think this is in the revised introduction to Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, his first book, or it's in the introduction to The Evolving Self, I can't remember, it's one of those two, the introductions to those books— but he talks about how his career was really about practical phenomenology. And that's what he was trying to do, is how do you actually systematize and measure phenomenology, right? The study of actual experience. And what's funny is, and he also says this, I think this is in Beyond Borderline Anxiety in the revised introduction, he talks about the experience sampling method, right? When pagers were suddenly developed and you could page people, 3 or 4 times. He flat out says flow took a 20-year hiatus in my life while I explored the experience sampling method. People often forget he wrote a textbook about that, just the methodology that he helped co-develop. And the reason it was so exciting to—

To interject for one second there, could you give a breakdown for folks of what that entails, that method?

Oh yeah. The experience sampling method was— So the problem he was trying to solve was, and it's a problem we face at the Flow Research Collective, which is I ask you after the fact to describe a flow experience, you're going to use fairly general terms. The really rich details are going to be missing. And this is also going to be the same if I ask you to describe any life experience, right? Coming at it from the future, looking backwards, you're going to miss a bunch of stuff. And Csikszentmihalyi started to notice that in the work he was doing in these interviews, after-the-fact interviews, they were just too generic to be useful as a scientist. So the question was, how do you get more immediate information about our actual experience of our day-to-day lives, rather than this retrospective, ask people about it afterwards? And the pager had just been introduced. The only people really who had pagers at this point were like Wall Street douchebags and drug dealers. And that was about it. Like it was in that category still, but they realized they could give it to research subjects and page them at various points during the day. And then they developed what became the Flow Short Scale and the Flow Long Scale and those original questionnaires to kind of what's going on in your daily life? How are you feeling? And then they took this idea and took semi-high. They first used it in the original kind of flow group, which was rock climbers and surgeons and dancers. That original group of flow studies. But it got, like, uh, in collaboration with his Italian collaborator whose last name I can never pronounce, so I'm not even going to try. They did really weird things. Like, at one point they gave pagers to a group who was climbing Everest. And at one point the group climbing Everest were, like, snowed in and buried in an avalanche in their tent for, like, 72 hours before they got dug out. But they were still paging them, and these guys were responding to the queries. So there's huge data sets on just what is ordinary experience actually like? How do people feel during their lives? And that hadn't really been done. Nobody really answered those questions. And it doesn't make sense if you think, oh, this is the flow guy. But if you think, oh no, this is a guy who was interested in the phenomenology of everyday experience and the much deeper question of what makes everyday experience, what makes life worthwhile, Then when he says something like, I took a 20-year detour down the Experience Sampling Method that almost nobody now talks about. He's not known for that, but that was a major step forward in just our understanding of how normal people live their lives and feel during their lives. And that was a huge step forward, huge contribution people are unaware that he made. I've always said he started out studying creativity, right? Flow emerged out of this study he was doing of talented artists. He was going in and observing painters. Painting. And he noticed that they couldn't give a shit about the painting once they were done. They were just into the process. And what's going on here? That violated everything we thought we knew about extrinsic motivation and human motivation. It just didn't make any sense. But why he started that study wasn't like, I'm hunting for flow. It was, I want to understand where ideas come from, how you create something out of nothing. And I always felt that His book Creativity is just a masterwork on the subject and a masterwork on sort of how humans think creatively. I've probably read every science book or psychology book written on creativity at this point in innovation. It still remains number one as far as I'm concerned in terms of the books that I think about and I'm like, "Oh, this is really useful." I don't mean useful in a scientific neat idea kind of way. I mean useful in a how I steer through my daily life kind of way, which I also— I think always his great contribution is he took psychology and philosophy and made it very, very practical. I also think he was a great 20th century thinker. And what I mean by that is there were certain big ideas that people in the 20th century thought a lot about— ethology, the study of animal behavior. He was very influenced by everybody from Konrad Lorenz and Mary Ainsworth, John Bowlby, who formulated attachment theory, all the way up to kind of the more modern ethologists. And that was very present in his work. So was evolution. He was part of the group of psychologists— and now this is another thing that he's never given credit for— is there's a field of evolutionary psychology that emerged in the second half of the 20th century and hugely influential on how I think about flow. Also hugely influential on how my wife and I created Rancho de Chihuahua and our healing methodology, with animals, like on both levels, right? Csikszentmihalyi was obsessed with evolution. The Evolving Self is his look at how does evolution create human beings and knowing what we know about how evolution creates human beings and how flow works, how do we come up with a life that means something in a society that means something? But it was an inquiry based around evolutionary theory. He thought a lot about, oddly, complexity. Even though he didn't work in that field at all, he definitely was part of the group of people that realized, "Oh, wow, complexity. The brain is a complex system and that the rules of complexity are going to apply here as well." And even though he never pursued this later on, I remember being shocked because I thought this was one of the things that I helped bring to flow science a little bit. And I was so sure this was one of my contributions that I stumbled on something that he wrote in the late '80s. And I was like, yep, he beat me here too.

That's actually really funny you mentioned complexity. There was a quote on creativity I wanted to share and get your thoughts on. And it goes, and this is obviously from Csikszentmihalyi, "If I had to express in one word what makes creative personalities different from others, it's complexity. 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." So very curious for your thoughts on that quote. And then just his contributions to creativity and your takeaways personally from his contributions to creativity specifically.

You actually landed upon one of his great contributions to creativity, which is his understanding. And Mike and I had a disagreement over this actually. He believes these traits are hardwired early on. And like the person, the creative personality may be a fixed personality type. Though he does say, interestingly, when he did his giant study of creativity, Some extraordinary number, like 50% of his study group lost their fathers or suffered really serious hardship in early childhood. So he does acknowledge there's a nurture component that really weighs in creativity. And we can come back to what has his thinking about why that matters in a second. But his idea of the creative personality type, the fact that we are— creatives are both and. You're very, very introverted, for the actual act, creative act, but be very extroverted when you kind of present it to the world. You have to be very, very naive to believe that your creativity is going to work, and yet you have to be very, very sophisticated to sell it to the world and actually make a living as a creative. And it's back and forth and back and forth. There's— I think they were like, in creativity, I'm going to get it wrong, but there's something like 17 or 19 different both-and binaries that creatives are. And Where I think this is so important to anybody who trains with us or anybody who does flow work in general is I think what the adult development research continues to show is that one of the things that happens is as you get more access to flow, you get more access to divergent thinking. You become more creative over time. You learn how to think more creatively over time. And especially if you're doing flow work and you want to use creativity in that pattern recognition, linking new ideas together as a flow trigger, which is such an accessible flow trigger in almost any situation. Situation you're in, I mean, you'd be a fool not to try to maximize it, right? Like, if you're interested in this work, I think what happens is we actually develop these both-and personalities. I think that's part of the path towards adult development. In fact, a lot of the work I'm doing on peak performance aging, based on some of the early research done by Gene Cohen, who's the geriatric psychiatrist and the founder of kind of successful aging movement and built a couple of the big national aging labs and things like that, he has found these same things that as our brains develop later in life, we start to gain access to creative superpowers, levels of creativity, ways of thinking that we don't have earlier on. So even if flow doesn't make us more creative over time, life is going to make us more creative over time. We're going to have a successful second half of our life. And I think that these both/and personality types are harder for people because what you get is more emotions, especially in the beginning. You're going to get way more feelings than you're used to because you have to open up parts of yourself that you don't want to be creative. It requires that sort of deeper vulnerability with yourself. And I think there are emotional control issues. This is one of the things I think, one of the reasons I wrote Art of Impossible is we were training people in flow. It was very easy to train up flow because the triggers work so well, the cycle works so well, but it wasn't stable in a lot of people. They get these huge spikes and they could return to baseline. And one of the reasons is they were creative skills that they needed to master, but also emotional regulation skills. And I think those skills are really important because as we become more creative, we become more emotional. I think one of Mike's contributions, biggest contributions, is that he saw this sort of writing on the wall before a bunch of other people and, you know, was poking at it through flow and through adult development. And I think it's gone further now, but I think that's really important. I think that's what that quote speaks to. But more specifically, the term complexity means something very specific in adult development. Complexity, in common language, we would call it wisdom, right? It's being able to see things from all perspectives. It's being able to, you know, understand that very few things are black and white and most things are gray, and understanding that you have biases and there are noise and judgments. And all that stuff gets folded under what we would call complexity, but it basically means you're growing up, you're wiser and you're moving up the development chain. It also seems to me though, more research needs to be done. It also seems to me you become way more flow prone. Going through these gateways, what you get on the other side is a lot more flow, which is interesting.

Yeah. One of the other things that I always found very compelling in Csikszentmihalyi's work in general and also in his creativity research is the emphasis on meaning. He says that creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. Most of most things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity. So I'm curious for your take on his emphasis of meaning through flow, through creativity, and through some of the other pieces that fall under that as well.

This is in a weird way— Chick Set Me High and Myself started with a very similar core question early on, which was we saw a lot of adults— we were both kids who were really miserable. Miserable in their lives for whatever reasons, but really miserable. And it didn't make sense because they had all the stuff that was supposed to make you happy. And they were all automatons in a sense, and nobody was happy. And that question of what makes life meaningful, in a sense, you know, that what is the meaning of meaning was a question he was asking. I was asking it in West of Jesus. And it led me to flow, though it didn't really lead me deep into his work on flow because I was much more interested, especially in the beginning, in the neurobiology more than the psychology. But I will say that I think one of the things that's sort of uncomfortable about the flow research is that what we call meaning is experiences that take place when these certain neurochemicals are present. Now, that's not the only thing we call meaning, but it certainly shows up a lot. When you go into terrorist training camps and you look at how are they indoctrinating people, or you go into cults, how are they indoctrinating people? They're altering consciousness and putting people into micro or macro flow states of varying kinds, or sometimes trance states, and then altering their beliefs. And when you feel that good, especially if you haven't felt that very often, and that's why I always say the minute somebody else starts making meaning for you, run, just run, right? Especially if it's about flow or these kinds of altered state experiences that it's weird, right? Like flow is ethically neutral. War can be deeply meaningful. The cat burglar can go out and rob your house and it's a deeply meaningful experience for that Now, that gets built upon. It's funny that it gets built upon the most in his book, Good Business. It's interesting that Good Business turns out to be a book about meaning, but what does it mean to do good business in a sense? It means that the work I'm doing serves the world, serves other people, is useful, isn't just about making a dollar. And that also plays a role. And, but, you know, in Art Impossible, it's again, we're talking about getting the neurochemicals of social reward. It's not good or bad, but it's about, you know, what we call meaning is the presence of certain neurochemistry during certain experiences. And those experiences are ethically neutral, right? And can be viewed from different perspectives. You know what I mean? Radically different ways. It could be deeply meaningful for somebody and could be the worst thing in the world for somebody on the opposite side of that particular fence. That's also tricky, but that's part of, I think, what we mean by complexity. But how to make a life more meaningful, how to increase overall life satisfaction and those sorts of things, I think he, as much as anybody, has shaped our practical answers to those questions.

In a moment, I want to switch gears into Csikszentmihalyi's personal life and some of the lessons that can be extrapolated from that. But one of the quotes that Dr. Brent Hogarth, one of our coaches here at FRC, often mentions that influenced him a lot from Csikszentmihalyi is the idea of putting structure in consciousness or structuring consciousness. And I'm curious how you think about that breakdown and how it falls into his research on flow and these other areas as well?

It's a great question. In a sense, this is another big 20th century idea, was the huge impact of thermodynamics and entropy on consciousness and what does it mean to be human. And Mike spent a lot of time talking about psychic entropy. And I always say that one of the other things that he's a tremendous tremendous philosopher of consciousness. And when I say that, one of the things I'm really speaking about is the influence of this notion of everything descends towards entropy unless you can make meaning out of it, unless you can fight against it. And flow is an anti-entropy process for Mike. So I think that's one of the things he had to think about to be able to get to the ideas of flow. And it's not just— one of the other books that I'm always recommending is The User Illusion, which is another book that kind of is about consciousness. And it opens with this same idea about the thermodynamic principle, the second law of thermodynamics, and these notions of entropy and what is psychic entropy about. And I think that's one of the big frames that allowed him to think about flow and human consciousness super successfully. And it's super useful to certain people. And I find like some of the engineers that we work with love his thinking about entropy, because it's a language that they— oh, consciousness information. I love it, because it also gets into Shannon and information theory. And, you know, questions like that, that I think are really neat and relevant here as well. And when I think mostly about it is I think, here's a guy who tried to make psychology giant. Whereas a lot of other people, Skinner, they were trying to make psychology small. And what I find so interesting is by making it giant, he made it unbelievably practical. He got from the second law of thermodynamics and Claude Shannon's information theory and flow to incredibly practical advice of, this is how we should live on a day-to-day basis. And that's huge. Not a lot of people get to do that. You know what I mean? In the 20th century, it's hard to think— Nietzsche tried, tried to do that. If you go back 100 years, William James tried to do that, but it's not that many people who can take a swing at that particular pitch and actually hit it, let alone like he did as far as he hit it.

Hey there, just gonna interrupt. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur and you want to take your professional success to the level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches, you'll go through our whole curriculum, you'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2, so then somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them. Which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up. And I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like, when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. That person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. So Csikszentmihalyi was often citing his own adolescence during and after World War II as a formative experience that prepared him for a life researching what he researched. And I know that you and him, when you spoke, also spoke about some of his hobbies and his own ways of accessing flow. So I'm curious if you can give a breakdown of your of his personal life, his hobbies, and how that impacted his research and contributions?

Okay. So there are about half a million people who are probably better qualified to answer this question than me, because I definitely did not know Mike super well. But what I found, he was certainly shaped early on by the fact that the adults around him were miserable. Despite having money, power, and education also, that was the other thing. They were incredibly well-educated people, they're still miserable. Information alone, money, none of these things were solving it, and personalities fell apart during the war in the face of hardship. What I think is interesting about that is you sort of touched on this earlier, we touched about so many people who were eminent creatives, these scientists and artists, whatever he looked at, creativity across the board, business leaders as well, all had this really painful childhood. In the interview he did somewhere along the way, I don't remember exactly where or when, somebody asked him about this. He said, "If your life is satisfying as a child, you're not going to learn to struggle enough to be able to get into the challenge-skill balance regularly." You're not going to learn the skills you need because you're already satisfied in your life. If you grow up with a safe childhood and you're satisfied, you're not going to learn that to get to— when you're dissatisfied, oftentimes what you have to do is push on the challenge, skills, balance, go harder, things like that. So I think part of his childhood was what he saw and what is the meaning of meaning. But part of it is he learned how to struggle gracefully. He learned how to push on the challenge, skills, balance. One of the things that always stuck out with me, he came to America with some like $1.20 to his name or some ridiculous no sum of money. It wasn't maybe $1.20, but it was a very little amount of money. It may have been $1.20 and no ability to speak English. Couldn't afford to get a psychological education in Europe, figure out how to get a scholarship in America, and showed up with no money and didn't speak the language.

Wow.

On top of that, was a mountaineer, was a rock climber, was a serious avid outdoorsman. This I definitely learned from him over the years. That was the last conversation we had, which I wrote about in that newsletter, is I had been reading, I think it was Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology. I want to say it's that. And there's an interview with him that was translated out of Italian for that book that I'd never seen before because it was only in Italian. And in it, he's talking about his rock climbing experiences. And I started to realize that he was a lot more serious of a rock climber than I ever believed. And I think one of the reasons I didn't believe he was ever a real rock climber is because he's built like a fullback. And like, guys who are built like fullbacks don't climb rocks as a general rule. They're mountaineers. But rock climbing is— people tend to be built like me or Alex Honnold. Like, we're skinny and tall and lanky, and you know what I mean? I'm not tall, he is. You know, he was a much more rabid outdoorsman, even if it was just playing with his dog. The very first conversation we ever had, I was working on a small furry prayer, and I was starting to notice that I was getting into what I thought were flow states with the animals in our pack at Rancho de Chihuahua. And I had no idea flow crossed species lines. And that was my first time I reached out to him is I emailed him. I was like, you don't know me. I've written about flow a little bit and maybe you heard of me and blah, blah, blah. But do you think maybe just possibly, you know what I mean? And I was terrified. I was like, I'm now reaching out to the godfather of flow psychology with what is probably a crazy question. Do dogs get into flow? At that point, when I was asking the question, it was a crazy question. And the first thing he emailed me back immediately is like, of course I get into flow with my dog every day when we play fetch. If you want to talk more about this, here's my number. And that was how we met, basically talking about animals in flow. And I remember thinking even back then, I didn't know him and his work nearly as well, but I remember thinking, Oh my God, that was brave. I mean, I was a journalist. I interviewed scientists all the freaking time and asked them crazy questions, and very few people are willing to like, you know, we had just started to scientifically prove that animals had emotions and these were real, and like dogs giving it, like, this was new. I don't even know if the University of Arizona— I think the University of Arizona work on dogs and flow and ferrets and no flow had been done already, right? But that was, it was just, I was so impressed by it, and I was so impressed that he was willing to like tell the truth. I was willing to believe all that stuff because I understood the neurochemistry. And he was just going off of psychology and experience. And I remember thinking, wow, that was really brave and intuitive and he was right and blah, blah, blah, but childhood experience outdoors. So even that, he was always, it seems like, around animals, in nature, in mountains. His students would tell stories about him coming back from weekend trips in nature with bruises all over his face and body. And he had a place in Montana and was off been out there hiking and whatnot. And it's not lost on me that, well, first of all, so many of the flow philosophers one way or another have hiked through the mountains. Nietzsche did it on a daily basis. There seems to be something about walking through the mountains on a daily basis that if you're going to do flow, real flow research, that may be some kind of a prerequisite. Arndt Dietrich was a long-distance runner who, he ran through the natural world a lot. It's a commonality among flow researchers over 200 100 years at this point also. I don't know if that's exactly an answer to his childhood, but that is a little bit more about what I knew about him a little bit.

You've told me a story before about a phone call you both had where he was giving you advice about how to make sure that you've got access to flow as you age.

Yeah. It was the last thing I wrote about in the newsletter is that I called— the last question I called him up to I've been reading all these things about him being a serious outdoorsman. I, like everybody else, have seen his TED Talk where he talks about being World War II shaping flow and his experience in prison camps, things like that. But I literally called him up. I was like, "Mike, I know what you've said on podcasts about your early childhood and flow and prison camps and the war and what you've said about studying artists, but everything I read about you tells me you were a really serious rock climber. You knew some of the early kind of big British climbs, you knew some of the early Yosemite climbers, you have a very good grasp of technical climbing language. And I got to ask you, those are just stories you've been telling, right? Because what really happened is you started to get into weird flowy shit started happening in the mountains and you wanted to know more about it and you thought action sports were totally unacceptable in academia. So you came up with this other story that was essentially what I said to him. And he was already not well at this point. So when the conversation started, before I asked this question, he was speaking slowly. I believe he was recovering from a stroke a little bit. He was still— and I— so I didn't quite know where he was at. So I asked this question. There was this enormous pause, just a huge— Mike was always a thoughtful thinker. So you, like, if you called him on the phone, and I don't know what he was like with other people, with me he would pause and long pauses. I was used to this pause, like it went on and on. And I started to think, have I insulted him? Did I cross a line? I could hear him breathing, so I knew he had to hug up. And what felt like a minute or two passed. And finally he says, you've got to be careful. And I was like, what the hell's going on here? Has Mike lost it? Like, you've got to be careful? Like, what are you talking about, man? And I was like, oh, well, maybe he's lost the thread. Maybe like something happened to his brain and he's just not, you know, picks up me high anymore. And I didn't say anything. And finally he said, you do something your whole life for flow and you get to be my age and forget about climbing mountains. Sometimes just getting out of bed is the mountain, and you have to be prepared for that. You have to be careful. And I thought that was just one of the most generous honest, you know what I mean? He was literally talking to me, one flow junkie to another, and he was right. He was saying, look, dude, have a backup plan, because if action sports is your only gateway into flow, you're going to get to my age and you're going to be fucked. Take it from me. And I'm sure he had his backup plans and everything else, but I was— it blew me away. And I thought it was so generous and so kind. And it was not an answer to my question, by the way. He never did answer my question. That was, by the way, I also have to say this, this was very I don't know, again, I don't know what other people's experience of Mike was, but if I emailed him a psychology question, I would get an answer in 30 seconds to 2 minutes, usually. If I mailed him a neuroscience question, it's like it never happened. It just never happened. Like, it frustrated me for a while, but in the end, I, like, I came to appreciate— like, I'm not saying he didn't have a deep interest in neuroscience, or, you know, his Italian collaborator was a neurologist, and But he stayed in his lane, and psychology was the lane he wanted to stay in. And man, I tried to tempt the dude out of that lane like twice a year for a decade, I would guess. And he never once swung at the pitch. Not once did he take the bait. And I could ask psychology question? In a second. Ethology? In a second. Probably consciousness in a second, philosophy.

"But nope, don't ask him a neuroscience question." Trey Lockerbie Was it stats that you said was kind of his equivalent outlet? That sort of dense information?

Brian Lawrence Johnson I always thought that. When he writes about statistics in his books, especially if you read The Experience Sampling Method or even some of the flow books, the things that he trusted the most, it seemed to me from an outside perspective is— you and I had this conversation earlier about interviews. He did the experience sampling method and these interviews he conducted with people. Of course, that was very, very real. When you do the interviews firsthand, it's not anecdote, it's experience, and you can trust the person. When you tell about it secondhand, the way he wrote about it in Flow, where it's quote after quote after quote after quote, it's trickier. It's trickier in hindsight, for example, You know, Mark Strand, who's a poet laureate from the 1990s, I think he was at Hopkins when I was there and I met him once, which is why he's stuck in my mind. He was our poet laureate 20 years ago. So now today, do you even know who the poet laureate of America is today? Right? Like, that's my— so like, you read those examples and they don't resonate as much because you don't know the names anymore. And because we've grown suspicious of anecdote. In science. But people's individual experience really resonated with him, A. And on the other hand, his knowledge of statistics and use of statistics and the way he thought about it really, which I think grew out of the experience sampling method and having so much data. I mean, he had huge psychological data sets to work with. I don't know, you know, when flow became a global psychological study, other than like a handful of ideas in behaviorism and maybe like the spread of Freudian psychology. And I could be wrong here. We're going to have Scott Barry Kaufman. You could talk to Scott about this. He might have a better answer. But there are very few global studies in psychology that were sort of run, you know, before we got things like the internet to make them easier. It's, you know what I mean, before the internet, it's It's really difficult to organize a global study in psychology or even to have an idea in psychology spread around the globe. So that generated more data, more psychological data than probably most psychologists have ever seen in their life, right? Until recent times, because you just couldn't get access to it. And by the way, you could get a data— Connor could come on as an actual data scientist and stats geek and tell me that I'm totally wrong. Was a total amateur with stats. But from my— I am not a data scientist, I just read a lot of work by data scientists. I thought he was really smart and really rigorous and really liked how he thought around statistics. And I liked also his awareness of the blind spots in statistics, that there's always a human somewhere in the data. So I always had respect for that as well.

Another thing that Chuck Summey emphasized a lot that relates to the meaning piece was purpose. In an interview from the mid-'90s that I managed to find, which was really interesting, he said, "We can't afford to become trapped within ourselves, our jobs, and our religions. If we do, we'll lose sight of the entire tapestry of life. When the self loses itself in a transcendent purpose, whether it's writing great poetry or or crafting beautiful furniture, or understanding the motions of galaxies, or helping children be happier, the self becomes largely invulnerable to the fears and setbacks of ordinary existence. So I'm curious what your sense of Csikszentmihalyi's impact on the concept of purpose is. And then I know you're also reading his book on self at the moment, and curious if there's any big insights from that that you'd like to share as well.

I'm not 100% certain how you hairsplit between meaning and purpose and happiness and well-being and life satisfaction, eudaimonia, engagement, a lot of those terms. I don't even know if I could divide them apart from myself other than thinking about them from a mechanistic neurobiological perspective a little bit, let alone try to speak for how my divided those things up. But what I think is really interesting is— I'm trying to think, it might be in The Evolving Self— but there's a quote somewhere in one of his books where, and it caught my attention because he doesn't often quote neuroscientists, as we've already established. And he, so he quotes a neuroscientist saying about the human condition, saying that much of the human condition is actually regulated by the hypothalamus. And the default setting of the hypothalamus is essentially worry and anxiety. And what I think a lot of the early flow work started to show, and what's a really weird, hard concept, is when we're in flow, we're not thinking about this life. The self is turned off and we tend to be happy and enjoy this life. When the self turns back on and we are once again aware of this life, right, the default human condition is one of worry and anxiety. And I think part of what he started to figure out, and how I would answer this question about meaning and purpose and those things, is like what I just said, as— and I don't mean this in a cynical way, but that sort of became the foundation, some of the foundational work on happiness. Wow, time in flow is actually what we mean by happiness. And that's weird because it also means happiness is when we're actually ignoring 99.9% of the world and focused on the one little thing we can control and affect and change. And that's a weird thing. So I think Mike added onto it, and I think we add onto it as human beings biologically, is it doesn't matter what that one thing is. You can focus on any one thing and get lost in it. And Mike, he says this in the new introduction to Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, which is amount of time spent in microflow is probably going to turn out to be our definition of happiness. And he said microflow is the most understudied of all aspects of flow. And I tend to agree with him. Certainly, it's incredibly useful to me too in terms of like, you know, the people we serve and the people we get to train and work with. We're not often teaching them how to have giant macro flow experiences. What we're really focused on is having lots of micro flow experiences, the boost in performance you get, and the boost in life satisfaction, right? We're playing in that same area, and that's sort of what we're training people in. And I feel like it's of great service, but it's a funny thing. And I think what Mike started to realize is that when we attach the thing that drops us into flow to something that helps other people, makes the world a better place, that is ultimately the meaning of meaning. And some of it is artificially created. And this was another big 20th century idea that Mike was very wedded to that we don't think about it anymore because World War II and World War I are a long time ago, but all of the great thinkers coming out of World War II were very much shaped by the problem of evil and the question of evil. They were deeply influenced by what happened during the Holocaust and what happened to Europe during the war and what happened under Stalin. And that really shaped a lot of thinking. And that built on something else, which was Nietzsche's original problem, which is God is dead. Once you have Darwin, once God is dead, once we've evolved in that way, you have a— this is the big question— where does meaning come from? We have to make it for ourselves is the kind of existential response, which is what I think Mike would've agreed with. And I think he just took a phenomenological approach to an existential question, which is where flow came from. And that ultimately comes down to what we mean by the meaning of meaning. What I think is interesting about all this is what's sneaky about flow is that it does make us more wise and empathetic over time. So in a sense, the pursuit of happiness and meaning, purpose, like the way it gets framed out from a practical perspective sounds selfish, what it does to the human being along the way actually is completely unselfish, right? It sort of turns you into the person deserving of that meaning and that purpose in a sense, which I think is interesting. It's a process of becoming. You're asking me all these great questions, but it turns out you happen to run a Flow company and were very influenced by Mike's work as well. And I know for you, because we've talked about it over the years. So I just want to ask this sort of same question back to you, because I know you spent a lot of time thinking about what Csikszentmihalyi thought about meaning, like this particular question. So do you disagree? What's your take on this?

There's two things that I'll mention on that that were very influential on my thinking. The first is his concept of vital engagement, which he talks about as this sort of overarching meta state that emerges when you are having lots of individual flow states that are galvanized by an overarching transcendent purpose. The way I used to experience that and still do experience that is basically as momentum, this feeling of things just moving well. You feel like you're getting after it. I find that sensation incredibly compelling and productive from a performance standpoint. I think the meaning piece is a key trigger or the purpose piece is a key trigger for that sort of state. Then the second thing on meaning that I really like from his work is his emphasis on meaning within organizations. I'm not actually sure if he was influenced by Maslow on this. I imagine so, but Maslow's book, Eupychian Management, is all about his thesis that organizations and businesses are the best mechanisms through which you can sort of affect change and help people individually and also within the context of the organization have a greater sense of meaning because of the fact that the percentage of their time at work is just so enormous. I love the fact that Csikszentmihalyi really emphasizes organizations as these really effective vehicles for individual meaning and then the ability to impact in a meaningful way. Larger as well.

It's interesting because you make— you bring up a good point, which is he took work seriously in a different way. I mean, we've been, right, since, since they got out the stopwatch and started timing workers during— doing tasks, you know what I mean, in the back in the Ford plant in the 1890s, we've been sort of doing some version of organizational psychology. So you can't say Mike influenced organizational psychology in that way, but he definitely changed the way we think about it. And he pointed out— and this was— so this is one of the great kind of like phenomenological observations he made, which was exactly sort of what you were poking at, which is, hey, wait a minute, we get into flow the most at work. It doesn't show up during leisure time, doesn't show up when we're chilling out. It shows up the most at work. And one, everybody had been arguing that like, hey, work is this thing you suffer through, like you have to do, it's miserable. And Mike came along and said, no, no, no, no, no, we've got like the largest study in psychology history that says people get great joy and great meaning and great pleasure out of this thing, right? Work is not like— it's not the four-letter word we we think it is, right? Flow is a different kind of four-letter word in a sense, right?

The way I always think about it, at least when I read his work, is that for me, purpose became a verb rather than a noun. Something that you do rather than something that you find or have. Uh, same with happiness.

That's an excellent way to phrase it. I think that's smarter than anything I've said.

I don't know, but I'll take it. I'll take it. The next question I was going to ask Stephen is on, from here on out. So what threads of Csikszentmihalyi's research are you seeing being advanced in interesting ways currently? And what aspects do you think are most important to be advanced and progressed?

Those are good questions. So I may be partially biased because we at The Collective have been very involved in this work. But I've been working for the past couple of years with our team and a bunch of outside researchers on basically flow and complexity. What is the network dynamic approach to flow and trying to decode that? And there were a bunch of people who were looking at it. And I think that's amazing that he was one of the first to notice it. And here we are 20 years later, 30 years later, uh, 25 years later, and that's being crystallized. I think certainly group flow, right, which went from something that Mike didn't think was real to something that he thought was real once he started working with Keith Sawyer and Keith did his work, all the way up to kind of where we, the field of flow researchers, are now. And we saw 2 weeks ago, I want to say, the first perhaps neurobiological signal for group flow, for team flow. We've seen new conceptions of team flow. We've got new ways of investigating team flow. We've obviously partnered as an organization with Flipby, which was Mike's leadership development organization. And I think that work is flowing into it. You know, when I started with that other company I used to work with, I always said that the limits of flow research were innovation, right? We knew, understood creativity, but applied creativity, innovation was still a gray area where we had case studies but not enough data. And I felt the same thing with sort of learning, that we had case studies in education but not enough data. And I think now education has become fairly robust, right? Mike wrote a textbook on it, but like on education and adult development, I think that's starting to firm up. And I think the same is true on innovation and organizational flow and those kinds of things. Those things are getting very, very firm or starting to get firm. And I think that's amazing that like if one person had managed to like kind of birth any one of the 5 different things I just listed, that would be amazing and get it 30 years later to where it is. And the entire field of positive psychology is to me, we're finally past the like stupid questions that we had to prove that everybody knew is meditation or mindfulness good for you? Is flow good? Like all the stupid stuff is out of the way. And we're starting to ask, like, you know, some of the gratitude research we're doing where we're saying, okay, in this particular situation, can you use gratitude as an intervention in real time in a high stress sports situation, a high stress research situation, a high stress business situation? Where does it work most effectively? Those kinds of like, this is like really practical applied positive psychology at a level that is really neat. It's like, you know, it's sort of, we're beyond the, oh, just meditation is good for you. Now we're at, if you want to be more creative, open senses meditation, because it does this stuff in the brain. If you'd like to be more logical and you have to do your taxes, or you want to calm down your nervous system, and those start to question. So we've gone from Mike's— the start of his career where he has to prove that an altered state of consciousness is real, it's a real thing, and it's actually good for you, to like really advanced applied psychology. That's— I mean, that's a 50-year journey, but that's really cool as well. And, you know, the threat— I don't think we've gone anywhere really, with the exception of the complexity stuff with the bigger ideas in his work. The stuff on evolution is unsolved. There's the next level up. I agree with Maslow and Mike on work because I tend to think of business as this is capitalism itself in a sense, is just a system of cooperation. It's how we figured out how to cooperate at scale. Totally flawed, totally broken in a million different directions, but it's the the best solution we have as human beings to how do we cooperate at scale. And we do it through these things called businesses. And, but, you know, under the hood, it's just people working together. Right. And I think what is interesting is the next level up, Mike, we're starting to see how flow works inside of companies, but how does it, what does it look like at the next level up of society? You know, which is questions that he poked at in his book, The Evolving Self. Which is his bigger look at flow in society. And you and I had a conversation earlier this morning about flow in the White House and do dictators get more flow than freely elected presidents and those kinds of questions. And do you want— should the presidency be a high-flow job, for example? Those kinds of really strange questions. I don't think we've gone anywhere with because we haven't figured out how to cooperate at that scale. You know what I mean? There's too many components that are not quite right to answer, but I think those questions, we're going to start to maybe be able to answer some of those. I think those are really— those get to the next level up of stuff that I've been very, very dubious of, like the whole question of cultural architecture and can you shape the the world, things like that. And I've said for a while, I think that's crap. I think it's a complex system. And like, it doesn't work like that. You can't steer. But Mike really thought, I think, you could steer in a way that— it's not that I disagree with it, but like, I think he was a little more optimistic than I was on that, on this particular one. And one way or another, figuring out if he's right or wrong hasn't been done yet. And I that is going to happen and all the like upper possibility space of human development stuff that is just getting now poked at. And even positive psychology, right? Like what does the field of positive psychology look like 50, 60, 70, 80, 100 years, right? When there's actually 100, we've got essentially 100 years of psychological data to fix broken, right? What happens when we have 100 years of psychological data about, you know, how to turn ordinary people into Superwoman and Superman? What does that look like? Or super gender-neutral term that I don't know, but we can— apologies for not knowing the super gender-neutral term here. Those questions haven't quite been answered yet at all. And then there's really, speaking of gender, there's really simple questions, right? Like, that Mike started to poke at. He asked really brave questions that are hard to ask today. Do poor kids have more flow than rich kids? Do white kids have more flow than Black kids? Do— like, those kinds of questions he was asking very early on. Like, these are hard questions that are worth— like, that we are talking about today, and he was doing research on 20, 30 years ago and getting answers that we can look at, and at least as the reference points and things like that. But he, you know, he certainly figured out that flow crosses all lines and all gender lines. But like, there's neat questions about, wow, there are really subtle differences in the brains of all, all the genders as they're formed. And do those influence how we get into peak performance, how we think about peak performance, maybe how we define peak performance? And what can we learn downstream from that? You know, some of this stuff is, you know, even just our more recent conceptions of gender and how flow works with it. This is new stuff, right, in society. And I don't think we've even begun to tap that. He poked at it. He poked at a lot of these questions. So I think, you know, we'll get firmer answers over the next 30, 40 years there. And I think that's— it's going to be interesting. I'm excited to learn about it. That's all.

Same, same. Final question, Steven, is for people who are listening and want to read more of Csikszentmihalyi's work who have maybe read Flow. I would say like 90% of people have just read Flow.

And I think my problem with it is that Flow is my least favorite book of his. I mean, it was the one he wrote for the most popular audience, the widest audience, but it literally, of all his books, it's my least favorite. I think Creativity, in terms of books for popular audiences, I think Creativity is my personal favorite. I always thought Good Business was a better flow primer than Flow itself.

Yeah, I think so too. And Good Business is really interesting with the case studies. It's actually very concise as well.

It's very concise. I agree with that. But personally, I'm in love with Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology. First textbook, mostly because if you're interested in his thinking, his thinking was so vast. Like I think I said in that, the obituary I wrote for him, that he painted the whole sky. His thinking was so vast. And if you get into Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology, there's so much that went into that and so much that is really sort fundamental and neat. I was looking at this, the index today, my notes on that book just to prep for this conversation. And one of the things I was thinking about is the first thing I circled in the book is— and this is really early on in his work— is the tight link between autonomy and attention, which is foundational to how you want to do flow work. And, you know, it was there really early on. Or here's something else. I think Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, his very first book, holds up remarkably well. And what's interesting about it is I spent a lot of time as a researcher thinking about questions from the history of science. What did somebody learn first, second, third, fourth? And how did this thing evolve? Most of Mike's conception of flow grew out of the challenge-skill balance. That's what they noticed first. And the Four Quadrant Model of Flow, boredom, anxiety, flow, that would produce the flow channel. That was sort of like that showed up early along with the immediate feedback piece. That was in the data long before there was a term flow. This was back when it was still autotelic experience that he was studying and not yet flow. And the other thing that shows up really early in the data is the merger of action and awareness. What's interesting about that is I think if we were trying to do this research from scratch now, we would have difficulty coming up with a term like the merger of action awareness. But that was very— he was doing this work in the '70s, right after the '60s, right after we've sort of like been poking at weird questions of consciousness and altered consciousness in a new way. And so there was a language that hadn't existed 10 years prior that was still getting formed. And that's where the merger of action awareness comes from. But it's a very precise description of something that is phenomenologically complicated, hard to get at. And I find it interesting just from a history of science perspective, like, wow, this is how you would come up with an idea as huge as flow. Remember, like, he came in building off of Maslow's peak experiences, right? Like, you got to remember where the guy started with this stuff and what started showing up in his research, right? How you come up with flow before flow exists is really neat to me. So like, I think Beyond Boredom and Anxiety is cool from that perspective, and not a lot of people read it, especially because it's called Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. I also think, by the way, it's worth pointing out that boredom is a huge, important topic in human experience and in psychology, and it's not one we talk about very often. It's interesting, there have not been very many books in psychology written about boredom. It's one of those kind of foundational topics that is in all of our lives one way or another, and very few thinkers have really gone at it. He went at it. I like Boredom and Anxiety. Also, it's short, it's 200 words long, and it's fairly straightforward. I think it holds up remarkably well. I think Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology, especially if you really want to think more deeply about this stuff, I think it's wonderful. And I think he's a marvelously readable academic writer, unlike a lot of textbooks. His textbooks are pretty fun. Yeah, they're academic, but they're pretty damn fun. I tend to read them like page-turners. Thrillers, but I'm a little bizarre. But I read a lot of textbooks and I think his are spectacular compared to almost everybody else's. And creativity. Those would be the 3 that I would start with. Not start with, but those would be the 3 that I would read outside of. And if you're more like, you just want the practical stuff and the— Good Business is, as you pointed out, awesome.

The full title for folks for creativity is Creativity, Flow, and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. So folks can pick that up as well. Anything else you want to mention, Steve, before we close out here?

Yeah, I want to send my condolences to his family and everybody who knew him. He clearly changed my life, changed the world. I think I speak for every— the collective has ever trained, you know, he changed, touched a lot of— a ton of lives. I always sort of say that like my measure of a human being is do you make the world a better place or not? And this guy made the world so much better for so, so, so many people. On that front, in terms of improving the quality of our lives, it's hard to think— you know what I mean? There aren't that many people who have had that much of an impact on that many people. And I might be biased from my flow perspective, but I really feel that way. I'll miss him.

And the final thing I'll add for folks is there's a few nice memorial articles that people can check out as well that are just concise and give a nice—

Oh, is Chris— Chris wrote a beautiful one.

Yep. Yep. Exactly. There's a few that were written by his family that we'll make sure to link. And then there's a really good breakdown from Claremont Graduate University, which is where he was when he passed. And it's called Passings: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Father of Flow. And then the New York Times had a brief piece as well called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Father of Flow, Dies at 87. 7, which are worth checking out. And we'll have those linked in the, in the show notes as well.

You had a great run.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you all, folks, for listening, and stay tuned for more episodes. If what you've heard on Flow Research Collective Radio has been helpful, please consider doing us a solid and leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening to this. Reviews help us connect to a wider audience so we can get these peak performance principles out to more people.