Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning (33 page)

To do so is like trying to build up material culture from scratch in each generation. No one in his right mind would want to start reinventing the wheel, fire, electricity, and the million objects and processes that we now take for granted as part of the human environment. Instead we learn how to make these things by receiving ordered information from teachers, from books, from models, so as to benefit from the knowledge of the past and eventually surpass it. To discard the hard-won information on how to live accumulated by our ancestors, or to expect to discover a viable set of goals all by oneself, is misguided hubris. The chances of success are about as good as in trying to build an electron microscope without the tools and knowledge of physics.

People who as adults develop coherent life themes often recall that when they were very young, their parents told them stories and read from books. When told by a loving adult whom one trusts, fairy tales, biblical stories, heroic historical deeds, and poignant family events are often the first intimations of meaningful order a person gleans from the experience of the past. In contrast, we found in our studies that individuals who never focus on any goal, or accept one unquestioningly from the society around them, tend not to remember their parents having read or told stories to them as children. Saturday morning kiddie shows on television, with their pointless sensationalism, are unlikely to achieve the same purpose.

Whatever one’s background, there are still many opportunities later on in life to draw meaning from the past. Most people who discover complex life themes remember either an older person or a historical figure whom they greatly admired and who served as a model, or they recall having read a book that revealed new possibilities for action. For instance, a now famous social scientist, widely respected for his integrity, tells how when he was in his early teens he read
A Tale of Two Cities
, and was so impressed by the social and political chaos Dickens described—which echoed the turmoil his parents had experienced in Europe after World War I—that he decided then and there that he would spend his life trying to understand why people made life miserable for one another. Another young boy, reared in a harsh orphanage, thought to himself, after reading by chance a Horatio Alger story in which a similarly poor and lonely youth makes his way in life by dint of hard work and good luck, “If he could do it, why not me?” Today this person is a retired banker well known for his philanthropy. Others remember being changed forever by the rational order of the Platonic
Dialogues
or by the courageous acts of characters in a science fiction story.

At its best, literature contains ordered information about behavior, models of purpose, and examples of lives successfully patterned around meaningful goals. Many people confronted with the randomness of existence have drawn hope from the knowledge that others before them had faced similar problems, and had been able to prevail. And this is just literature; what about music, art, philosophy, and religion?

Occasionally I run a seminar for business managers on the topic of how to handle the midlife crisis. Many of these successful executives, having risen as far as they are likely to advance in their organizations, and often with their family and private lives in disarray, welcome the opportunity to spend some time thinking about what they want to do next. For years I have relied on the best theories and research results in developmental psychology for the lectures and discussions. I was reasonably content with how these seminars worked out, and the participants usually felt that they had learned something useful. But I was never quite satisfied that the material made enough sense.

Finally it occurred to me to try something more unusual. I would begin the seminar with a quick review of Dante’s
Divina Commedia
. After all, written over six hundred years ago, this was the earliest description I knew of a midlife crisis and its resolution. “In the middle of the journey of our life,” writes Dante in the first line of his enormously long and rich poem, “I found myself inside a dark forest, for the right way I had completely lost.” What happens afterward is a gripping and in many ways still relevant account of the difficulties to be encountered in middle age.

First of all, wandering in the dark forest, Dante realizes that three fierce beasts are stalking him, licking their chops in anticipation. They are a lion, a lynx, and a she-wolf—representing, among other things, ambition, lust, and greed. As for the contemporary protagonist of one of the bestsellers of 1988, the middle-aged New York bond trader in Tom Wolfe’s
Bonfire of the Vanities
, Dante’s nemesis turns out to be the desire for power, sex, and money. To avoid being destroyed by them, Dante tries to escape by climbing a hill. But the beasts keep drawing nearer, and in desperation Dante calls for divine help. His prayer is answered by an apparition: it is the ghost of Virgil, a poet who died more than a thousand years before Dante was born, but whose wise and majestic verse Dante admired so much that he thought of the poet as his mentor. Virgil tries to reassure Dante: The good news is that there is a way out of the dark forest. The bad news is that the way leads through hell. And through hell they slowly wend their way, witnessing as they go the sufferings of those who had never chosen a goal, and the even worse fate of those whose purpose in life had been to increase entropy—the so-called “sinners.”

I was rather concerned about how the harried business executives would take to this centuries-old parable. Chances were, I feared, that they would regard it as a waste of their precious time. I need not have worried. We never had as open and as serious a discussion of the pitfalls of midlife, and of the options for enriching the years that would follow, as we had after talking about the
Commedia
. Later, several participants told me privately that starting the seminar with Dante had been a great idea. His story focused the issues so clearly that it became much easier to think and to talk about them afterward.

Dante is an important model for another reason as well. Although his poem is informed by a deep religious ethic, it is very clear to anyone who reads it that Dante’s Christianity is not an
accepted
but a
discovered
belief. In other words, the religious life theme he created was made up of the best insights of Christianity combined with the best of Greek philosophy and Islamic wisdom that had filtered into Europe. At the same time, his Inferno is densely populated with popes, cardinals, and clerics suffering eternal damnation. Even his first guide, Virgil, is not a Christian saint but a heathen poet. Dante recognized that every system of spiritual order, when it becomes incorporated into a worldly structure like an organized church, begins to suffer the effects of entropy. So to extract meaning from a system of beliefs a person must first compare the information contained in it with his or her concrete experience, retain what makes sense, and then reject the rest.

These days we occasionally still meet people whose lives reveal an inner order based on the spiritual insights of the great religions of the past. Despite what we read every day about the amorality of the stock market, the corruption of defense contractors, and the lack of principles in politicians, examples to the contrary do exist. Thus there are also successful businessmen who spend some of their free time in hospitals keeping company with dying patients because they believe that reaching out to people who suffer is a necessary part of a meaningful life. And many people continue to derive strength and serenity from prayer, people for whom a personally meaningful belief system provides goals and rules for intense flow experiences.

But it seems clear that an increasing majority are not being helped by traditional religions and belief systems. Many are unable to separate the truth in the old doctrines from the distortions and degradations that time has added, and since they cannot accept error, they reject the truth as well. Others are so desperate for some order that they cling rigidly to whatever belief happens to be at hand—warts and all—and become fundamentalist Christians, or Muslims, or communists.

Is there any possibility that a new system of goals and means will arise to help give meaning to the lives of our children in the next century? Some people are confident that Christianity restored to its former glory will answer that need. Some still believe that communism will solve the problem of chaos in human experience and that its order will spread across the world. At present, neither of these outcomes seems likely.

If a new faith is to capture our imagination, it must be one that will account rationally for the things we know, the things we feel, the things we hope for, and the ones we dread. It must be a system of beliefs that will marshal our psychic energy toward meaningful goals, a system that provides rules for a way of life that can provide flow.

It is difficult to imagine that a system of beliefs such as this will not be based, at least to some degree, on what science has revealed about humanity and about the universe. Without such a foundation, our consciousness would remain split between faith and knowledge. But if science is to be of real help, it will have to transform itself. In addition to the various specialized disciplines aimed at describing and controlling isolated aspects of reality, it will have to develop an integrated interpretation of all that is known, and relate it to humankind and its destiny.

One way to accomplish this is through the concept of evolution. Everything that matters most to us—such questions as: Where did we come from? Where are we going? What powers shape our lives? What is good and bad? How are we related to one another, and to the rest of the universe? What are the consequences of our actions?—could be discussed in a systematic way in terms of what we now know about evolution and even more in terms of what we are going to know about it in the future.

The obvious critique of this scenario is that science in general, and the science of evolution in particular, deals with what
is
, not with what
ought to be
. Faiths and beliefs, on the other hand, are not limited by actuality; they deal with what is right, what is desirable. But one of the consequences of an evolutionary faith might be precisely a closer integration between the
is
and the
ought
. When we understand better why we are as we are, when we appreciate more fully the origins of instinctual drives, social controls, cultural expressions—all the elements that contribute to the formation of consciousness—it will become easier to direct our energies where they ought to go.

And the evolutionary perspective also points to a goal worthy of our energies. There seems to be no question about the fact that over the billions of years of activity on the earth, more and more complex life forms have made their appearance, culminating in the intricacies of the human nervous system. In turn, the cerebral cortex has evolved consciousness, which now envelops the earth as thoroughly as the atmosphere does. The reality of complexification is both an
is
and an
ought:
it has happened—given the conditions ruling the earth, it was bound to happen—but it might not continue unless we wish it to go on. The future of evolution is now in our hands.

In the past few thousand years—a mere split second in evolutionary time—humanity has achieved incredible advances in the
differentiation
of consciousness. We have developed a realization that mankind is separate from other forms of life. We have conceived of individual human beings as separate from one another. We have invented abstraction and analysis—the ability to separate dimensions of objects and processes from each other, such as the velocity of a falling object from its weight and its mass. It is this differentiation that has produced science, technology, and the unprecedented power of mankind to build up and to destroy its environment.

But complexity consists of
integration
as well as differentiation. The task of the next decades and centuries is to realize this under-developed component of the mind. Just as we have learned to separate ourselves from each other and from the environment, we now need to learn how to reunite ourselves with other entities around us without losing our hard-won individuality. The most promising faith for the future might be based on the realization that the entire universe is a system related by common laws and that it makes no sense to impose our dreams and desires on nature without taking them into account. Recognizing the limitations of human will, accepting a cooperative rather than a ruling role in the universe, we should feel the relief of the exile who is finally returning home. The problem of meaning will then be resolved as the individual’s purpose merges with the universal flow.

NOTES

CHAPTER 1

Happiness.
Aristotle’s views of happiness are most clearly developed in the
Nicomachean Ethics
, book 1, and book 9, chapters 9 and 10. Contemporary research on happiness by psychologists and other social scientists started relatively late, but has recently begun to catch up with this important topic in earnest. One of the first, and still very influential, works in this field has been Norman Bradburn’s
The Structure of Psychological Well-Being
(Bradburn 1969), which pointed out that happiness and unhappiness were independent of each other; in other words, just because a person is happy it does not mean he can’t also be unhappy at the same time. Dr. Ruut Veenhoven at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, has recently published a
Databook of Happiness
which summarizes 245 surveys conducted in 32 countries between 1911 and 1975 (Veenhoven 1984); a second volume is in preparation. The Archimedes Foundation of Toronto, Canada, has also set as its task the keeping track of investigations of human happiness and well-being; its first directory appeared in 1988.
The Psychology of Happiness
, by the Oxford social psychologist Michael Argyle, was published in 1987. Another comprehensive collection of ideas and research in this area is the volume by Strack, Argyle, & Schwartz (1990).

Undreamed-of material luxuries.
Good recent accounts of the conditions of everyday life in past centuries can be found in a series under the general editorship of Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, entitled
A History of Private Life
. The first volume,
From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
, edited by Paul Veyne, was published here in 1987. Another magisterial series on the same topic is Fernand Braudel’s
The Structures of Everyday Life
, whose first volume appeared in English in 1981. For the changes in home furnishings, see also Le Roy Ladurie (1979) and Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton (1981).

Flow.
My work on optimal experience began with my doctoral dissertation, which involved a study of how young artists went about creating a painting. Some of the results were reported in the book
The Creative Vision
(Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi 1976). Since then several dozen scholarly articles have appeared on the subject. The first book that described the flow experience directly was
Beyond Boredom and Anxiety
(Csikszentmihalyi 1975). The latest summary of the academic research on the flow experience was collected in the edited volume
Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness
(Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi 1988).

Experience Sampling Method.
I first used this technique in a study of adult workers in 1976; the first publication concerned a study of adolescents (Csikszentmihalyi, Larson, & Prescott 1977). Detailed descriptions of the method are available in Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1984, 1987).

Applications of the flow concept.
These are described in the first chapter of
Optimal Experience
(Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi 1988).

Goals.
The earliest explanations of human behavior, starting with Aristotle, assumed that actions were motivated by goals. Modern psychology, however, has shown that much of what people do can be explained more parsimoniously by simpler, often unconscious, causes. As a result, the importance of goals in directing behavior has been greatly discredited. Some exceptions include Alfred Adler (1956), who believed that people develop goal hierarchies that inform their decisions throughout life; and the American psychologists Gordon Allport (1955) and Abraham Maslow (1968), who believed that after more basic needs are satisfied, goals may begin to be effective in directing actions. Goals have also regained some credibility in cognitive psychology, where researchers such as Miller, Galanter, & Pribram (1960), Mandler (1975), Neisser (1976), and Emde (1980) have used the concept to explain decision-making sequences and the regulation of behavior. I do not claim that most people most of the time act the way they do because they are trying to achieve goals; but only that when they do so, they experience a sense of control which is absent when behavior is not motivated by consciously chosen goals (see Csikszentmihalyi 1989).

Chaos.
It might seem strange that a book which deals with optimal experience should be concerned with the chaos of the universe. The reason for this is that the value of life cannot be understood except against the background of its problems and dangers. Ever since the first known work of literature, the
Gilgamesh
, was written 35 centuries ago (Mason 1971), it has been customary to start with a review of the Fall before venturing to suggest ways to improve the human condition. Perhaps the best prototype is Dante’s
Divina Commedia
, where the reader first has to pass through the gates of Hell (“
per me si va nell’eterno dolore…
”) before he or she can contemplate a solution to the predicaments of life. In this context we are following these illustrious exemplars not because of a sense of tradition, but because it makes good sense psychologically.

Hierarchy of needs.
The best-known formulation of the relationship between “lower order” needs such as survival and safety and “higher” goals like self-actualization is the one by Abraham Maslow (1968, 1971).

Escalating expectations.
According to many authors, chronic dissatisfaction with the status quo is a feature of modernity. The quintessential modern man, Goethe’s Faust, was given power by the Devil on condition that he never be satisfied with what he has. A good recent treatment of this theme can be found in Berman (1982). It is more likely, however, that hankering for more than what one has is a fairly universal human trait, probably connected with the development of consciousness.

That happiness and satisfaction with life depend on how small a gap one perceives between what one wishes for and what one possesses, and that expectations tend to rise, have been often observed. For instance, in a poll conducted in 1987 and reported in the
Chicago Tribune
(Sept. 24, sect. 1, p. 3), Americans making more than $100,000 a year (who constitute 2 percent of the population) believe that to live in comfort they would need $88,000 a year; those who earn less think $30,000 would be sufficient. The more affluent also said that they would need a quarter-million to fulfill their dreams, while the price tag on the average American’s dream was only one-fifth that sum.

Of the scholars who have been studying the quality of life, many have reported similar findings: e.g., Campbell, Converse, & Rodgers (1976), Davis (1959), Lewin et al. (1944 [1962]), Martin (1981), Michalos (1985), and Williams (1975). These approaches, however, tend to focus on the
extrinsic
conditions of happiness, such as health, financial affluence, and so on. The approach of this book is concerned instead with happiness that results from a person’s actions.

Controlling one’s life.
The effort to achieve self-control is one of the oldest goals of human psychology. In a lucid summary of several hundred writings of different intellectual traditions aimed at increasing self-control (e.g., Yoga, various philosophies, psychoanalysis, personality psychology, self-help), Klausner (1965) found that the objects to which control was directed could be summarized in four categories: (1) control of performance or behavior; (2) control of underlying physiological drives; (3) control of intellectual functions, i.e., thinking; (4) control of emotions, i.e., feeling.

Culture as defense
against chaos. See, for instance, Nelson’s (1965) summary on this point. Interesting treatments of the positive integrative effects of culture are Ruth Benedict’s concept of “synergy” (Maslow & Honigmann 1970), and Laszlo’s (1970) general systems perspective. (See also Redfield 1942; von Bertalanffy 1960, 1968; and Polanyi 1968, 1969.) For an example of how meaning is created by individuals in a cultural context, see Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton (1981).

Cultures believe themselves to be at the center of the universe.
Ethnocentrism tends to be one of the basic tenets of every culture; see for instance LeVine & Campbell (1972), Csikszentmihalyi (1973).

Ontological anxiety.
The experts on ontological (or existential) anxiety have been, at least in the past few centuries, the poets, the painters, the playwrights, and other sundry artists. Among philosophers one must mention Kierkegaard (1944, 1954), Heidegger (1962), Sartre (1956), and Jaspers (1923, 1955); among psychiatrists, Sullivan (1953) and Laing (1960, 1961).

Meaning.
An experience is
meaningful
when it is related positively to a person’s goals. Life has meaning when we have a purpose that justifies our strivings, and when experience is ordered. To achieve this order in experience it is often necessary to posit some supernatural force, or providential plan, without which life might make no sense. See also Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton (1981). The problem of meaning will be discussed in more depth in chapter 10.

Religion and the loss of meaning.
That religion still helps as a shield against chaos is shown by several studies that report higher satisfaction with life among adults who report themselves as being religious (Bee 1987, p. 373). But there have been several claims made recently to the effect that the cultural values which sustained our society are no longer as effective as they once were; for example, see Daniel Bell (1976) on the decline of capitalistic values, and Robert Bellah (1975) on the decline of religion. At the same time, it is clear that even the so-called “Age of Faith” in Europe, during the entire Middle Ages, was beset by doubt and confusion. For the spiritual turmoil of those times see the excellent accounts of Johann Huizinga (1954) and Le Roy Ladurie (1979).

Trends in social pathology.
For the statistics on energy use, see
Statistical Abstracts of the U.S.
(U.S. Dept. of Commerce 1985, p. 199); for those on poverty, see ibid., p. 457. Violent crime trends are drawn from the
U.S. Dept. of Justice’s Uniform Crime Reports
(July 25, 1987, p. 41), the
Statistical Abstracts
(1985, p. 166), and the Commerce Department’s
U.S. Social Indicators
(1980, pp. 235, 241). Venereal disease statistics are from the
Statistical Abstracts of the U.S.
(1985, p. 115); for divorce see ibid., p. 88.

Mental health
figures are from the
U.S. Social Indicators
, p. 93. The budget figures are from the
U.S. Statistical Abstracts
(1985, p. 332).

For information on the number of
adolescents living in two-parent families
see Brandwein (1977), Cooper (1970), Glick (1979), and Weitzman (1978). For crime statistics, see
U.S. Statistical Abstracts
(1985, p. 189).

Adolescent pathology.
For suicide and homicide among teenagers, see
Vital Statistics of the United States
, 1985 (U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 1988), table 8.5. Changes in SAT scores are reported in the
U.S. Statistical Abstracts
(1985, p. 147). According to reliable estimates, teenage suicide increased by about 300 percent between 1950 and 1980, with the heaviest losses among the privileged cohorts of white, middle-class, male adolescents (
Social Indicators
, 1981). The same patterns are shown for crime, homicide, illegitimate pregnancies, venereal diseases, and psychosomatic complaints (Wynne 1978, Yankelovich 1981). By 1980 one out of ten high school seniors was using psychotropic drugs daily (Johnston, Bachman, & O’Malley 1981). To qualify this picture of gloom, it should be mentioned that in most cultures, as far as it is possible to ascertain, adolescents have been seen as troublesome (Fox 1977). “The great internal turmoil and external disorder of adolescence are universal and only moderately affected by cultural determinants” (Kiell 1969, p. 9). According to Offer, Ostrov, & Howard (1981), only about 20 percent of contemporary U.S. adolescents are to be considered “troubled,” but even this conservative estimate represents, of course, quite a huge number of young people.

Socialization.
The necessity to postpone gratification in order to function in society was discussed by Freud in
Civilization and Its Discontents
(1930). Brown (1959) provided a spirited rebuttal of Freud’s arguments. For standard works on socialization see Clausen (1968) and Zigler & Child (1973). A recent extended study of socialization in adolescence can be found in Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1984).

Social controls.
Some good examples of how social controls are enforced by creating chemical dependencies are the case of the Spaniards’ introduction of rum and brandy into Central America (Braudel 1981, pp. 248–49); the use of whiskey in the expropriation of American Indian territories; and the Chinese Opium Wars. Herbert Marcuse (1955, 1964) has discussed extensively how dominant social groups coopt sexuality and pornography to enforce social controls. As Aristotle said long ago, “The study of pleasure and pain belongs to the province of the political philosopher” (
Nicomachean Ethics
, book 7, chapter 11).

Genes and personal advantage.
The argument that genes were programmed for their own benefit, and not to make life better for their carriers, was first formulated in a coherent way by Dawkins (1976), although the saying “The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg,” which encapsulates Dawkins’s idea very well, is much older. For another view of this matter, see Csikszentmihalyi & Massimini (1985) and Csikszentmihalyi (1988).

Paths of liberation.
The history of this quest is so rich and long that it is impossible to do it justice in a short space. For the
mystical
traditions see Behanan (1937) and Wood (1954) on Yoga, and Scholem (1969) on Jewish mysticism. In
philosophy
one might single out Hadas (1960) on Greek humanism; Arnold (1911) and Murray (1940) on the Stoics; and MacVannel (1896) on Hegel. For more contemporary philosophers see Tillich (1952) and Sartre (1956). A recent reinterpretation of Aristotle’s notion of virtue that is very similar in some ways to the concept of autotelic activity, or flow, presented here can be found in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre (1984). In
history
Croce (1962), Toynbee (1934), and Berdyaev (1952) stand out; in
sociology
Marx (1844 [1956]), Durkheim (1897, 1912), Sorokin (1956, 1967), and Gouldner (1968); in
psychology
Angyal (1941, 1965), Maslow (1968, 1970), and Rogers (1951); in
anthropology
see Benedict (1934), Mead (1964), and Geertz (1973). This is just an idiosyncratic selection among a huge array of possible choices.