Engleski A - 2024./25. probna - reading 4.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, co-founder of positive psychology

and leading expert on

happiness and wellbeing through something he dubbed 'flow state'.

Although the meaning of the phrase he coined back in 1990

now seem a bit murky, then it made a lot of sense once you found out about its background.

After surviving the horrors of World War II, Csikszentmihalyi embarked

a career in psychology and became one of the first happiness psychologists to do the actual groundwork and find out what makes us fulfilled, creative, and productive.

His target subjects were artists, musicians, and athletes, since he wanted to find out first-hand what made them reach their highest levels of achievement and how attaining their goals made them feel. As it turns out, reaching maximum performance is

linked to being in a state when one's work simply flows out without overthinking and additional effort.

This means that when we do

which arouses our interest and we are adept at, we find such activities enjoyable and are more likely to excel at doing them.

There are,

some prerequisites to attaining flow.

One of the most important ones is the source of motivation. It can come from within, in which case it is called intrinsic, but it can also be extrinsic, meaning it comes from outside. Extrinsic motivation is very short-lived,

is why extrinsic motivators such as school marks or monetary compensation do not make us happy in the long run. Unlike extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation is doing something because we love doing it, making this motivation more likely to make us flow.