What, he wondered, do people feel when they are most happy? What is their state of mind? Why do certain activities bring enjoyment and others do not?

It was worth doing-indeed, it was done-simply for the sake of doing it. Whether or not a finished painting produced significant extrinsic rewards-money, praise, fame, even a sense of achievement-the act of creating was intrinsically rewarding. After witnessing this process again and again, he realized that it was the activity itself-the work of painting-that so enthralled his subjects and not, as he had expected, the anticipation of its outcome. The researcher was an immigrant of Hungarian descent named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “CHICK-sent-me-high-ee”). Curiously, once a painting was finished, this highly focused state quickly dissipated and the artists simply set aside the very thing they had labored so hard to create. Immersed in their work and oblivious to outside obligations, the passage of time, and even their own hunger and fatigue, the artists seemed to be seized in a kind of trance. What he was most struck by was their intense and total involvement as they struggled to bring their vision to life on canvas. In the course of his research on the creative process, he had spent hundreds of hours observing artists at work and interviewing them about the nature of their experience. In 1963, a young doctoral student in psychology at the University of Chicago noticed a most intriguing phenomenon. “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” -Walter Pater

The flow experience