Flow

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent forty years studying the moments when people feel most alive.

He studied surgeons, chess players, rock climbers, assembly-line workers, musicians, writers, and athletes, across six continents, interviewing thousands of people about the moments in their lives when they felt most fully themselves.

And everywhere he looked, he found the same thing: The moments of greatest human satisfaction do not occur during rest. They do not occur during leisure. They occur during intense, voluntary engagement with something challenging that engages our minds and drives us to create.

He called the state "flow," the condition in which challenge and skill are matched, attention is fully absorbed, self-consciousness drops away, time distorts, and the person operates at the outer edge of their capability. Flow is the reason the rock climber returns to the cliff. The reason the chess player forgets to eat. The reason the programmer loses an entire Saturday to a problem that no one is