2021-12-24
这里格式有些乱，将就着留存待查。
有几本关于ikigai的书里面竟然有flow的内容。
- Mitsuhashi, Yukari. Ikigai: Giving every day meaning and joy. Hachette UK, 2018.
- Mogi, Ken. Awakening Your Ikigai: How the Japanese Wake Up to Joy and Purpose Every Day. The Experiment, 2018.
Chapter 5 Flow and creativity有相关内容。
-另一本关于ikigai的书：
García, Héctor, and Francesc Miralles. Ikigai: The Japanese secret to a long and happy life. Penguin, 2017.
里面，也有专门一章内容：
IV: FIND FLOW IN EVERYTHING YOU DO
Going with the flow
The power of flow
Strategy 1: Choose a difficult task (but not too difficult!)
Strategy 2: Have a clear, concrete objective
Strategy 3: Concentrate on a single task
Flow in Japan: Takumis, engineers, geniuses, and otakus
The art of the takumi
Steve Jobs in Japan
Sophisticated simplicity
The purity of Ghibli
The recluses
Microflow: Enjoying mundane tasks
Instant vacations: Getting there through meditation
Humans as ritualistic beings
Using flow to find your ikigai
以下的内容来自这一部分的第一章。
Going with the flow
Imagine you are skiing down one of your favorite slopes. Powdery snow flies up on both sides of you like white sand. Conditions are perfect.
You are entirely focused on skiing as well as you can. You know exactly how to move at each moment. There is no future, no past. There is only the present. You feel the snow, your skis, your body, and your consciousness united as a single entity. You are completely immersed in the experience, not thinking about or distracted by anything else. Your ego dissolves, and you become part of what you are doing.
This is the kind of experience Bruce Lee described with his famous “Be water, my friend.”
We’ve all felt our sense of time vanish when we lose ourselves in an activity we enjoy. We start cooking and before we know it, several hours have passed. We spend an afternoon with a book and forget about the world going by until we notice the sunset and realize we haven’t eaten dinner. We go surfing and don’t realize how many hours we have spent in the water until the next day, when our muscles ache.
The opposite can also happen. When we have to complete a task we don’t want to do, every minute feels like a lifetime and we can’t stop looking at our watch. As the quip attributed to Einstein goes, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That is relativity.”
The funny thing is that someone else might really enjoy the same task, but we want to finish as quickly as possible.
What makes us enjoy doing something so much that we forget about whatever worries we might have while we do it? When are we happiest? These questions can help us discover our ikigai.
- The power of flow
These questions are also at the heart of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research into the experience of being completely immersed in what we are doing. Csikszentmihalyi called this state “flow,” and described it as the pleasure, delight, creativity, and process when we are completely immersed in life.
There is no magic recipe for finding happiness, for living according to your ikigai, but one key ingredient is the ability to reach this state of flow and, through this state, to have an “optimal experience.”
In order to achieve this optimal experience, we have to focus on increasing the time we spend on activities that bring us to this state of flow, rather than allowing ourselves to get caught up in activities that offer immediate pleasure—like eating too much, abusing drugs or alcohol, or stuffing ourselves with chocolate in front of the TV.
As Csikszentmihalyi asserts in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, flow is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”
It is not only creative professionals who require the high doses of concentration that promote flow. Most athletes, chess players, and engineers also spend much of their time on activities that bring them to this state.
According to Csikszentmihalyi’s research, a chess player feels the same way upon entering a state of flow as a mathematician working on a formula or a surgeon performing an operation. A professor of psychology, Csikszentmihalyi analyzed data from people around the world and discovered that flow is the same among individuals of all ages and cultures. In New York and Okinawa, we all reach a state of flow in the same way.
But what happens to our mind when we are in that state?
When we flow, we are focused on a concrete task without any distractions. Our mind is “in order.” The opposite occurs when we try to do something while our mind is on other things.
If you often find yourself losing focus while working on something you consider important, there are several strategies you can employ to increase your chances of achieving flow. - The Seven Conditions for Achieving Flow
According to researcher Owen Schaffer of DePaul University, the requirements for achieving flow are:
- Knowing what to do
- Knowing how to do it
- Knowing how well you are doing
- Knowing where to go (where navigation is involved)
- Perceiving significant challenges
- Perceiving significant skills
- Being free from distractions1
- Strategy 1: Choose a difficult task (but not too difficult!)
Schaffer’s model encourages us to take on tasks that we have a chance of completing but that are slightly outside our comfort zone.
Every task, sport, or job has a set of rules, and we need a set of skills to follow them. If the rules for completing a task or achieving a purpose are too basic relative to our skill set, we will likely get bored. Activities that are too easy lead to apathy.
If, on the other hand, we assign ourselves a task that is too difficult, we won’t have the skills to complete it and will almost certainly give up—and feel frustrated, to boot.
The ideal is to find a middle path, something aligned with our abilities but just a bit of a stretch, so we experience it as a challenge. This is what Ernest Hemingway meant when he said, “Sometimes I write better than I can.”2
We want to see challenges through to the end because we enjoy the feeling of pushing ourselves. Bertrand Russell expressed a similar idea when he said, “To be able to concentrate for a considerable amount of time is essential to difficult achievement.”3
If you’re a graphic designer, learn a new software program for your next project. If you’re a programmer, use a new programming language. If you’re a dancer, try to incorporate into your next routine a movement that has seemed impossible for years.
Add a little something extra, something that takes you out of your comfort zone.
Even doing something as simple as reading means following certain rules, having certain abilities and knowledge. If we set out to read a book on quantum mechanics for specialists in physics without being specialists in physics ourselves, we’ll probably give up after a few minutes. On the other end of the spectrum, if we already know everything a book has to tell us, we’ll get bored right away.
However, if the book is appropriate to our knowledge and abilities, and builds on what we already know, we’ll immerse ourselves in our reading, and time will flow. This pleasure and satisfaction are evidence that we are in tune with our ikigai.
Easy Challenging Beyond Our Abilities
Boredom Flow Anxiety - Strategy 2: Have a clear, concrete objective
Video games—played in moderation—board games, and sports are great ways to achieve flow, because the objective tends to be very clear: Beat your rival or your own record while following a set of explicitly defined rules.
Unfortunately, the objective isn’t quite as clear in most situations.
According to a study by Boston Consulting Group, when asked about their bosses, the number one complaint of employees at multinational corporations is that they don’t “communicate the team’s mission clearly,” and that, as a result, the employees don’t know what their objectives are.
What often happens, especially in big companies, is that the executives get lost in the details of obsessive planning, creating strategies to hide the fact that they don’t have a clear objective. It’s like heading out to sea with a map but no destination.
It is much more important to have a compass pointing to a concrete objective than to have a map. Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, encourages us to use the principle of “compass over maps” as a tool to navigate our world of uncertainty. In the book Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future, he and Jeff Howe write, “In an increasingly unpredictable world moving ever more quickly, a detailed map may lead you deep into the woods at an unnecessarily high cost. A good compass, though, will always take you where you need to go. It doesn’t mean that you should start your journey without any idea where you’re going. What it does mean is understanding that while the path to your goal may not be straight, you’ll finish faster and more efficiently than you would have if you had trudged along a preplanned route.”
In business, the creative professions, and education alike, it’s important to reflect on what we hope to achieve before starting to work, study, or make something. We should ask ourselves questions such as:
What is my objective for today’s session in the studio?
How many words am I going to write today for the article coming out next month?
What is my team’s mission?
How fast will I set the metronome tomorrow in order to play that sonata at an allegro tempo by the end of the week?
Having a clear objective is important in achieving flow, but we also have to know how to leave it behind when we get down to business. Once the journey has begun, we should keep this objective in mind without obsessing over it.
When Olympic athletes compete for a gold medal, they can’t stop to think how pretty the medal is. They have to be present in the moment—they have to flow. If they lose focus for a second, thinking how proud they’ll be to show the medal to their parents, they’ll almost certainly commit an error at a critical moment and will not win the competition.
One common example of this is writer’s block. Imagine that a writer has to finish a novel in three months. The objective is clear; the problem is that the writer can’t stop obsessing over it. Every day she wakes up thinking, “I have to write that novel,” and every day she sets about reading the newspaper and cleaning the house. Every evening she feels frustrated and promises she’ll get to work the next day.
Days, weeks, and months pass, and the writer still hasn’t gotten anything down on the page, when all it would have taken was to sit down and get that first word out, then the second . . . to flow with the project, expressing her ikigai.
As soon as you take these first small steps, your anxiety will disappear and you will achieve a pleasant flow in the activity you’re doing. Getting back to Albert Einstein, “a happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell on the future.”4
Vague Objective Clearly Defined Objective and a Focus on Process Obsessive Desire to Achieve a Goal While Ignoring Process
Confusion; time and energy wasted on meaningless tasks Flow Fixation on the objective rather than getting down to business
Mental block Flow Mental block
Strategy 3: Concentrate on a single task
This is perhaps one of the greatest obstacles we face today, with so much technology and so many distractions. We’re listening to a video on YouTube while writing an e-mail, when suddenly a chat prompt pops up and we answer it. Then our smartphone vibrates in our pocket; just as soon as we respond to that message, we’re back at our computer, logging on to Facebook.
Pretty soon thirty minutes have passed, and we’ve forgotten what the e-mail we were writing was supposed to be about.
This also happens sometimes when we put on a movie with dinner and don’t realize how delicious the salmon was until we’re taking the last bite.
We often think that combining tasks will save us time, but scientific evidence shows that it has the opposite effect. Even those who claim to be good at multitasking are not very productive. In fact, they are some of the least productive people.
Our brains can take in millions of bits of information but can only actually process a few dozen per second. When we say we’re multitasking, what we’re really doing is switching back and forth between tasks very quickly. Unfortunately, we’re not computers adept at parallel processing. We end up spending all our energy alternating between tasks, instead of focusing on doing one of them well.
Concentrating on one thing at a time may be the single most important factor in achieving flow.
According to Csikszentmihalyi, in order to focus on a task we need:
- To be in a distraction-free environment
- To have control over what we are doing at every moment
Technology is great, if we’re in control of it. It’s not so great if it takes control of us. For example, if you have to write a research paper, you might sit down at your computer and use Google to look up the information you need. However, if you’re not very disciplined, you might end up surfing the Web instead of writing that paper. In that case, Google and the Internet will have taken over, pulling you out of your state of flow.
It has been scientifically shown that if we continually ask our brains to switch back and forth between tasks, we waste time, make more mistakes, and remember less of what we’ve done.
Several studies conducted at Stanford University by Clifford Ivar Nass describe our generation as suffering from an epidemic of multitasking. One such study analyzed the behavior of hundreds of students, dividing them into groups based on the number of things they tended to do at once. The students who were the most addicted to multitasking typically alternated among more than four tasks; for example, taking notes while reading a textbook, listening to a podcast, answering messages on their smartphone, and sometimes checking their Twitter timeline.
Each group of students was shown a screen with several red and several blue arrows. The objective of the exercise was to count the red arrows.
At first, all the students answered correctly right away, without much trouble. As the number of blue arrows increased (the number of red arrows stayed the same; only their position changed), however, the students accustomed to multitasking had serious trouble counting the red arrows in the time allotted, or as quickly as the students who did not habitually multitask, for one very simple reason: They got distracted by the blue arrows! Their brains were trained to pay attention to every stimulus, regardless of its importance, while the brains of the other students were trained to focus on a single task—in this case, counting the red arrows and ignoring the blue ones.5
Other studies indicate that working on several things at once lowers our productivity by at least 60 percent and our IQ by more than ten points.
One study funded by the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research found that a sample group of more than four thousand young adults between the ages of twenty and twenty-four who were addicted to their smartphones got less sleep, felt less connected to their community at school, and were more likely to show signs of depression.6
Concentrating on a Single Task Multitasking
Makes achieving flow more likely Makes achieving flow impossible
Increases productivity Decreases productivity by 60 percent (though it doesn’t seem to)
Increases our power of retention Makes it harder to remember things
Makes us less likely to make mistakes Makes us more likely to make mistakes
Helps us feel calm and in control of the task at hand Makes us feel stressed by the sensation that we’re losing control, that our tasks are controlling us
Causes us to become more considerate as we pay full attention to those around us Causes us to hurt those around us through our “addiction” to stimuli: always checking our phones, always on social media . . .
Increases creativity Reduces creativity
What can we do to avoid falling victim to this flow-impeding epidemic? How can we train our brains to focus on a single task? Here are a few ideas for creating a space and time free of distractions, to increase our chances of reaching a state of flow and thereby getting in touch with our ikigai:
Don’t look at any kind of screen for the first hour you’re awake and the last hour before you go to sleep.
Turn off your phone before you achieve flow. There is nothing more important than the task you have chosen to do during this time. If this seems too extreme, enable the “do not disturb” function so only the people closest to you can contact you in case of emergency.
Designate one day of the week, perhaps a Saturday or Sunday, a day of technological “fasting,” making exceptions only for e-readers (without Wi-Fi) or MP3 players.
Go to a café that doesn’t have Wi-Fi.
Read and respond to e-mail only once or twice per day. Define those times clearly and stick to them.
Try the Pomodoro Technique: Get yourself a kitchen timer (some are made to look like a pomodoro, or tomato) and commit to working on a single task as long as it’s running. The Pomodoro Technique recommends 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest for each cycle, but you can also do 50 minutes of work and 10 minutes of rest. Find the pace that’s best for you; the most important thing is to be disciplined in completing each cycle.
Start your work session with a ritual you enjoy and end it with a reward.
Train your mind to return to the present when you find yourself getting distracted. Practice mindfulness or another form of meditation, go for a walk or a swim—whatever will help you get centered again.
Work in a space where you will not be distracted. If you can’t do this at home, go to a library, a café, or, if your task involves playing the saxophone, a music studio. If you find that your surroundings continue to distract you, keep looking until you find the right place.
Divide each activity into groups of related tasks, and assign each group its own place and time. For example, if you’re writing a magazine article, you could do research and take notes at home in the morning, write in the library in the afternoon, and edit on the couch at night.
Bundle routine tasks—such as sending out invoices, making phone calls, and so on—and do them all at once.
Advantages of Flow Disadvantages of Distraction
A focused mind A wandering mind
Living in the present Thinking about the past and the future
We are free from worry Concerns about our daily life and the people around us invade our thoughts
The hours fly by Every minute seems endless
We feel in control We lose control and fail to complete the task at hand, or other tasks or people keep us from our work
We prepare thoroughly We act without being prepared
We know what we should be doing at any given moment We frequently get stuck and don’t know how to proceed
Our mind is clear and overcomes all obstacles to the flow of thought We are plagued by doubts, concerns, and low self-esteem
It’s pleasant It’s boring and exhausting
Our ego fades: We are not the ones controlling the activity or task we’re doing—the task is leading us Constant self-criticism: Our ego is present and we feel frustrated
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