015 • How to find joy in existence

What if I told you that you could learn to enjoy life’s journey - challenges, setbacks and all?

I’m going to talk all about the book that I mentioned in the first issue of ‘Four from Fundamentalised’, my midweek content curation email.

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

This book is all about how one can learn to enter a state of flow, becoming so engrossed in the task at hand that you forget the rest of the world.

Nothing exists except your actions in the present moment.

After dedicating your psychic energy (what Csikszentmihalyi calls attention) towards achieving and maintaining flow, you’re drained. But you emerge from the activity fulfilled.

You’ve given order to chaos in your small corner of the world and have strengthened your sense of self because of it.

So how does one go about achieving flow?

There are a few different elements that identify the majority of flow-inducing activities and situations…

• A chance of task completion

• The ability to concentrate on the task

• The task has clear goals

• The task provides immediate feedback

• ‘Deep, effortless involvement’ that removes awareness of outside execution

• Control over one’s actions

• Loss of self-concern

• Alteration of the sense of duration

Normally flow is characterised by a certain few activities, by a certain few people. Professional athletes are a good example. They have to be in flow to perform at their best.

However, you can find flow in anything if you bring enough of these above elements to the activity, creating enough structure in chaos for you to become enveloped in achieving it.

In the book, there was a superb story about a multi-national group of intellectuals stuck in a Hungarian prison that stood out to me whilst reading…

They didn’t have anything to do in their cells, but they found a way to communicate by scraping words into a film of soap spread over their shoe soles.

After this, they went about developing a pastime…

They agreed on a set poem and all went about creating their own translations of it. After this was complete, they shared each other’s translations and decided upon a winner. Then they chose another poem and repeated the process.

This whilst communicating everything through messages carved into soap on the bottom of their shoes.

Remarkable.

These inmates had built parameters to achieve flow, leading to contentment despite their dire situation inside the prison.

This is how you can make the most of your life, no matter the situation. Material gain goes out the window, along with any other external motivator and you execute tasks in the moment because it brings a deep connection with happiness and fulfilment.

Paradoxically, if you can reach flow in what you’re doing, you’re more likely to succeed in gaining what you’re striving for compared to worrying about it all the time.

If you’re in flow when working on your business, the quality of work you produce is going to be better.

If you’re in flow when you’re speaking to people you’re both going to gain more from the interaction, creating better relationships.

Pursue flow. Enjoy the journey that life takes you on.