Remembering Csikszentmihalyi 2: Mark Csikszentmihalyi Remembering His Father, The Influence He Had & How Csikszentmihalyi Practiced What He Preached | Flow Research Collective Radio

Nothing was drudgery. There was always a way to make a game out of something, to make it a challenge, even if it was a kind of boring activity, that you don't ever accept things. And I think this is a hallmark of how he approached things. If there was something that was going to be a boring thing to do, he would add parameters to it to make it more challenging. When I was a kid, he would call it making a game out of something. But then as I grew up, I realized that what he's doing by making a game is he's adding certain rules to it to increase the complexity of the activity, to make it more challenging.

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 Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is an 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, it 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.

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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, Ryan Dorris here with the Flow Research Collective. And this is the second part in a really special 3-part series that we're doing here on Flow Research Collective Radio in honor of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who very sadly passed recently and who we here at the Flow Research Collective are forever indebted to for his incredible work and his incredible life. And we wanted to create this series to really honor Csikszentmihalyi's legacy, to remember him, and to highlight some of the underappreciated and underemphasized aspects of his work, and also to highlight aspects of his personal life that people may not be as aware of. So this is the second episode in this series. The first was with Stephen Kotler. This one is with Mark Csikszentmihalyi, who is Csikszentmihalyi's son. And it was incredibly, incredibly kind and gracious of Mark to join us for this series in honor of his father, especially given that this was recorded less than 2 weeks after the very sad passing of Mihai. And Mark is an incredible mind and an academic in his own right. Mark is a professor at Berkeley. Currently, he has a PhD in Asian languages from Stanford and an AB in East Asian languages and civilizations from Harvard. And in this episode, we had the absolute pleasure of talking about Mark's thoughts as Mihai's son on the impact of Csikszentmihalyi's work and on some really incredible aspects of Csikszentmihalyi's life, such as growing up in Europe just after the war, the way that he would interact and behave at home and as a father. And we also got to dive into some of Mark's work, and we talked about what he's currently working on, how he was influenced by Csikszentmihalyi in his path, into academia and into research, and then some fun things that he's currently researching, such as the difference between Taoism and Taoism, which was a real blast as well, and some of the other philosophies from ancient Asia that are most relevant to current life according to Mark. So, you're going to really enjoy this episode. It was a special one. And I want to just thank Mark again for joining us in this tender period after Mihaly's passing. It was incredibly gracious and kind of him. You're going to really enjoy it as you'll experience Mark's an incredible person in his own right. All righty. All the best. Enjoy this episode. Mark Csikszentmihalyi, it's so great to have you here on Flow Research Collective Radio. Thank you so much for being generous with your time and joining us. It's a real honor.

Thank you, Ryan. It's nice to be here.

Great to have you here. So the first question I wanted to ask is really on the biographical note with Mihai. And I would love for you to share with folks one example of a memory that you have with Mihai that you have been reflecting on a lot in the last few weeks.

Yeah. I mean, I think that going through photo albums with my mother in the days after he passed away, brought me back to kind of my childhood, and I remember the first house on the campus of Lake Forest College that we lived in. It was kind of faculty housing, and in the basement, that's where he would paint. He had an easel set up. Some of my earliest memories are just of kind of him painting and the smell of turpentine and the oil paints that he would use with his easel there, and he often would work off of photos, but just being with him and kind of bouncing around on a little trampoline and things like that. I just, that for me was kind of a memory that I realized that I hadn't really thought about for a long time, but then some of the photos have kind of triggered that. And I feel that I've been to a couple of funerals lately of academics where it's funny, the last two funerals I've been to of academics, one of their kids have gotten up and said something like, I'm really jealous of his students because they got the time that he didn't give us. And I was kind of shocked at that. And I realized, you know, being a successful academic actually is a major time commitment. You know, if you have a research program, there are times that you really come home very late. But I never felt that way about my father. I think my brother will say the same thing that He was someone who always had time and always had good counsel. And for me, it kind of goes back to that time just hanging out while he painted, and I would just ask him questions and he would think about it and give his kind of trademark wry, kind of funny answers. But beneath that humor, he was trying to get me to think about things. It was just I just kind of wanted to mention that just because, you know, those other funerals I've been to, he really was someone who also was kind of very invested in family too.

Are there any particular memories you have where he provoked certain thoughts that were very novel within you?

Oh, that's a good question. I, I, um, I guess I remember One time, when he was a kind of young faculty member at the University of Chicago, he would often take a bunch of graduate students over to a place called Jimmy's, which was down from his office. I think it was on Ellis Avenue, and over on 55th was Jimmy's, and it was kind of a bar where they would order kind of greasy food and there was this time I remember I was 8, and I just sat and listened to them talk about life, but also a lot about their research. You know, this was in the early days of the experience sampling method, you know, this method he had for kind of paging, using pagers to develop a kind of cross-sectional picture of ordinary experience. And so they're talking about, you know, the correlations that they're finding with this data. I remember following it for the first time and afterwards we went back to his office and afterwards I said, "It's funny, I really feel like for the first time I have some idea what's going on when adults are talking." He turned to me and he said, "Eight is a time when," and he started talking about what happens when you're 8 and I'm thinking, oh my gosh, you mean I'm really, Life is like that, that you kind of develop on a plan, kind of like there's these moments biologically when you— and I'm at 8 and he knows what's happening, and maybe I can think about what's going to happen at 10. And, you know, and it was just, it was, it was funny. I mean, so that kind of idea that psychology really can trigger a kind of deeper understanding of one's own life, that was a real big moment for me. And I ended up not going into psychology, but really believing in kind of the possibility of good empirical data to really tell you about yourself in a way. And that's something he fundamentally believed in.

There's something incredibly amusing and endearing about him having a conscious awareness of being 8. 8 is when this happens, when you're 8. Right.

And so he was describing to me what I was going through and why I had that feeling that suddenly I was understanding what adults did. Yeah.

That's really interesting. You also mentioned that he always had time or it felt like he always had time. And I'm curious what you attribute that to, especially given just the magnitude and volume of work and accomplishment. That he achieved, how that sense of always had time showed up and what you can attribute it to.

I think if you look at his career, and maybe my brother might, he's 4 years younger than I am. I left home between Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, which was his pathbreaking academic book that introduced his ideas, and Flow, which was in 1990. And I imagine it might have been different after Flow, you know, when, when he ended up just broadening his audience and his engagement with the non-academic world, and then eventually moving and starting the Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont Graduate University and Probably at that time, I might have felt differently, but I was already gone at that time. So when he was an academic psychologist at the University of Chicago, first at Lake Forest College and then University of Chicago, he wasn't Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi the superstar. And so yeah, who knows what would have happened if that had happened earlier. But it was a funny change. It was, I think, Daniel Goleman who I know you've had actually on your podcast, wrote an article about him in Newsweek at one point based on the type of work he was doing that was in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety. And, and I think that was kind of the first step in him reaching a wider audience, and it resulted in kind of the book contracts and things like that that were non, you know, outside of the academic publishers. So that was a kind of trajectory, but most of Most of my memories of being at home with him were in the pre-Flow times.

Was it a big deal for you, for him, for the family with the launch of Flow? Because Flow at this point, I mean, it's sort of mind-blowing that it came out in 1990, given how it's still referenced and talked about so often. I see on Instagram all the time, people having screenshots of it on their story, listening to it on Audible. I don't know how many copies it sold at this point, but it's one hell of a Perennial Seller. And I'm curious if with the launch of that, you remember it as being a big deal of, "Oh my God, Dad's famous now," or what that looked like, or if it was a more gradual build?

Thomas Gayner: I distinctly remember when Beyond Burnout and Anxiety came out, we had a kind of book party in the apartment in Hyde Park on South Hyde Park Boulevard and 53rd. They lived in a condo on the third floor of a house, or we lived there, and there was a party and everyone came, and I remember making a little kind of painted facsimile of the book, and it was a really big deal, but it was a small-scale kind of University of Chicago big deal as opposed to Flow. But we never had any marker of Flow, so I think at that time, you know, I think that when the Newsweek piece came out, that was kind of a big deal. I remember that. There was always a feeling that something really special was going on in, you know, from the '70s with Beyond Boredom, that what they were doing in that kind of lab at the University of Chicago, it was attracting really good graduate students. They were coming up with all these really interesting results. He was doing these books with different graduate students who worked on the project on different aspects of ordinary experience, like Bob Kubey, they did a book on television, you know, using the data on what people's experience was like watching television. And so there were a lot of instances of that. And so it already seemed like it was kind of taking off, that they were carving out an area, you know, that people really hadn't done before. I think with flow, it was kind of more of a process. My perception was it was more of a process of people kind of outside getting wind of what was already going on. So for me, I remember the launch of Beyond Boredom, but I don't remember the launch of Flow.

You've had a really impressive career in your own right, and you're obviously— you're at Berkeley right now. You've got a PhD in Asian languages from Stanford, I believe. Was Mihaly's academic path a big influence on you going that direction, or was that totally unrelated?

I'd say it's very related, but it's more the example of the person, kind of, and what he believed in. I mean, I think, you know, you have to think about the fact that he grew up in post-war Italy. I mean, I don't know that much about that period. I mean, I've seen The Bicycle Thief, but from what I understand, it was kind of, you know, after the war, there was this feeling that everything, you know, had fallen apart. And I think he really ended up looking at psychology as he was growing up in kind of post-war Rome. After the end of the war, the family ended up in, in Rome, where my grandfather, who had been a diplomat, ended up as a— opening up a restaurant there, which my father worked at. And he worked at a number of other jobs, but I think he really saw psychology as having the potential to try to answer some questions about, you know, human beings that might solve the issue of the crazy behavior that he had seen, you know, as he grew up. And he really did believe in the power of both psychology, but also science in general to make our lives better. So I think that value, you know, the value of having kind of a place to study and research and try to understand how human beings work is kind of the value that both my brother and I, you know, growing up, we were like, we're never gonna be professors. We wanna do something different. You know, we don't wanna be in an ivory tower, but then we both ended up now, you know, he's at Cornell and I'm at Berkeley, we're doing what he did. And it's partly just because we kind of bought into that idea, you know, that there's a lot of worth in kind of reflecting on what life is about and having a place, you know, where people do that. That's really a tradition that he believed in, and we kind of bought into that eventually.

It took a little while, but the rebellion teen years, I'm sure, and then it circled back around or something. Was there other elements of appeal in, you know, going down this path that you observed in terms of lifestyle, or even things like him coming back from work, you know, feeling invigorated by what he was thinking about and studying? You know, do you think there are other things that drove you and, and your brother to go this route as well?

Yeah, I mean, I just, as you know, spending— coming— my school was right near his office, so after, uh, school, a lot of times I would just come over and, you know, go through the piles of papers on his desk and hang out until he's ready to go home. And like those discussions at Jimmy's, there's something about the ability to talk about ideas, you know, and to really try and solve puzzles that it's a pretty good gig if you really find something where those puzzles are interesting to you, there's a flow dimension to it. And you're a podcaster. I mean, you talk about ideas all the time. So you understand what I'm talking about. I also like to go to baseball games, but if I had to choose, I would do the talking about ideas.

William Green Steven always talks about it as puzzle solving ultimately at base. And that is what is so compelling and flowy and autotelic about, I think, the idea space. Before we go back to Mihaly, Mark, I'd love to ask you actually a little bit about your your own journey and career. This bio might be slightly out of date, but in the one that I was reading, which is on the Berkeley site, it was saying that one of the current things you're doing is translating a set of Song Dynasty essays, which I thought was fascinating. You're also the editor of the Journal of Chinese Religions and a number of other really interesting books that people should definitely check out. I'd love if you could give a little bit of a breakdown on what your your body of research is, what you have been most excited about over the last decade, and what's currently exciting you within your domain.

I went to college knowing very little about China. I mean, my father always talked about China a fair amount. He had taken some courses with Hurley Creel, who was the kind of China expert at the University of Chicago when he was finishing his work there and actually had a research job with Creel at one point. So there was a fair amount about China in my, in my background, and also from my— a little bit from my, my father. And also both my parents immigrated from Eastern Europe, and I actually found growing up in Chicago that a lot of the Chinese American kids I had a lot in common with them because they were also kind of second generation, and so I had a lot of friends. And so I started taking some courses in college and eventually switched my major, I think my junior year, to East Asian Studies and ended up kind of forcing myself to learn Chinese and then some Japanese in graduate school because I was really— I mean, I felt like I knew a lot about European civilization. In the summers in high school, my dad would have me read all these books about medieval Europe and things that he thought I really should be— So I knew a lot about Europe, but then I started taking these classes on China and I thought, well, there are these questions, there are these fundamental questions that I've seen what the Euro-American answers are. And here I'm studying China and I see the same questions are coming up, but there's a completely— no, I wouldn't say different, but an alternative way of framing the answers that's really interesting. And I suddenly felt like culturally I had, you know, I'd been seeing things with one eye and now I had kind of two eyes. I had a perspective on these issues. And so I was really attracted to Chinese thought, like early Chinese religion and philosophy, just because they answered questions about, say, the good life in a way that was, I thought, kind of really provocatively different, like just slightly changing the terms of the questions. And so the answers ended up, I thought, providing a really valuable perspective on the answers with which I was familiar up till then.

What would be an example of that? That's a really interesting point.

So one of the stories that I've spent a lot of time on over the last few decades is from the Zhuangzi, which is an early Taoist work. And it's— there are a whole set of stories about skillfulness in that book, and it's probably, you know, 3rd, 2nd century BCE. But there are these exemplars, these extremely skillful people who are able to kind of lose themselves in activities and I remember in college when I was first starting to take this, I shared one of these stories with my father, which is the story of this butcher who carves an ox. And he starts off seeing the whole ox, but in time he kind of gets so good at it that he loses himself completely in the activity and he no longer sees the whole ox, but the knife just goes through. And we had these conversations about it because it struck me, I was like, you know, this is a lot like, you know, what your work is about. And we had these great conversations. And it's, it's, I wouldn't say it's an example of flow, but it's really interesting, the ways that it's asking a similar set of questions about, you know, what is good, about knowing how to do things. I mean, it's definitely describing a kind of knack, you know, that this guy develops, where he totally is channeled into the activity. So definitely flow, like overlapping with flow in a certain way. But the similarities and differences in the ways the story is framed and the discussion with the confusions that the story develops out of, right? There's this kind of confusion stories about whether you should kill an ox in order to consecrate ritual objects. And this is kind of a response to that story. So we'd have these discussions about this and then lo and behold, that ends up as a a thing in Flow where he not only took the translation, you know, talks about the translation that I provided him with, it turns out he went to the library, probably Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, found some other translations and actually kind of triangulated between those translations to really have what I thought some real insights into, you know, what the story was about and includes it in, I guess, was it in Flow? I'm trying to remember, in one of his books, he has a couple of pages on these skillfulness stories. So it's that kind of like the way that looking at similar problems in another culture, I know he, at least he found it a really interesting thing to introduce as a kind of comparative point.

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This was like a really weird thing that happened is my they 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, it allows somebody to self-identify 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 get portflow.com. It's a really interesting example of flow showing up across time, across cultures, where the butcher is getting lost in the activity itself. That's a great, great example. In your study of Chinese culture and religion, Is there anything that stands out most, whether it's a value or a characteristic or a societal policy that you think the West would most benefit from? And it doesn't need to be present in current China, but that you've seen through the years and the centuries of studying China and Chinese history.

Well, I guess here, I mean, not to draw another connection with my father's work, but there's a value in early Daoism that in Chinese is "chu zhu," which is knowing when you have enough. And it's talked about in the Laozi, one of the other, the other early Daoist classic, with the Zhuangzi. And there are a lot of really nice stories about it as kind of a value that, you know, effectively says, you know, there's a certain amount that people need, and you really have to know when you've gotten that amount. And it applies it to kind of political realms, personal realms, and things like that. And I've always felt like that was always very resonant to me because, you know, as you know, with the autotelic personality, the idea is that you don't depend on extrinsic rewards, you know, my father wrote about the— and I think especially in later in life, he was particularly concerned with the difference between a kind of eudaimonic approach where you're interested in your internal motivations versus a kind of more hedonistic approach where, you know, you're interested in external motivations from things like accumulation of wealth. And so I always felt like I kind of— that's one thing that I don't think is emphasized that much when people talk about early China, but both the Confucians and the Daoists in early China, in pre-Buddhist China, have this very strong kind of anti-materialist rhetoric. And then of course Buddhism comes and, you know, preaches renunciation and asceticism and things like that. So it's a real— I think it's a real strong resource within East Asian traditions that I think is not as— people don't pay as much attention to. And I think that's a message that was seen as an important type of self-discipline in the pre-modern world that I feel like kind of has been lost a little bit.

What was the word again for that?

Uh, zhi, knowing, and zu is sufficiency or enough, knowing when you're satisfied or something like that.

William Green It's funny. I mean, it reminds me of the positive psychology research around income thresholds and happiness where I think it's roughly $70,000 a year is when you see the big diminishing returns set in, in terms of wellbeing. So I think what's interesting there as well as a tie to Mihaly's work is that positive psychology, attempts to put empiricism behind values like that and really sort of formalize it, which is interesting. To hold on the East Asian studies point for a second, what would you say the biggest difference between Taoism and Confucianism is? And what is the biggest similarity between those two belief systems, ways of thinking?

That kind of question I could hijack this whole discussion for 10 minutes on. I mean, one of the things that, as a kind of someone who approaches these traditions kind of historically, I guess I want to first say that it's hard to talk about those two traditions without kind of over-essentializing them. That is, you know, those both develop over 2,000 years, and if you talk about that length of a tradition like Christianity and say, well, what's its core value? Well, it really changes over time and it kind of depends on which Christians you talk to. And I think that's largely the same. But I think for much of Chinese history, Confucianism becomes kind of allied with the state and it takes on somewhat different characteristics, stressing things like loyalty and filial piety. But if you go back to the very earliest period, before it's allied with the state, it has a picture of kind of personal self-cultivation, of kind of how to become a person who cultivates certain behaviors that are— I guess you could call them moral, but they're efficacious in different ways. They, you know, knowing how to conduct, relate to other people in a ritually correct way, knowing how to apply compassion when compassion is needed. So that tradition of self-cultivation at the very beginning of Confucianism is also, I think, also found at the beginning of Taoism, that need to kind of transform oneself and to develop certain dispositions that you might— some early thinkers will say that you're born with these dispositions, others will say, no, you're just born with desires, but you have to develop these dispositions from studying with a good teacher or from a good book. But that view of the human— of human life is ideally dedicated to a kind of spiritual or personal training. And that, you know, it's, it's never a question of just knowing the right thing to do and doing it. It's always a question of training yourself over time to develop these new dispositions that— and the actual dispositions are going to be different between Confucians and Daoists in the early period, but that picture of the human being as kind of a continuous work in progress that's always working on kind of developing oneself towards a set of ideal kind of behaviors, that's what I'd say they have in common.

It's a great breakdown, Mark. Thank you for that. To loop back for a moment then to Mihai's life, I'm curious what impact you think him being born in Rijeka in Croatia and then coming to the US has in terms of his success and then also potentially that secondary impact on you. You mentioned that the Chinese American kids, you had a lot of things in common with. So I'm curious what the impact for you and I think for Mihai was about coming to America and having that sort of transition.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's an interesting kind of constellation of questions there. So he was born in, in, in what was then called Fiume, which was part of Italy. And so his father was in the Hungarian consulate there representing Hungary in Italy. But as you say, it was, uh, now it's Croatia. It was a— and, and actually his mother was of Croatian background. And so It was just multicultural. It was a kind of polyglot place. He had a German nanny, and so actually, you know, he would say his first language was German, and then of course Hungarian, and then Italian. And then he went to this school in Rome once they moved there after the war, this classical gymnasium where he studied Latin and Greek. I mean, I think he knew by the end, some 13 languages or something like that. And so I think that that kind of understanding of being kind of truly an international person is part of the reason why he ended up being such a Renaissance man. I mean, he just was gregarious. He, you know, in his writings, you see all these references to the Greek thinkers that he read about, Torquato Tasso, the Roman school that he went to. And I feel like that idea that human beings are all kind of the same, and on some level that there's something physiologically similar about us, and that, you know, part of the European mistake that led to the war is reliance on kind of nationalism and the idea of these separate ethnic identities, you know. So that, I think, all kind of worked into this, this personality that was kind of interested in human beings rather than Italians or Hungarians or anything like that. I think that was a big part of it. You also asked about the influence on me. I feel like in college when people said, well, why are you taking Chinese? And I would say, well, my father knows 13 languages, but he doesn't know Chinese. So this is my way of—

That's funny. Getting them back.

Yeah.

So this second last question here, Marc, is from my interviews with a couple of Mihaly's grad students. One of the things that was really compelling was that they emphasized that his view and thinking on flow and creativity wasn't limited to academia and wasn't limited to the theoretical landscape. And that he would emphasize directly to them to do things like taking the class they're most interested in so that they'll get the highest access to flow, which will be a predictor of success and things like that. So I'm curious about your sense of how much his ideas on flow and creativity and meaning kind of made it outside of the walls of academia within his own life. And I know that he had some flow activities that he was committed to, but I'm curious what that looked like from your vantage point.

You know, it really— rock climbing and painting and some of those activities were always on his mind as he did his research. And, you know, his personal experience in those areas and also hiking. And, you know, he spent a lot of time in the Italian Boy Scouts, actually, because he was just, you know, his family had relocated to Rome, and they'd kind of been dislocated. He loved the outdoors and just doing, you know, from rock climbing, but also just hiking. And so I think that those are activities that he did as long as he could. Or soccer, I remember when I was a kid, he would always go out to the Point, which is this kind of spit of land that goes out into Lake Michigan, and there would be these Saturday soccer games. So I think he just was someone who sought it in his own life. And then even more, so many activities, and this is something I feel like it was, you know, Chris and I really, we learned that was extremely valuable for him is just nothing was drudgery. There was always a way to make a game out of something, to make it make it a challenge, even if it was a kind of boring activity, that you don't ever accept things. And I think this is a hallmark of how he approached things. If there was something that was going to be a boring thing to do, he would add parameters to it to make it more challenging, right? When I was a kid, he would call it making a game out of something. But then as I grew up, I realized that what he's doing by making a game is he's adding certain rules to it to increase the complexity of the activity, to make it more challenging. That's definitely a way that he had internalized those ideas into practice in everyday life. I think later on he did this work, you mentioned some of the students that he'd been working with who apply it to different activities. And talk about kind of specific flow strategies for flow in different activities. And then other people have taken that much further when they work with, you know, anything from sports to intellectual activities. But I think that, that very basic idea of not, not letting any activity become unchallenging, that's, that's something that, that he definitely had throughout his life.

I love that example. I mean, it sounds like he's taking the flow triggers that he researched and intentionally embedding them into certain activities to make them more conducive to flow.

Yeah. Well, and he hated boredom. He just couldn't, you know, like— but part of his sense of humor, I think, is that same thing where there are all these kind of pro forma conversations we have where we kind of have rehearsed lines. And I would always find that he would be making jokes, especially in those situations, because those exchanges can be rote, you know, they can be very boring. And so he would often, you know, he would always be looking for a kind of wry comment or, or something to kind of provoke discussion and say, even though we're doing this kind of formulaic call-and-response kind of interaction. I'm actually in here, I'm actually making a little joke to show you that this is— that's also a form of boredom he didn't like. And so humor, in a way, I think was— his sense of humor was also a little bit that making things more complex in a way that keep you from being bored by formulaic interactions.

That's a really great breakdown. And then the final question, which is a little bit broad, Mark, is just what would you like folks to most remember either about Mihaly himself or about his work that may apply to different individuals' own lives? Curious what that is.

Well, I mean, I think he really was very interested in The good life and how, how to live a life that was individually fulfilling and happy. And I feel like he was within psychology, he was kind of reacting to a set of approaches that were interested in making people more efficient, making people less difficult to deal with in society. And, you know, just, I think that while flow is, you know, can be abstracted and talked about as a strategy, I think that what I feel his books will still be useful for in 50 years are embedding that discussion of kind of flow in this broader, more philosophical question of the good life. Flow really took off and has its own life now, but I think where kind of it's really interesting is, or where his work still I find really interesting to read, is in the way that he's trying to relate it to questions about kind of how the individual deals with society and these bigger questions, because those were all on his mind too. When I say he's a Renaissance man, I mean he was a psychologist, but he was always kind of, uh, thinking in terms of kind of broader questions about those deeper sets of issues. And I— that's, that's where I think his enduring kind of legacy will be.

Well, thank you so much, Mark, for your time and generosity. And again, I just want to mention I'm so sorry for your loss as well at a personal level. So, well, thanks so much.

This has been a a nice chance to talk about him, which is actually very nice for me. So thanks, Ryan.

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