Author
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The psychologist who named flow, measured it with pagers, and argued that a life is the sum of what it attended to.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was born in 1934 in Fiume, then Italy, to a Hungarian family, emigrated to the United States as a young man and spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, later at Claremont Graduate University.
His experience sampling method, paging people at random moments to report what they were doing and how they felt, produced the research behind Flow, published in 1990, which named the state of full absorption and set out its conditions. Later books applied it to creativity, work and everyday life, and he became, with Martin Seligman, a founder of positive psychology.
He died in 2021. The word he gave to a universal experience is now used by athletes, musicians, programmers and teachers who have never read the book.
The signature
Csikszentmihalyi writes as a scientist with a philosophical spine: data from thousands of pager reports, then a claim about what a good life is. His signature is the diagram of challenge against skill and the insistence that attention, not circumstance, is what a life is made of.