Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning (39 page)

The conclusion that
drugs are not consciousness-expanding
is based on interviews with about 200 artists whom our team has been studying for the past 25 years (see Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi 1965, 1976; Csikszentmihalyi, Getzels, & Kahn 1984). Although artists have a tendency to glorify drug-induced experiences, I have yet to hear of a creative work (or at least one that the artists themselves thought was a
good
one) produced entirely under the influence of drugs.

Coleridge and
Kubla Khan
.
One of the most often-quoted examples of how drugs help creativity is Coleridge’s claim that he wrote
Kubla Khan
in a flash of inspiration caused by the ingestion of laudanum—or opium. But Schneider (1953) has cast serious doubts on this story, presenting documentary evidence that Coleridge wrote several drafts of the poem, and made up the opium story to appeal to the romantic tastes of early-19th-century readers. Presumably if he had lived now, he would have done the same.

Our current research with
talented teenagers
shows that many fail to develop their skills not because they have cognitive deficits, but because they cannot stand being alone, and are left behind by their peers who can tolerate the difficult learning and practicing required to perfect a talent (for a first report on this topic, see Nakamura 1988 and Robinson 1986). In the latter study, equally talented high school mathematics students were divided into those who by objective and subjective criteria were still involved in math by senior year, and those who were not. It was found that the involved students spent 15 percent of their waking time outside of school studying, 6 percent in structured leisure activities (e.g., playing a musical instrument, doing sports), and 14 percent in unstructured activities, like hanging out with buddies and socializing. For those no longer involved, the respective percentages were 5 percent, 2 percent, and 26 percent. Since each percentage point corresponds to about one hour spent in the activity each week, the figures mean that students still involved in math spend one hour a week more studying than in unstructured socializing, whereas those no longer involved spend 21 more hours a week socializing than studying. When a teenager becomes exclusively dependent on the company of peers, there is little chance to develop a complex skill.

The description of
Dorothy
’s life-style is based on personal experience.

For
Susan Butcher,
see
The New Yorker
(Oct. 5, 1987, pp. 34–35).

Kinship groups.
One of the most eloquent essays on the civilizing effects of the family on humankind is Lévi-Strauss’s
Les Structures élementaires de la Parenté
(1947 [1969]). The
sociobiological
claim was first articulated by Hamilton (1964), Trivers (1972), Alexander (1974), and E. O. Wilson (1975). For later contributions to this topic see Sahlins (1976), Alexander (1979), Lumdsen & Wilson (1983), and Boyd & Richerson (1985). The attachment literature is now very large; the classics in the area include work by John Bowlby (1969) and Mary D. Ainsworth et al. (1978).

Primogeniture.
For the effects of inheritance laws in Europe see Habakuk (1955); in France, see Pitts (1964); in Austria and Germany, see Mitterauer & Sieder (1983).

Monogamy.
According to some sociobiologists, however, monogamy does have an absolute advantage over other mating combinations. If we assume that siblings help each other more in proportion to the genes they share, then children of monogamous marriages will help each other more because they share more genes than children whose parents are not the same. Thus under selective pressures, children of monogamous couples will get more help, and thus might survive more easily, and reproduce proportionately more, than children of polygamous couples growing up in a similar environment. Moving from the biological to the cultural level of explanation, it seems clear that, other things being equal, stable monogamous couples are able to provide better psychological as well as financial resources for their children. Just from a strictly economic point of view, serial monogamy (or the frequency of divorce) seems to be an inefficient way of redistributing income and property. For the plight of one-parent families, economic and otherwise, see, for instance, Hetherington (1979), McLanahan (1988), and Tessman (1978).

Cistothorus palustris
.
The marital practices of the marsh wren are described in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(1985, vol. 14, p. 701).

Cicero
’s quote about freedom was printed in my seventh-grade school assignment diary, but despite several attempts I have been unable to find its source. I sincerely hope it is not apocryphal.

Family complexity.
Following the lead of Pagels’s (1988) definition of complexity, we could also say that a family whose interactions are more difficult to describe, and whose future interactions are more difficult to predict on the basis of present knowledge, is more complex than a family that is easier to describe and to predict. Such a measure would presumably give very similar results to a measure of complexity based on differentiation and integration.

Suburban teenagers.
The anthropologist Jules Henry (1965) gave a profoundly insightful description of what growing up in suburban communities entailed a generation ago. More recently Schwartz (1987) compared six Midwestern communities in terms of what opportunities they gave adolescents for experiencing freedom and self-respect, and found striking differences from one community to the next, which suggests that sweeping generalizations about what is involved in being a teenager in our society might not be very accurate.

If parents talked more.
In one study of adolescents at a very good suburban high school, we found that although teenagers spent 12.7 percent of their waking time with parents, time alone with fathers amounted to an average of only five minutes a day, half of which was spent watching television together (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson 1984, p. 73). It is difficult to imagine how any deep communication of values can occur in such short periods. It might be true that it is “quality time” that counts, but after a certain point quantity has a bearing on quality.

Teenage pregnancy.
The United States now leads other developed countries in teenage pregnancies, abortions, and childbearing. For every 1,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 19, 96 get pregnant in the United States each year. Next is France, with 43 pregnancies per 1,000 (Mall 1985). The number of out-of-wedlock births to teenagers has doubled between 1960 and 1980 (Schiamberg 1988, p. 718). At present rates, it has been estimated that 40 percent of today’s 14-year-old girls will become pregnant at least once before they turn 20 (Wallis et al. 1985).

Families that provide flow.
The characteristics of families that facilitate the development of autotelic personalities in children are being studied by Rathunde (1988).

Positive moods with friends.
When teenagers are with friends, they report very significantly higher levels of happiness, self-esteem, strength, and motivation—but lower levels of concentration and cognitive efficiency—than they report in any other social context (Csikszentmihalyi & Larson 1984). The same pattern is true for older people studied with the ESM. For example, married adults and retired couples report more intense positive moods when they are with friends than when they are with their spouses or children—or anyone else.

Drinking patterns.
The different patterns of public drinking, and the resultant patterns of social interaction that they make possible, have been described in Csikszentmihalyi (1968).

Instrumental versus expressive.
The distinction between these two functions was introduced into the sociological literature by Talcott Parsons (1942). For a contemporary application, see Schwartz (1987), who argues that one of the main problems with teenagers is that there are too few opportunities for expressive behavior within the boundaries of society, and thus they have to resort to deviance.

Politics.
Hannah Arendt (1958) defines politics as the mode of interaction that allows individuals to get objective feedback about their strengths and weaknesses. In a political situation, where a person is given a chance to argue a point of view and to convince peers of its worth, the hidden capabilities of an individual are allowed to surface. But this kind of impartial feedback can only occur in a “public realm” where each person is willing to listen and evaluate others on their merit. According to Arendt the public realm is the best medium for personal growth, creativity, and self-revelation.

Irrationality of economic approaches.
Max Weber (1930 [1958]), in his famous essay on the Protestant ethic, argued that the apparent rationality of economic calculation was deceptive. Hard work, savings, investment, the entire science of production and consumption are justified because of the belief that they make life happier. But, Weber claimed, after this science was perfected it developed its own goals, based on the logic of production and consumption and not that of human happiness. At that point economic behavior ceases to be rational, because it is no longer guided by the goal that originally justified it. Weber’s argument applies to many other activities that after developing clear goals and rules become autonomous from their original purposes, and begin to be pursued for intrinsic reasons—because they are fun to do. This was recognized by Weber himself, who complained that capitalism, which originated as a religious vocation, had in time become a mere “sport” for entrepreneurs—and an “iron cage” for everyone else. See also Csikszentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton (1981, chapter 9).

CHAPTER 9

This entire section to p. 198
draws heavily on interview transcripts made available to me by Professor Massimini. I translated the Italian answers into English.

The quote by Franz
Alexander
was cited in Siegel (1986, p. 1). Norman Cousins’s strategy for controlling his illness is described in his
Anatomy of an Illness
(1979).

“When a man knows…”
is from Johnson’s
Letters to Boswell
, Sept. 19, 1777.

Stress.
Hans Selye, who began studying the physiology of stress in 1934, defined it as the generalized result, whether mental or physical, of any demand on the body (1956 [1978]). An important breakthrough in the investigation of psychological effects of such demands was the development of a scale that attempts to measure their severity (Holmes & Rahe 1967). On this scale the highest stress is caused by “Death of spouse” with a value of 100; “Marriage” has a value of 50, and “Christmas” a value of 12. In other words, the impact of four Christmases is almost equal to the stress of getting married. It is to be noted that both negative and positive events can cause stress, since they both present “demands” one must adapt to.

Supports.
Of the various resources that mitigate the effects of stressful events, social supports, or social networks, have been studied the most extensively (Lieberman et al. 1979). Family and friends often provide material help, emotional support, and needed information (Schaefer, Coyne, & Lazarus 1981). But even interest in other people seems to alleviate stress: “Those who have a concern for other people and concerns beyond the self have fewer stressful experiences, and stress has less effect on anxiety, depression, and hostility; they make more active attempts to cope with their problems” (Crandall 1984, p. 172).

Coping styles.
The experience of stress is mediated by a person’s coping style. The same event might have positive or negative psychological outcomes, depending on the person’s inner resources.
Hardiness
is a term coined by Salvatore Maddi and Suzanne Kobasa to describe the tendency of certain people to respond to threats by transforming them into manageable challenges. The three main components of hardiness are commitment to one’s goals, a sense of being in control, and enjoyment of challenges (Kobasa, Maddi, & Kahn 1982). A similar term is Vaillant’s (1977) concept of “mature defense,” Lazarus’s concept of “coping” (Lazarus & Folkman 1984), and the concept of “personality strength” measured in German surveys by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1983, 1985). All of these coping styles—hardiness, mature defenses, and transformational coping—share many characteristics with the autotelic personality trait described in this volume.

Courage.
That people consider courage the foremost reason for admiring others emerged from the data of my three-generation family study when Bert Lyons analyzed it for his Ph.D. dissertation (1988).

Dissipative structures.
For the meaning of this term in the natural sciences see Prigogine (1980).

Transformational skills in adolescence.
One longitudinal study conducted with the ESM (Freeman, Larson, & Csikszentmihalyi 1986) suggests that older teenagers have just as many negative experiences with family, with friends, and alone as younger teenagers do, but that they interpret them more leniently—that is, the conflicts that at 13 years of age seemed tragic at 17 are seen to be perfectly manageable.

Unselfconscious self-assurance.
For the development of this concept see Logan (1985, 1988).

“Each individual crystal…”
This quote from Chouinard was reported in Robinson (1969, p. 6).

“My cockpit is small…”
is from Lindbergh (1953, pp. 227–28).

Discovering new goals.
That a complex self emerges out of various experiences in the world, just as a creative painting emerges out of the interaction between the artist and his materials, has been argued in Csikszentmihalyi (1985a) and Csikszentmihalyi & Beattie (1979).

Artists’ discovery.
The process of problem finding, or discovery, in art is described in a variety of papers starting with Csikszentmihalyi (1965) and ending with Csikszentmihalyi & Getzels (1989). See also Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi (1976). Very briefly, our findings show that art students who in 1964 painted in the manner described here (i.e., who approached the canvas without a clearly worked out image of the finished painting) were 18 years later significantly more successful—by the standards of the artistic community—than their peers who worked out the finished product in their minds beforehand. Other characteristics, such as technical competence, did not differentiate the two groups.