Free Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

relationship with his co-workers.
    Julio’s problem is simple, almost trivial, but it has been weighing heavily on his mind. One evening a few days earlier he noticed on arriving home from work that one of his tires was quite low. Next morning the rim of the wheel was almost touching the ground. Julio would not receive his paycheck till the end of the following week, and he was certain he would not have enough money until then to have the tire patched up, let alone buy a new one. Credit was something he had not yet learned to use. The factory was out in the suburbs, about twenty miles from where he lived, and he simply had to reach it by 8:00 A.M. The only solution Julio could think of was to drive gingerly to the service station in the morning, fill the tire with air, and then drive to work as quickly as possible. After work the tire was low again, so he inflated it at a gas station near the factory and drove home.
    On the morning in question, he had been doing this for three days, hoping the procedure would work until the next paycheck. But today, by the time he made it to the factory, he could hardly steer the car because the wheel with the bum tire was so flat. All through the day he worried: “Will I make it home tonight? How will I get to work tomorrow morning?” These questions kept intruding in his mind, disrupting concentration on his work and throwing a pall on his moods.
    Julio is a good example of what happens when the internal order of the self is disrupted. The basic pattern is always the same: some information that conflicts with an individual’s goals appears in consciousness. Depending on how central that goal is to the self and on how severe the threat to it is, some amount of attention will have to be mobilized to eliminate the danger, leaving less attention free to deal with other matters. For Julio, holding a job was a goal of very high priority. If he were to lose it, all his other goals would be compromised; therefore keeping it was essential to maintain the order of his self. The flat tire was jeopardizing the job, and consequently it absorbed a great deal of his psychic energy.
    Whenever information disrupts consciousness by threatening its goals we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy , a disorganization of the self that impairs its effectiveness. Prolonged experiences of this kind can weaken the self to the point that it is no longer able to invest attention and pursue its goals.
    Julio’s problem was relatively mild and transient. A more chronic example of psychic entropy is the case of Jim Harris, a greatly talented high school sophomore who was in one of our surveys. Alone at home on a Wednesday afternoon, he was standing in front of the mirror in the bedroom his parents used to share. On the box at his feet, a tape of the Grateful Dead was playing, as it had been almost without interruption for the past week. Jim was trying on one of his father’s favorite garments, a heavy green chamois shirt his father had worn whenever the two had gone camping together. Passing his hand over the warm fabric, Jim remembered the cozy feeling of being snuggled up to his dad in the smoky tent, while the loons were laughing across the lake. In his right hand, Jim was holding a pair of large sewing scissors. The sleeves were too long for him, and he was wondering if he dared to trim them. Dad would be furious…or would he even notice? A few hours later, Jim was lying in his bed. On the nightstand beside him was a bottle of aspirin, now empty, although there had been seventy tablets in it just a while before.
    Jim’s parents had separated a year earlier, and now they were getting a divorce. During the week while he was in school, Jim lived with his mother. Friday evenings he packed up to go and stay in his father’s new apartment in the suburbs. One of the problems with this arrangement was that he was never able to be with his friends: during the week they were all too busy, and on