Here Is Why You Don’t Like Your Job
Flow plays a bigger role in it than you may think.
The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his highly acclaimed book Flow, introduced this now ubiquitous term to refer to a state of consciousness that allows one to be completely immersed in an “optimal experience”. While in this state, a person is able to forget about all distractions in life and fully enjoy an activity, which can contribute to an increase in happiness and quality of life.
This theory was developed from decades of research and is one of the great contributions to modern psychology. In his book, Csikszentmihalyi describes the elements of Flow and also shows how they can be applied to make any activity into an optimal experience. With this knowledge, it becomes easy to understand why we don’t enjoy activities that we have to do in our daily lives, such as our jobs; and to change our environment in order to turn them into experiences that provide flow and, thus, fulfillment.
I have recently read this book and, because it has some important concepts that opened my mind, I wanted to share some of the highlights that I took and also add some additional insights taken from other authors who wrote on related topics.
The Elements of Flow
The experience of flow is universal and has been reported across multiple nationalities, ages, classes, and genders. It also spans many different types of activities.
In dozens of studies, people who enjoyed optimal experiences were interviewed. From chess players in tournaments to young Japanese teens in motorcycle clubs, they all described the feeling and the causes that made them feel that way in essentially the same manner. They all describe one or most of the following elements.
Feasible Tasks
In order to experience flow, the task at hand should effectively balance challenge and skills. This means that the activity should require appropriate skills and that it is consistent with the person’s capabilities. That is not to say that tasks that don’t require skills are not enjoyable, but that people report higher levels of satisfaction and optimal experience when performing tasks that match their abilities to the challenge. Daniel Pink, author of the book Drive, calls these “Goldilock tasks”. He goes on to say that when there is a mismatch between challenge and skills, this becomes a source of frustration. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety; and when it falls short on their capabilities, the result is boredom.
Burnout is being overwhelmed by work. Boreout is being underwhelmed by work. Having too much responsibility is exhausting. Having too little is deflating. Idle time and pointless tasks undermine energy. Motivation depends on balancing what’s meaningful with what’s manageable
— Adam Grant
Capacity for Concentration
When the task reaches this golden proportion, there is no room left for the person to think about anything else and their attention becomes completely absorbed by it. It becomes an end in itself, an autotelic activity. In fact, that is why this optimal experience is called Flow. The ideia is that when people reach this state, the movement is effortless and the goal is to keep on flowing, not to reach a specific goal or destination. Again, Daniel Pink also elaborates on the motivation for these tasks and breaks them down into two categories: extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. While the former targets external goals, like money and fame, the latter makes the task itself the reward and is the underlying motivation in activities characterized by Flow.
Profound and Effortless Involvement
One of the causes that people see flow as a way to improve their quality of life and well-being is that since the clearly structured demands of this optimal activity leave no room for thinking about anything else, the interference of day-to-day concerns and anxieties — what Csikszentmihalyi calls entropy — is completely discarded.
Loss of Self-Consciousness
One of these particular issues that the mind lets go of when experiencing flow deserves special attention, self-consciousness. When this occurs, we feel more integrated and part of the outside world. This element is maybe more pronounced in physical activities such as climbing mountains, or playing the violin, but is also present when people see themselves as part of a larger community, which expands the frontiers of the self, such as political parties or religion.
Clear Goals and Immediate Feedback
Another condition for reaching the state of flow is that the activity should not only present clear goals and a set of rules to achieve them but also present the possibility for immediate feedback. Sometimes the goals are not that clear or the feedback is ambiguous. But it’s the person’s job to refine them in order to appreciate the experience.
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate and the author of the famous book Thinking Fast and Slow, also has an insightful view on the importance of this element when he explains some conditions that are necessary for developing expertise and intuition. This, in turn, is again linked to the first element of flow. He poses that the conditions are: (1) you have to be in a world that is regular and slow to change, where there are rules to be picked up; (2) you have to have an opportunity to learn those rules, which takes a lot of time and practice; and, finally, (3) you need immediate and accurate feedback.
Feeling of Control Over The Actions
Another element that is deeply appreciated when people talk about flow is their ability to control their environment and their actions, or even not worrying about losing control. An important distinction is a fact that, rather than enjoying the sensation of feeling in control, people enjoy exercising control over difficult situations. This means that, in order to experience flow, one has to be willing to give up on comfort zones.
Altered Time Perception
It’s common knowledge that enjoyable activities feel like they go by much more quickly than do regular ones. However, people experiencing flow have a more complex and altered perception of time. In some cases, like the one expressed by a ballerina, a difficult turn that takes less than a second extends to what feels like minutes when she is performing it. However, in hindsight, when recounting it, she feels like it passed really fast.
Flow in the Work Environment
In order to improve the quality of life through work, two complementary strategies are needed. You have to make your work be the most similar to an experience of flow by fostering an environment where the above elements are present. But, changing external factors is not enough, you also have to shift and develop your mindset to be more autotelic.
Some activities, at first sight, might not seem like they have what it takes to provide flow. That’s when an autotelic personality is most important. Some examples brought by Csikszentmihalyi clearly illustrate this. A seventy-six-year-old woman living in the Italian Alps wakes up every day at five in the morning, milks her cows, prepares breakfast, cleans her house, and takes care of her garden. In the summer, she moves huge bales of hay on top of her head by many miles down to the barn. When asked what she would rather be doing if she had all the time and money in the world, she laughed and answered the exact same thing she does every day. People like her are able to transform tough, boring, and meaningless tasks into complex activities by noticing opportunities of action where others can’t. As a result, the work becomes enjoyable.
There are four main characteristics of an autotelic self.
- One should establish clear goals by oneself and commit to them by developing the necessary skills to accomplish them. Again it’s also important to pay attention to the results through feedback.
- The autotelic personality should be completely involved by the activity.
- One should make a deliberate concentration effort. This means loosing consciousness of the self and instead focusing on the environment and activity.
- As a result, one learns to appreciate the activity even in adverse situations. The optimal experience doesn’t result from a hedonist approach to life, but a voluntary effort to develop the skills to sustain the enjoyment.
In his studies, Csikszentmihalyi, however, found an interesting paradox regarding work. While people have reported having lived their most positive experiences while working, they also state that they would rather not have to work. The opposite was also true, although people supposedly enjoyed their time dedicated to leisure, they often reported lack of motivation; still, they continue wanting more of that. The author explains that, while there are multiple explanations for this phenomenon, one conclusion seems to be inevitable: when working, people don’t pay attention to the evidence displayed by their senses. Instead, they base their motivations on the profoundly rooted cultural stereotype of how work should be.
It is possible to argue that, even though people find their jobs enjoyable, we can’t handle indefinite levels of challenges and self-control on a single day and we need a well-deserved rest to recharge our energies. This is commonly referred to in literature as ego depletion. However, some meta-analyses and studies have questioned this long-held popular belief. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues showed that signs of ego depletion were displayed only by people who believed willpower was a limited resource. On the other hand, people who didn’t see it that way didn’t show signs of ego depletion.
Dealing with Stress
All of this seems to be easy to accomplish provided that you are healthy, rich, and handsome enough to have time to devote to it. However, how can people still benefit from flow when their life is full of unfortunate events, stress, and injustices?
People react differently to stressful events and this capacity or style of dealing with stress is composed by three main resources, as Csikszentmihalyi explains. These are their available external support, their intrinsic psychological resources (such as intelligence, background, and personality traits), and, finally, their particular strategies to dealing with stress. Of those, the latter is the most relevant because it’s most effective, general and it’s under our control.
A lot can be said about these strategies. Viktor Frankl, Ph.D., a psychiatrist and founder of Logotherapy was someone who wrote extensively about it as a Holocaust survivor. In his best-selling book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he explains how he was able to endure and find meaning in all of his suffering in concentration camps.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way
— Viktor Frankl
The idea behind his book wasn’t to provide a detailed description of how life in concentration camps was. Instead, the focus was to explain how he was able to endure the inhumane treatments as a prisoner, while many others had lost hopes. They asked themselves: “Will we survive the camp? For, if not, all this suffering has no meaning.” On the other hand, the question that beset Frankl was: “Has all this suffering, this dying around us, a meaning? For, if not, then ultimately there is no meaning to survival; for a life whose meaning depends upon such a happenstance — as whether one escapes or not — ultimately would not be worth living at all.”
The takeaway is that, once you can find meaning in the stressful events you face, then they cease to be suffering as they can be regarded as sacrifices. To give an example, Frankl tells a story about how he was able to help an elderly general practitioner severely depressed over the loss of his wife who had died two years before.
Frankl: What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?
Doctor: Oh, for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!
Frankl: You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it was you who have spared her this suffering — to be sure, at the price that now you have to survive and mourn her
The Doctor said no word, but shook Frankl’s hand and calmly left his office.
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.
— Viktor Frankl
Creating Meaning
Even when we can transform disparate experiences in flow, if we don’t have a global objective with unified goals and a sense of meaning we can fall prey to exhaustion and entropy. It’s important to note that, by meaning, Csikszentmihalyi, as Frankl, doesn’t refer to a supreme, intrinsic goal that is valid for every human being. However, it does not follow that life cannot be given meaning.
It is one thing to recognize that life is, by itself, meaningless. It is another thing entirely to accept this with resignation. The first fact does not entail the second any more than the fact that we lack wings prevents us from flying.
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
It doesn’t matter what your objective is, provided it is compelling enough to give order to your actions throughout your life. The goal can be curing cancer or simply raising your children through adulthood. As long as it provides clear objectives, clear rules for action, and a way to concentrate and become involved, any goal can serve to give meaning to a person’s life.
It’s relatively easy to provide order to the mind for brief periods of time (any activity with a realistic goal, like a game or a work emergency, can do that). However, it is much more difficult to extend that to your whole life. In order to achieve that, we must invest energy in goals that are so persuasive that they justify effort even when our resources are exhausted and when fate is merciless in refusing us a chance at having a comfortable life.
Conclusion
Whether you’re going through a mid-life crisis or just trying to understand how to extract the most out of your experiences and your job, this book is a must-read. I had a misconception that, depending on your personality, you would never be able to enjoy certain activities, be it in your personal life, or in your work. Then, after reading Flow, I realized that the ability to appreciate and become completely involved in experiences depends ultimately on your ability to perceive them in a way that the elements of flow are possible; and on cultivating an autotelic personality.
Also, another takeaway from this book that I found particularly important is the need to define an ultimate goal and meaning, and how this contributes to creating a unifying experience that provides a constant flow throughout life albeit obstacles, stress, and exhaustion.
To finish off this review, I will leave you with another one of the hundreds of profound quotes from Viktor Frankl.
Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual
— Viktor Frankl
Further Readings
If the concepts covered in this post caught your attention and if you want to learn more about them, besides, of course, the book Flow, I also strongly recommend the following related readings:
- Drive, by Daniel Pink
- Have We Been Thinking About Willpower the Wrong Way for 30 Years?
- Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl
- The Happiness Advantage, by Shawn Achor
