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

weekends Jim was stranded in foreign territory where he knew nobody. He spent his free time on the phone, trying to make connections with his friends. Or he listened to tapes that he felt echoed the solitude gnawing inside him. But the worst thing, Jim felt, was that his parents were constantly battling for his loyalty. They kept making snide remarks about each other, trying to make Jim feel guilty if he showed any interest or love toward one in the presence of the other. “Help!” he scribbled in his diary a few days before his attempted suicide. “I don’t want to hate my Mom, I don’t want to hate my Dad. I wish they stopped doing this to me.”
    Luckily that evening Jim’s sister noticed the empty bottle of aspirin and called her mother, and Jim ended up in the hospital, where his stomach was pumped and he was set back on his feet in a few days. Thousands of kids his age are not that fortunate.
    The flat tire that threw Julio into a temporary panic and the divorce that almost killed Jim don’t act directly as physical causes producing a physical effect—as, for instance, one billiard ball hitting another and making it carom in a predictable direction. The outside event appears in consciousness purely as information, without necessarily having a positive or negative value attached to it. It is the self that interprets that raw information in the context of its own interests, and determines whether it is harmful or not. For instance, if Julio had had more money or some credit, his problem would have been perfectly innocuous. If in the past he had invested more psychic energy in making friends on the job, the flat tire would not have created panic, because he could have always asked one of his co-workers to give him a ride for a few days. And if he had had a stronger sense of self-confidence, the temporary setback would not have affected him as much because he would have trusted his ability to overcome it eventually. Similarly, if Jim had been more independent, the divorce would not have affected him as deeply. But at his age his goals must have still been bound up too closely with those of his mother and father, so that the split between them also split his sense of self. Had he had closer friends or a longer record of goals successfully achieved, his self would have had the strength to maintain its integrity. He was lucky that after the breakdown his parents realized the predicament and sought help for themselves and their son, reestablishing a stable enough relationship with Jim to allow him to go on with the task of building a sturdy self.
    Every piece of information we process gets evaluated for its bearing on the self. Does it threaten our goals, does it support them, or is it neutral? News of the fall of the stock market will upset the banker, but it might reinforce the sense of self of the political activist. A new piece of information will either create disorder in consciousness, by getting us all worked up to face the threat, or it will reinforce our goals, thereby freeing up psychic energy.

ORDER IN CONSCIOUSNESS: FLOW
    The opposite state from the condition of psychic entropy is optimal experience. When the information that keeps coming into awareness is congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly. There is no need to worry, no reason to question one’s adequacy. But whenever one does stop to think about oneself, the evidence is encouraging: “You are doing all right.” The positive feedback strengthens the self, and more attention is freed to deal with the outer and the inner environment.
    Another one of our respondents, a worker named Rico Medellin, gets this feeling quite often on his job. He works in the same factory as Julio, a little further up on the assembly line. The task he has to perform on each unit that passes in front of his station should take forty-three seconds to perform—the same exact operation almost six hundred times in a working day. Most people would grow tired of