The author of the bestselling Flow (more than 125,000 copies sold) offers an intelligent, inspiring guide to life in the future.
Customer Reviews
The Everyman’s Guide: Concrete Ways to a More Complex Self:
The book is a loving, enthusiastic attempt to replace religious faith (a cultural meme) with faith in evolution, and it is not without its dazzling existential insights, wherever one chooses to place one’s faith. Readers interested in defining happiness will find much to digest. The author’s sensibilities, however, are a dinosaur-a heavy irony in a book devoted to evolutionary psychology. (Three-martini lunches? Aren’t those extinct?) An example of the rhetoric I object to follows: “But now it is possible for a drunk officer in some missile silo to press the wrong button, and then natural selection might give the prize to the cockroach.” A cliché, an exteme one. I wouldn’t make fun of the author if I didn’t think his metaphorical errors weren’t related to logical fallacies in the book.
The largest irony, I find, is that in a book that purports to glorify complexity, the author is ruthlessly reductive; for example, he leaves little room for the possibility of evolution coexisting with a Creator, which would arguably be a more complex vision. I think the author’s vision of “flow” could be more complex in this book, as well; I think flow varies in type and degree in the way that individual temperament and intelligence types vary, and I would argue that entropy might be a necessary companion to flow. For example, I derive peak flow experiences from processing complex ideas, but generally an interim gestation period exists in which I experience a share of entropy, boredom, conflict, irritation, all of which serve to heighten the joy I experience when deriving the payoff. Then again, I am a particularly complex and abstract personality, and my mind is boggled when I read that some folks experience flow when driving the car or gardening. But more power to them. (Meyers-Briggs type indication could be a helpful tool here.)
This brings me to my main point and my perception of the author’s blind spot. But first I should explain why I read the book. I have become interested in concepts of evolutionary intelligence since becoming mother to a highly-gifted child of complex and unusual temperament. I thought that any book discussing evolutionary psychology would have to consider the existence of gifted people, especially those who are genetically hard-wired as global thinkers, empaths, abstract thinkers with innate high degrees of moral sensitivity, born transcenders. But gifted people don’t seem to exist in Csikszentmihalyi’s world. He is more interested in the folks out there of average intelligence and common, concrete temperament who can perhaps be encouraged to mimic traits inherent to the abstract idealist by “reading the more complex magazine, having the more complex conversation, voting for the candidate with the more complex platform, learning the more complex skills on one’s job, choosing the more complex leisure activity,” etc. Such a reader he must have in mind when he includes Q&A sections after each chapter and encourages a grassroots movement to form “cells of the future,” both of which made me laugh out loud because of their prosaic and pragmatic nature.
Well, I’m only going to irritate people by writing about giftedness, since our egalitarian society wants to mow down those tall poppies, but I’ll persist, in case there’s one other person out there who gets what I’m saying. The author writes, “The reason complexity appears to be such a central principle of evolution is that when two organisms compete for energy, the one with the more complex physiology or behavioral repertoire tends to have the advantage.” If gifted people are arguably more complex, do they have the evolutionary advantage? I’m not so sure. Society favors average kids, and parents of average kids are likely to have more kids. Complex kids suffer from lack of societal fit, and gifted kids and adults are prone to existential depression due to lack of fit. Most gifted kids experience abuse and humiliation in public school settings and may even be medicated because of “aberrant” behavior due to boredom. Some of these kids may have the advantage as adults, especially if they find success in technological fields; others may drop out of society. More interestingly, one could consider the effects of early humiliation on a successful genius like Edward Teller, who might arguably have unleashed negative and entropic energy as a subconscious response. In any event, if I were an evolutionary psychologist, I think I’d choose to invest my limited energy in studying the more complex gifted population, who might evidence the hand of evolution at a genetic level.
This is a book in which the gifted are glaringly absent, and I’m probably the only one who will care. Nonetheless, the book was engaging. But for my money, I prefer Harold Bloom on the expansion of consciousness through the study of literature. Sometimes the social sciences seem ponderous when compared to literature, in which lightening-fast apprehension can be manifest without cumbersome data generation. If you’re interested in the evolution of human consciousness, I think Bloom does best when he cites Shakespeare as the inventor of the human.
Align with the Divine Inteligence:
Professor Mike is on to something with this book. When you follow your positive emotions, especially Flow, you are following the guidence of the Divine Intelligence that is unfolding the universe. This is a very thought provoking and inspiring book. As a life coach, I see the practical application of Mihaly’s work every day. This may be the way to a happier, more harmonious and sustainable future for our planet. Thanks Mike for showing us how to follow our Flow to build a better self and a better world.
Clear and Positive Message:
By discussiing the evolution of the mind, this book gives us a clear and positive message about the future direction of our species. This made gave me hope about our future even though there are many terrible things going on in the world. The author argues that we are evolving self-organizing systems and we can continue to evolve. The message is very similar to the book “The Ever-Transcending Spirit” by Toru Sato except that Sato’s remarkable book explains this in more simple and straightforward language. I think we all need to learn from these types of thinkers in order to help us move toward positive change in our evolution.
Great Book - Amazon misspelled author’s name!!:
Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi
This is the author’s correct name, taken from the actual titles themselves. Amazon[.com] needs to correct their site, as the author’s name is not spelled correctly anywhere, for any of his titles!
Otherwise, I thought the book was excellent, better than his book Flow in many ways. I used it as a resource for a college paper this week, and encourage others who liked The Moral Animal or The Selfish Gene to read it. Especially worthwhile for those who are nihilistic, pessimistic, and doubtful about humanity’s survival or overal worthwhile characteristics.
Read this book!
A new landmark for the third millenium:
Flow experiences, human peak experiences and high synergetic states are introduced in such an original and practical way in this book that, while readind it, one really experiences flow. Genes are the information units of life; they are associated with the genetic code, while “memes” are the equivalent information units when dealing with consciousness, with mind, with the noosphere, and they are coded in this master piece, from beginning to end, so that the “I” is challenged continually to evolve and to know how to obtain wisdom, “because wisdom is a cognitive skill, a special way of acting and a personal good, because the practice of wisdom leads to inner serenity and enjoyment”. Complexity is certainly a fashionable catchword but again Mihaly makes it graspable and human, a practical tool, so to speak, because the final principle of evolution is an increase in both differentiation and integration … Differentiation refers to the parts that differ in structure or function and integration refers to the whole in which the different parts communicate and enhance one another’s goals. Flow, memes and complexity are presented in this work in such a unified framework that we can think that with it we have finally a truly complementary work for the “I”, or some sort of evolutionary ontology, while with Ken Wilber work Sex, Ecology and Spirituality we have the corresponding philosophical counterpart, for the “we”, and with Physics and the Principle of Synergy by Epsilon Pi, we have the corresponding scientifical counterpart, for the “It”. But the important point to recall is that they all three are integral proposal; they really complement each other in this new stage of mankind in which the integration of the big three is a main concern. Synergy is a principle that when applied produces harmony and when not produces entropy, and when synergy is obtained, flow is experienced and a “field” is created, a field that can be used as a medium to detect a higher ordered state or an increased complexity, as “a good society is one that encourages the individuals to realize their potentials and permits complexity to evolve”.
After reading this most influential book you will be not the same again because its “memetic” influence will start working by itself in your own evolving self.
