(From Handbook For Humans)
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks very eloquently about the experience of flow. Flow is related to enjoyment—which is not the same as simple pleasures such as eating dessert. Enjoyment or flow occurs when we are deeply focused on some process, so that time seems almost to disappear. It occurs when we’re engaged in an activity where the challenges we face, and the skills we have to meet those challenges, are evenly balanced.
If the activity we’re engaged in is more challenging than our talent or skill can deal with, we feel anxiety. Conversely, if our skills are much larger than the challenges, we feel boredom. The enjoyment of flow occurs in a zone where skill and challenge are matched.
This can occur in activities that vary as widely as a tennis or chess game, listening to music, caring for children, the pursuit of a scientific theory, skiing down or climbing up a mountain, reading, writing, leading a team, working with a computer, using a machine tool, taking photographs, and so on. Any of these activities and others can create flow for us or not, depending on our individual makeup.
What activities have in common, when flow occurs, is that they engage our deep concentration, and do so in a way that combines control and satisfaction. People describe it as being “lost in the flow” or “out of time” or “totally involved,” a combination of relaxation and attentive focusing.
We’ve all experienced this at times. Those moments when we’re challenged but up to the challenge, when we’re so engaged in what we’re doing that only the moment exists. The moments of true enjoyment.
The key to fulfillment in the dimension of mind is to identify what kinds of activity produce this effect in us, and then to discover a life-theme related to that activity. We don’t simply want a job or an occupation, but rather, something that we can learn and grow with, something we’ll find satisfying if we spend a lifetime with it, something where our talents and enjoyments can be harnessed to make a contribution to ourselves and others. This is the concept of right livelihood.
But what about money?
Michael Phillips in 1974 published seven laws of money, and I especially like the first one. He formulated it in this way:
Do it!
Money will come when
you are doing the right thing.
That is, our proper focus is on our passion. If we find our true passion, we will find an almost unlimited number of ways to make money at it. That’s been my experience. When we are doing the right thing, the way our livelihood sometimes comes through can seem to defy the laws of logic. When we’re that devoted to something, it’s as if the universe itself takes notice.
That doesn’t mean it will necessarily be easy. It doesn’t mean that we just get up in the morning and do whatever we feel like. It doesn’t mean that we daydream about being something and wait for the universe to magically support us.
Everybody I know who has followed their passion has had to make extreme sacrifices at one time or another, and often frequently. Sometimes they’ve had to take extra jobs, or put various things off. Sometimes they’ve had to take two steps back in order to take three forward. Sometimes they’ve had to “work while others play,” in Churchill’s pithy phrase. Sometimes they’ve only been able to work at their passion ten minutes a day. But they’ve continued.
For that’s the interesting thing about following your passion: You can’t fail. Because the very following itself is your success. Even if worldly success or money doesn’t come at first, even if it doesn’t come for a long time or ever, even if you have to make sacrifices—and you will, count on it—the very following of your passion is success and fulfillment in itself.
© 1997 by James Sloman
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