Still, however those individual desires express themselves on the surface, they grow from common roots. We’re born to be players, not pawns. We’re meant to be autonomous individuals, not individual automatons. We’re designed to be Type I. But outside forces—including the very idea that we need to be “managed”—have conspired to change our default setting and turn us into Type X. If we update the environments we’re in—not only at work, but also at school and at home—and if leaders recognize both the truth of the human condition and the science that supports it, we can return ourselves and our colleagues to our natural state.
“The course of human history has always moved in the direction of greater freedom. And there’s a reason for that—because it’s in our nature to push for it,” Ryan told me. “If we were just plastic like [some] people think, this wouldn’t be happening. But somebody stands in front of a tank in China. Women, who’ve been denied autonomy, keep advocating for rights. This is the course of history. This is why ultimately human nature, if it ever realizes itself, will do so by becoming more autonomous.”
CHAPTER 5
Mastery
You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,
you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression, forgetting
themselves in a function.
How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.
—W. H. Auden
One summer morning in 1944, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, age ten, stood on a train platform in Budapest, Hungary, with his mother, two brothers, and about seventy relatives who’d come to see them off. World War II was raging, and Hungary, an ambivalent member of the Axis, was being squeezed from every political and geographic corner. Nazi soldiers were occupying the country in retaliation for Hungary’s secret peace negotiations with the United States and Great Britain. Meanwhile, Soviet troops were advancing on the capital city.
It was time to leave. So the foursome boarded a train for Venice, Italy, where Csikszentmihalyi’s father, a diplomat, was working. As the train rumbled southwest, bombs exploded in the distance. Bullets ripped through the train’s windows, while a rifle-toting soldier on board fired back at the attackers. The ten-year-old crouched under his seat, terrified but also a little annoyed.
“It struck me at that point that grown-ups had really no idea how to live,” Csikszentmihalyi told me some sixty-five years later.
His train would turn out to be the last to cross the Danube River for many years. Shortly after its departure, air strikes destroyed Hungary’s major bridges. The Csikszentmihalyis were well educated and well connected, but the war flattened their lives. Of the relatives on the train platform that morning, more than half would be dead five months later. One of Csikszentmihalyi’s brothers spent six years doing hard labor in the Ural Mountains. Another was killed fighting the Soviets.
“The whole experience got me thinking,” Csikszentmihalyi said, recalling his ten-year-old self. “There has got to be a better way to live than this.”
FROM COMPLIANCE TO ENGAGEMENT
The opposite of autonomy is control. And since they sit at different poles of the behavioral compass, they point us toward different destinations. Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement. And this distinction leads to the second element of Type I behavior: mastery—the desire to get better and better at something that matters.
As I explained in Part One, Motivation 2.0’s goal was to encourage people to do particular things in particular ways—that is, to get them to comply. And for that objective, few motivators are more effective than a nice bunch of carrots and the threat of an occasional stick. This was rarely a promising route to self-actualization, of course. But as an economic strategy, it had a certain logic. For routine tasks, the sort of work that defined most of the twentieth century, gaining compliance usually worked just fine.
But that was then. For the definitional tasks of the twenty-first century, such a strategy falls short, often woefully short. Solving complex problems requires an inquiring mind and the willingness to experiment one’s way to a fresh solution. Where Motivation 2.0 sought compliance, Motivation 3.0 seeks engagement. Only engagement can produce mastery. And the pursuit of mastery, an important but often dormant part of our third drive, has become essential in making one’s way in today’s economy.
Unfortunately, despite sweet-smelling words like “empowerment” that waft through corporate corridors, the modern workplace’s most notable feature may be its lack of engagement and its disregard for mastery. Gallup’s extensive research on the subject shows that in the United States, more than 50 percent of employees are not engaged at work—and nearly 20 percent are actively disengaged. The cost of all this disengagement: about $300 billion a year in lost productivity—a sum larger than the GDP of Portugal, Singapore, or Israel.1 Yet in comparative terms, the United States looks like a veritable haven of Type I behavior at work. According to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., in some countries as little as 2 to 3 percent of the workforce is highly engaged in their work.2
Equally important, engagement as a route to mastery is a powerful force in our personal lives. While complying can be an effective strategy for physical survival, it’s a lousy one for personal fulfillment. Living a satisfying life requires more than simply meeting the demands of those in control. Yet in our offices and our classrooms we have way too much compliance and way too little engagement. The former might get you through the day, but only the latter will get you through the night. And that brings us back to Csikszentmihalyi’s story.
In his early teens, after witnessing the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the Soviet takeover of his country, Csikszentmihalyi was understandably weary of compliance and looking for engagement. But he wouldn’t find it at school. He dropped out of high school at thirteen. For nearly a decade, he worked in various Western European countries at a series of jobs, some odder than others, to support himself. And hoping to answer his youthful question about a better way to live, he read everything he could get his hands on in religion and philosophy. What he learned didn’t satisfy him. It wasn’t until he inadvertently stumbled into a lecture by none other than Carl Jung that he heard about the field of psychology and decided that it might hold the secrets he sought.
So in 1956, at the age of twenty-two, Csikszentmihalyi set off for the United States to study psychology. He arrived in Chicago, a high school dropout with $1.25 in his pocket whose only familiarity with the English language came from reading Pogo comic strips. Hungarian contacts in Chicago helped him find a job and a place to live. His knowledge of Latin, German, and Pogo helped him pass the Illinois high school equivalency test in a language he neither spoke nor read. He enrolled in the University of Illinois-Chicago, took classes during the day, worked as a hotel auditor at night, and eventually wound up at the University of Chicago psychology department, where—just nine years after setting foot in America—he earned a Ph.D.
But Csikszentmihalyi resisted rafting down the main currents of his field. As he told me one spring morning not long ago, he wanted to explore “the positive, innovative, creative approach to life instead of the remedial, pathological view that Sigmund Freud had or the mechanistic work” of B. F. Skinner and others who reduced behavior to simple stimulus and response. He began by writing about creativity. Creativity took him into the study of play. And his exploration of play unlocked an insight about the human experience that would make him famous.
In the midst of play, many people enjoyed what Csikszentmihalyi called “autotelic experiences”—from the Greek auto (self ) and telos (goal or purpose). In an autotelic experience, the goal is self-fulfilling; the activity is its own reward. Painters he observed during his Ph.D. research, Csikszentmihalyi said, were so enthralled in what they were doing that they seemed to
be in a trance. For them, time passed quickly and self-consciousness dissolved. He sought out other people who gravitated to these sorts of pursuits—rock climbers, soccer players, swimmers, spelunkers—and interviewed them to discover what made an activity autotelic. It was frustrating. “When people try to recall how it felt to climb a mountain or play a great musical piece,” Csikszentmihalyi later wrote, “their stories are usually quite stereotyped and uninsightful.”3 He needed a way to probe people’s experiences in the moment. And in the mid-1970s, a bold new technology—one that any twelve-year-old now would find laughingly retrograde—came to the rescue: the electronic pager.
Csikszentmihalyi, who by then was teaching at the University of Chicago and running his own psychology lab, clipped on a pager and asked his graduate students to beep him randomly several times each day. Whenever the pager sounded, he recorded what he was doing and how he was feeling. “It was so much fun,” he recalled in his office at the Claremont Graduate University in southern California, where he now teaches. “You got such a detailed picture of how people lived.” On the basis of this test run, he developed a methodology called the Experience Sampling Method. Csikszentmihalyi would page people eight times a day at random intervals and ask them to write in a booklet their answers to several short questions about what they were doing, who they were with, and how they’d describe their state of mind. Put the findings together for seven days and you had a flip book, a mini-movie, of someone’s week. Assemble the individual findings and you had an entire library of human experiences.
“Throughout my athletics career, the overall goal was always to be a better athlete than I was at that moment—whether next week, next month or next year. The improvement was the goal. The medal was simply the ultimate reward for achieving that goal.”
SEBASTIAN COE
Middle-distance runner
and two-time Olympic
gold medal winner
From these results, Csikszentmihalyi began to peel back the layers of those autotelic experiences. Perhaps equally significant, he replaced that wonky Greek-derived adjective with a word he found people using to describe these optimal moments: flow. The highest, most satisfying experiences in people’s lives were when they were in flow. And this previously unacknowledged mental state, which seemed so inscrutable and transcendent, was actually fairly easy to unpack. In flow, goals are clear. You have to reach the top of the mountain, hit the ball across the net, or mold the clay just right. Feedback is immediate. The mountaintop gets closer or farther, the ball sails in or out of bounds, the pot you’re throwing comes out smooth or uneven.
Most important, in flow, the relationship between what a person had to do and what he could do was perfect. The challenge wasn’t too easy. Nor was it too difficult. It was a notch or two beyond his current abilities, which stretched the body and mind in a way that made the effort itself the most delicious reward. That balance produced a degree of focus and satisfaction that easily surpassed other, more quotidian, experiences. In flow, people lived so deeply in the moment, and felt so utterly in control, that their sense of time, place, and even self melted away. They were autonomous, of course. But more than that, they were engaged. They were, as the poet W. H. Auden wrote, “forgetting themselves in a function.”
Maybe this state of mind was what that ten-year-old boy was seeking as that train rolled through Europe. Maybe reaching flow, not for a single moment but as an ethic for living—maintaining that beautiful “eye-on-the-object look” to achieve mastery as a cook, a surgeon, or a clerk—was the answer. Maybe this was the way to live.
GOLDILOCKS ON A CARGO SHIP
Several years ago—he can’t recall exactly when—Csikszentmihalyi was invited to Davos, Switzerland, by Klaus Schwab, who runs an annual conclave of the global power elite in that city. Joining him on the trip were three other University of Chicago faculty members—Gary Becker, George Stigler, and Milton Friedman—all of them economists, all of them winners of the Nobel Prize. The five men gathered for dinner one night and at the end of the meal, Schwab asked the academics what they considered the most important issue in modern economics.
“The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it’s in the arts, sciences, or business.”
TERESA AMABILE
Professor, Harvard University
“To my incredulous surprise,” Csikszentmihalyi recounted, “Becker, Stigler, and Friedman all ended up saying a variation of ‘There’s something missing,’ ” that for all its explanatory power, economics still failed to offer a rich enough account of behavior, even in business settings.
Csikszentmihalyi smiled and complimented his colleagues on their perspicacity. The concept of flow, which he introduced in the mid-1970s, was not an immediate game-changer. It gained some traction in 1990 when Csikszentmihalyi wrote his first book on the topic for a wide audience and gained a small band of followers in the business world. However, putting this notion into place in the real operations of real organizations has been slower going. After all, Motivation 2.0 has little room for a concept like flow. The Type X operating system doesn’t oppose people taking on optimal challenges on the job, but it suggests that such moments are happy accidents rather than necessary conditions for people to do great work.
But ever so slowly the ground might be shifting. As the data on worker disengagement earlier in the chapter reveal, the costs—in both human satisfaction and organizational health—are high when a workplace is a no-flow zone. That’s why a few enterprises are trying to do things differently. As Fast Company magazine has noted, a number of companies, including Microsoft, Patagonia, and Toyota, have realized that creating flow-friendly environments that help people move toward mastery can increase productivity and satisfaction at work.4
For example, Stefan Falk, a vice president at Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications concern, used the principles of flow to smooth a merger of the company’s business units. He persuaded managers to configure work assignments so that employees had clear objectives and a way to get quick feedback. And instead of meeting with their charges for once-a-year performance reviews, managers sat down with employees one-on-one six times a year, often for as long as ninety minutes, to discuss their level of engagement and path toward mastery. The flow-centered strategy worked well enough that Ericsson began using it in offices around the world. After that, Falk moved to Green Cargo, an enormous logistics and shipping company in Sweden. There, he developed a method of training managers in how flow worked. Then he required them to meet with staff once a month to get a sense of whether people were overwhelmed or underwhelmed with their work—and to adjust assignments to help them find flow. After two years of managerial revamping, state-owned Green Cargo became profitable for the first time in 125 years—and executives cite its newfound flowcentricity as a key reason.5
In addition, a study of 11,000 industrial scientists and engineers working at companies in the United States found that the desire for intellectual challenge—that is, the urge to master something new and engaging—was the best predictor of productivity. Scientists motivated by this intrinsic desire filed significantly more patents than those whose main motivation was money, even controlling for the amount of effort each group expended.6 (That is, the extrinsically motivated group worked as long and as hard as their more Type I colleagues. They just accomplished less—perhaps because they spent less of their work time in flow.)
And then there’s Jenova Chen, a young game designer who, in 2006, wrote his MFA thesis on Csikszentmihalyi’s theory. Chen believed that video games held the promise to deliver quintessential flow experiences, but that too many games required an almost obsessive level of commitment. Why not, he thought, design a game to bring the flow sensation to more casual gamers? Using his thesis project as his laboratory, Chen created a game in which players use a computer mouse to guide an on-screen amoeba-like organism through a surreal ocean landscape as it
gobblies other creatures and slowly evolves into a higher form. While most games require players to proceed through a fixed and predetermined series of skill levels, Chen’s allows them to advance and explore any way they desire. And unlike games in which failure ends the session, in Chen’s game failure merely pushes the player to a level better matched to her ability. Chen calls his game flOw. And it’s been a huge hit. People have played the free online version of the game more than three million times. (You can find it at http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/). The paid version, designed for the PlayStation game console, has generated more than 350,000 downloads and collected a shelf full of awards. Chen used the game to launch his own firm, thatgamecompany, built around both flow and flOw, that quickly won a three-game development deal from Sony, something almost unheard of for an unknown start-up run by a couple of twenty-six-year-old California game designers.
Green Cargo, thatgamecompany, and the companies employing the patent-cranking scientists typically use two tactics that their less savvy competitors do not. First, they provide employees with what I call “Goldilocks tasks”—challenges that are not too hot and not too cold, neither overly difficult nor overly simple. One source of frustration in the workplace is the frequent mismatch between what people must do and what people can do. When what they must do exceeds their capabilities, the result is anxiety. When what they must do falls short of their capabilities, the result is boredom. (Indeed, Csikszentmihalyi titled his first book on autotelic experiences Beyond Boredom and Anxiety.) But when the match is just right, the results can be glorious. This is the essence of flow. Goldilocks tasks offer us the powerful experience of inhabiting the zone, of living on the knife’s edge between order and disorder, of—as painter Fritz Scholder once described it—“walking the tightrope between accident and discipline.”