Below I’ve listed some key ideas and notes (along my thoughts and conclusions at the end) from Flow - The Psychology of Optimal Experience, a book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:
- So how can we reach this elusive goal [happiness] that cannot be attained by a direct route? My studies of hte past quarter-century have convinced me that there is a way. It is a circuitous path that begins with achieving control over the contents of our consciousness. (pg 2)
- Yet we have all experience times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happense, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long charished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like. (pg 3)
- It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable. (pg 7)
- How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interpret everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe. (pg 9)
- Though the evidence suggests that most people are caught up on this frustrating treadmill of rising expectations, many individuals have found ways to escape it. These are people who regardless of their material conditions, have been able to improve the quality of their lives, who are satisfied, and who have a way of making those around them also a bit more happy… …Such individuals lead vigorous lives, are open to a variety of experiences, keep on learning until the day they die, and have strong ties and commitments to other people and to the environment in which they live… Perhaps their greatest strength is that they are in control of their lives. (pg 10)
- …after each success it becomes clearer that money, power, status, and possessions do not, by themselves, necessarily add one iota to the quality of life. (pg 13)
There’s so much great content in this book. This particular passage highlights something I’ve slowly observed as I’ve entered and exited various kinds of societal systems ( schools, family, friend groups, athletic teams, etc.):
Caught in the treadmill of social controls, that person keeps reaching for a prize that always dissolves in his hands. IN a complex society, many powerful groups are involved in socializing, sometimes to seemingly contradictory goals. On the one hand, official institutions like schools, churches, and banks try to turns us into responsible citizens willing to work hard and save. ON the other hand, we are constantly cajoled by merchants, manufacturers, and advertisers to spend our earnings on products that will produce the most profits for them. And, finally, the underground system of forbidden pleasures run by gamblers, pimps, and drug dealers, which is dialectically linked to the official institutions, promises its own rewards of easy dissipation–provided we pay. The messages are very different, but their outcome is essentially the same: they make us dependent on a social system that exploits our energies for its own purposes.
There is no question that to survive, and especially to survive in a complex society, it is necessary to work for external goals and to postpone immediate gratifications. But a person does not have to be turned into a puppet jerked about by social controls. The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one’s own power. This is not to say that we should abandon every goal endorsed by society; rather, it means that, in addition to or instead of the goals others use to bribe us with, we develop a set of our own.
Most entrepreneurial disruptions to economic and social systems occur because someone or something from outside a system makes a change that those within a given system cannot understand. There is an apparent corollation between entrepreneurial success and independence from economic and societal systems. Many aspiring entrepreneurs that I know understand this point.
But there is another closely related point that many aspiring entrepreneurs do not understand. Once a change is made, that change must fit back into the system. You built a cool widget — but will the masses actually use it? Because if you think your widget is the coolest thing on earth, but no one else does, you don’t have a business.
Entrepreneurs break the system in order to fix it, and often times they do it unintentionally.
s ago, offered last week to show me the progress he and his partners have made on 
Sumit and his team put together all of the equipment themselves, with the help of some other brewers and electricians to make sure everything was properly designed. The place is already very impressive, and there’s still a couple weeks worth of aesthetic work to finish before opening.
