This week, Life Training Online is reviewing Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle discovered that more than anything else, men and women just want to be happy. If Aristotle would look into our present day and age he might think that by now we would have discovered how one creates happiness. Yet with all our technological advances and personal wealth, we might even be less happy than people were in Aristotle’s day. Sure we’re more secure, and providing for one’s needs on a day-to-day basis is clearly not the struggle as back in his day, but happiness still tends to elude us.
In his national bestseller Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that happiness is not attained through any external condition that may come through ease of living or material possessions, but instead through what he refers to as “optimal experience” — an internal, controllable state that is not left to chance.
Revealing more than two decades of research on the psychology of optimal experience, Mihaly reveals how we can create these “flow” experiences ourselves, thereby improving the quality of our lives.
Is this just another short-term quick-fix solution to creating happiness in our lives or some psycho-babble that stuffs our brains with a bunch of unapplicable facts and statistics, or does Mihaly really have something to offer here? Let’s find out this week as we dive into this book…
Flow is the sixteenth of fifty-two books in Life Training – Online’s series 52 Personal Development Books in 52 Weeks.
