This book appeals to individuals who want to learn about different actions to pursue in order to have a more enjoyable life.

Summary

Preface

  • This book summarizes, for a general audience, decades of research on the positive aspects of human experience, joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life I call flow.
  • This book does not have insider tips. A joyful life is an individual creation, not a copy.
  • This book presents general principles and concrete examples of how these principles are used.

Chapter 1: Happiness Revisited

  • Happiness must be prepared for, cultivated and defended privately by each person.
  • Flow - so involved in an activity that nothing else matters. The activity itself is rewarding.
  • In our lifetime we exert little influence over the forces that interfere with our well-being.
  • Individuals must become independent on their social environment to avoid being exploited.
  • The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls it to live in the moment.

Chapter 2: The Anatomy of Consciousness

  • Time is limited. What do you care about most? What should you spend your finite attention on?
  • Consciousness has circular causality. Attention shapes the self, and is in turn shaped by it.
  • Events occur. How we interpret them will either lead to psychic entropy or optimal experience.
  • The self should be integrated socially and differentiated individually in order to be balanced.

Chapter 3: Enjoyment and the Quality of life

  • Relying on external events for happiness is brittle since you only control internal experience.
  • A sign of enjoyment is when we fondly reflect on an experience which grew our self.
  • Studies show enjoyment has eight major components. See chapter for details.
  • The key element of an optimal experience is it is an end in itself aka intrinsically rewarding.
  • Flow is not fundamentally good. It has the potential to improve life but it can be harmful.

Chapter 4: The Conditions of Flow

  • Activities conducive to flow and designed to make optimal experience easier to achieve:
    • Have rules that require the learning of skills.
    • Set up goals.
    • Provide feedback.
    • Make control possible.
    • Make the activity distinct as possible.
  • Channeling of attention to a limited set of goals allows effortless action.
  • How parents interact with a child will have a lasting effect on how that child grows up.
  • The family context promoting optimal experience has five characteristics:
    • Clarity
    • Centering
    • Choice
    • Commitment
    • Challenge
  • People who have a strongly directed purpose that is not self-seeking helps flow.

Chapter 5: The Body in Flow

  • Muscles and brain are equally involved when physical activity leads to flow.
  • Physical activities have dimensions or layers to enjoy the experience at a higher level.
  • Life is diminished when people restrain themselves from fear.
  • Professionals and amateurs are both able to find delight in what the body can do.

Chapter 6: The Flow of Thought

  • Entropy is the normal state of consciousness. Attention wavers unless a person orders his mind.
  • Avoid this entropy through habits that provide control over mental processes of the individual.
  • In certain disciplines, a person can eventually develop from a consumer to a producer.
  • Intrinsically motivated education develops a personally meaningful sense of one’s experience.

Chapter 7: Work as Flow

  • Work is universal yet varied. It largely influences one’s overall living as enjoyable or not.
  • Autotelic people can repurpose work into an opportunity for expressing freedom and creativity.
  • Another option for everyone is to can change jobs until its conditions are conducive to flow.
  • Investing attention in a task against our will makes us feel we are wasting psychic energy.
  • Like everything else, work and leisure can be appropriated for our needs.

Chapter 8: Enjoying Solitude and Other People

  • How we manage relationships makes an enormous difference to our happiness.
  • Acquire the habit of finding challenges that bring out hidden potentials for growth.
  • Family is typically our most important social environment. Family can take different forms.
  • It is in the context of intimate friendships that the most intense experiences occur.

Chapter 9: Cheating Chaos

  • Tragic events can provide clarity by presenting clear goals and reducing choices.
  • No trait is more useful than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.
  • Sooner or later everyone will have to confront events that contradict his goals.
  • The peak of coping skills is when no external disappointment can undermine who someone is.
  • The autotelic self transforms potentially entropic experience into flow.

Chapter 10: The Making of Meaning

  • It is possible to give meaning to one’s entire life by working towards a difficult enough goal.
  • Meaning usually emerges to an individual in different stages. Stages seem like different games.
  • Action and reflection should ideally complement and support each other.
  • Typically, the life goal benefits more than one person. It may altruistically benefit mankind.
  • Meaning can be found from the past by recalling historical figures, role models, books, etc.