“More than anything else, the self represents the hierarchy of goals that we have built up, bit by bit, over the years.”

A personal injury lawyer attends a speech opening a new modern art sculpture in Chicago. While most of the audience dozes, he appears to follow the speech with rapt attention, his lips moving rapidly. When a companion asks him why after the speech, he admits to calculating the total personal injury claims that will arise from children climbing the statue. Is this lawyer lucky, able to transform everything he sees into something relevant to his own life and skills and so enjoy it? Or unlucky, deprived of the opportunity to grow by focusing only on what he already knows (and also somewhat morbid)?

I started Flow with some trepidation. The concept of flow is impressively widely referenced, but I worried that trying to stretch a simple idea into a full book might be trying to make money from it without adding value. Flow, by the way, is the happiness and energy we get when are absorbed in activities that match our skills to difficulty (see above graph). To be truly happy, by this logic, we need lifelong learning to keep upping the difficulty of our activities: passively watching TV cannot bring happiness. Whether what we do is history, philosophy, mountain climbing, or welding, we can find flow in it if we are careful to set goals, watch for feedback, and immerse ourselves in it.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, as the book focuses on what lessons the concept of flow can give us for how to optimally experience life. Most of that, of course, is still fairly obvious (try to get flow in your own activities!), but the author has some excellent off the cuff remarks. He argues, for example, that one of the reasons young people struggle today is that they no longer have challenges or responsibilities commensurate with their abilities: unable to reach flow through schoolwork, they turn to alternate sources of enjoyment, like delinquency or drugs. He worries that the change in professions from hunting/gathering to farming to industrial has seen a steady decline in the simplicity of finding flow in one’s work, as feedback and goals become abstract and delayed in time (Shop Class as Soulcraft would agree). Similarly, I’m not sure many of us have a ready answer as to whether the personal injury lawyer is lucky or not.

The book is by no means life changing, and a lot of the content is available in other places (I’m looking at you, Marcus Aurelius). Still, it was quick and more engaging than I had expected, and though simple we can probably all use more structure in how we think about finding meaning and pleasure in our work and our leisure.

You can pick up a copy here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just subscribe to the Subtle Illumination email list and work on feeling flow while reading!