Ever since I came across Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's concept of Flow it has stayed with me as a simple framework and beacon for finding joy, creativity, and total involvement with life.  

"What I 'discovered' was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us come to being happy."

When researching happiness Csikszentmihalyi found that be they climbers, ballet dancers, chess players, or gardeners, people gave surprisingly similar descriptions to how they felt at their peak experience while performing an activity.

When in flow people are wholly focused on the present moment, they experience a strong sense of control, they lose their self-consciousness and their ego, their experience of time changes so that time can fly by or a moment can seem to slow down, and the joy of performing the activity becomes an end in itself.

Flow has a fairly simple set of conditions which I find myself using as a little mental checklist:

When climbing, a prototypical flow activity, it's clear that you are trying to get to the top, you can immediately see if you are making progress and whether an action progressed you or not, and it's wise to pick a wall that is difficult but not impossible, for you to enjoy it. No wonder climbing can be so addictive.

By contrast, it was evident to me that none of these were present when studying for my PhD.

I also like flow because it reminds me that peak happiness is unlikely to be experienced by sitting around watching the TV.

The quote is from, Flow, the psychology of happiness, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who also taught me that any name can work to do great work.

Flow

Intuitively, we can relate to this: as we get closer to completing a goal we can feel more motivation to complete it. Getting close to the last piece of a puzzle, the last clue of a murder mystery or escape room, the final chapter of your book (perhaps), the final kilometre of a marathon, or as you find you need just one more stamp to get a free coffee, being so close to our goal can give us a motivation lift to get to the end. It has a name:  the goal-gradient effect*.

In the example in the sketch, Oleg Urminksy and coauthors found that as people approached the final stamp towards a free coffee they were more likely to pick up the rate of buying coffees. And when issued with the new card, the coffee buying rate went back down again. They also found that it wasn't so much the absolute 'distance' from a goal, but the perception of distance. So, people who started out on a 12 stamp card with 2 stamps already complete tended to complete the card faster than the people who had a 10 stamp card starting empty even though it was the same number of stamps to the goal.

Read more in Katy Milkman and Kassie Brabaw's Scientific American article, Why Feeling Close to the Finish Line Makes You Push Harder.

Katy Milkman also educated me about the fresh start effect.

*The goal-gradient effect is also known as the goal-gradient hypothesis

The goal-gradient effect

I hadn’t given much thought to hope, beyond it being a nice feeling to have, until I heard of CR Snyder’s cognitive model for hope which shed a new light on it for me. He proposed a model of hope where (paraphrasing) an individual may be hopeful if they have:

Goals they desire. If you don’t or can’t picture any future state you’d like then you won’t have a lot of hope.

Pathways. You need to see some ways that you may make step-by-step progress towards a goal.

Willpower or agency. You need to be motivated and believe that you have the ability to succeed at your goal.

With all of these you can imagine feeling hopeful. Without any one of them and you probably won’t so much.

The mountain is the Ogre, a wholly impossible looking peak scaled by Doug Scott and others for which I would have had zero hope to climb (no pathways, no willpower) and yet they remarkably did.

HT once again to Brené Brown in Dare to Lead.

Sketchplanations tagged with goals