Save yourself 2 hours and $14 and just head to your nearest Los Angeles new-age cafe and ask a stranger about the good life. From a University of Chicago Professor of Psychology, I expected more than unjustified blanket statements (“In the United States and other technologically advanced societies, individualism and materialism have almost completely prevailed over allegiance to the community and to spiritual values”) and crackpot new-agey physics misinterpretations (Special relativity and fractal geometry imply polytheism? Exactly who was on this guy’s hiring committee?).

I picked up this book for insights into work flow and creativity, but most of the material is already known to anyone who frequently self-reflects or has read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (still the only self-help/personal philosophy I’ve come across with anything deeply profound to say). That said, I did pick up (or at least had reinforced) a few interesting tid-bits:

• We tend to self-reflect only when our thoughts are negative (“I can’t believe I forgot how to convolve two Gaussians! Arghhh!”). Be sure to self-reflect on the good moments of life as well (“I was conquering channel capacities left and right! It was like Thermopylae.”)
• Experiment with your life (meal times, sleep times, work environment, etc). Science is the way and the word, my son.
• Take advantage of both ends of the extroversion-introversion spectrum and know the difference between when your mind requires conversation and when it requires solitude (ideas come from human networks, but if you’re always plugged in, you might forget how to generate packets of your own and just become a thoughtless optical fiber).
• Make your work meaningful, regardless of whether you believe you are forced to do it (“Either you find the normal modes of oscillation of a coupled pendulum, Mr. Bond, or we will poison the water supplies of New York…”).
• Pay attention to the routine in life: question it, understand it, and improve it (it’s amazing how much of our lives amount to deeply ingrained habits that we never care to question; a life made up of only habits is devoid of mind).
• Never passively accept that the way you are doing something is the only way (contrary to popular belief, that least squares is the measure of error is not a fundamental law of Nature).
• Own your actions regardless of whether you ‘chose’ to do them. (“Are you kidding? I love calculating entropy-typical sets. One year I skipped Christmas taming one of these bad boys.”)

This book also inspired for me an interesting new agey metaphor for the self: a rhythmic pattern in equilibrium with the environment (rhythmic because we tend to settle into habits). The self is built on the environment. Move, travel, and change can be considered states of temporary non-equilibrium with the environment, so that a new stage of life is a new state of displaced equilibrium. Thus, simulated annealing could be considered a metaphor for life. A stagnant, boring life is one with the temperature parameter too low (caught in an undesirable local minima), a life of crime, psychopathy, and/or depression is one with the temperature too high (nothing is stable and we pop from minima to minima), and a successful life is on with the temperature set just right so that we can balance exploration of habits and interests with exploitation of the favorites we have already found.

Despite my skepticism over Csikszentmihalyi’s rigor, I’ll likely still check out Flow, The Evolving Self, and/or Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention since I’m hoping that Finding Flow was simply a watered-down version for the masses and that perhaps Csikszentmihalyi’s other work will be more substantial.

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