MC talks about his early work and experience that led to his ideas about flow, also, his initial exposure to psychology was an accidental meeting with one of the most famous psychologists of all time.

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Rob: And welcome to the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show WNJC 1360 AM out of Washington Township reaching Metro Philiy and South Jersey. Online at iTunes under my name Rob Kall, K-A-L-L, and at opednews.com/podcasts,. iTunes only lists the most recent hundred shows and there are about three hundred of them all together. My guest tonight, and I'm very excited to have him on the show, is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The most unspellable name I have ever encountered, he also goes by Mike. He is the Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University. He is the former head of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago and of the department of sociology and anthropology at Lake Forest College. His Ted Talk, Flow, the Secret to Happiness, has had close to three million views. Martin Seligman, the former president of the American Psychological Association, described him as the world's leading researcher on positive psychology. Welcome to the show.

MC: Hi Rob.

Rob: And I have to say that our connection goes back a long time. I first discovered your work around 1988. You had a book out then called Optimal Experience and I called you and spoke to you on the phone about it A couple years later in the early nineties; we had lunch at a conference on applied psychophysiology and biofeedback (AAPB.org) and biofeedback. So I've been a long, long fan of yours. Thank you so much for all the work you have done.

MC: Great, thank you. It is good to talk to a fan.

Rob: So I've got a lot of things I want -- ground I want to cover with you, but I think the first thing that you need to do is cover a couple of basic definitions and give us a story. I want to make sure we cover early on the definition of flow, auto-telic, and extrinsic motivation. And if you could introduce the idea of flow with your story about playing chess as a young man, that would be great.

MC: Yeah, well, as a young kid growing up in Europe at the end of the war, the Second World War, I noticed -- I went from one kind of a world to another world completely, within a period of half a year. We had a good, nice middle class life in Italy because my father was a consular diplomat in Italy. And we had a pretty good life, even during the war, but then as the war ended, suddenly everything collapsed. The Russian troops moved into Hungary and they kind of -- you know, one of my brothers was killed trying to defend Budapest even though they didn't have any weapons or anything, but the students were asked to leave the university and try to stop the Russian troops. And he was nineteen years old and finishing engineering class and out of fourteen hundred engineering students, only eight survived trying to stop the tanks and so forth with old muskets they had and stuff.

So anyway people lost their jobs, they lost their home or whatever they had, furniture burned down or stolen and it looked like complete chaos and at the same time we read that a nuclear device had been dropped in Japan and people had learned how to build these incredible weapons and yet they behaved completely like cavemen at the end of the war and the people lost their -- what they owned became completely helpless, and people. they didn't know what to do with themselves, they became depressed. So it was -- I couldn't understand how these two things could be together you know on the one hand, great science and the other kind of a helpless, childish behavior. By the way, can you hear me?

Rob: Every word, perfect; crystal clear.

MC: Okay. So as I grew up from there, I tried to understand, how could people be so clueless in some ways about how to make a decent life, even though they were making all these great advances in science and so forth. And so I tried to read as much as I could in religion, history, philosophy, this that, but it didn't seem to add up really, what I was reading into any coherent explanation. And then I had to leave school when I was thirteen because we didn't have any money back then. My father had lost his job and we couldn't work in Italy because we were refugees and we couldn't get the official documents to work in Italy. So I did all kinds of odd jobs instead of going to school and that way we kind of survived. But then I had set some money aside to go to Switzerland to ski one spring when I was fifteen, and I went there but unfortunately the snow had melted mostly.

And I didn't have money really to go to the movies so I didn't know what to do, but I read in the paper that there was a talk about flying saucers at the university and it was free. And that sounded interesting, so I went and the guy who talked turned out to be a psychologist, which I didn't know existed, that there were psychologists at that time in Europe. They were really few and they were mostly in the medical school and so forth. But, - so anyway this guy was really amazing. He was talking about how Europe had lost all belief in values and that kind of conviction that they knew where they were going and so, one thing that helped them was to imagine that there were these circles in the sky, these flying saucers. There was a real constant reporting of sightings at that time in the late forties, early fifties; people reported seeing all these kinds of flying saucers. And he said that that was a kind of a re-creation of old Hindu religious beliefs of the mandalas, which was a circle like a saucer which reflected all the forces of the universe in balance with each other. And that was his notion that we inherited this belief from generation to generation without even knowing it and then, when we needed, we kind of tried to bring out whatever helps at the time and at the time what helped here of course, the feeling that there was a center, a kind of a balance, a spiritual force that would lead out of the misery more and --

So that seemed intriguing. It seemed crazy too, but it was intriguing that there are people who are thinking about these things and try to make sense of them in a more or less scientific way. And so I read more of the books that this guy had written and he was Carl Jung, who was one of Freud's disciples and who split from Freud and went his way believing of these kind of archetypes that we have and that represent what's really important in life and so forth. So anyway, I studied it in psychology and it turned out that of course -

Rob: Wait, I just need to get this clear. You stumbled almost by accident because you were kind of broke and didn't have money to go to a movie and you went to a talk by Carl Jung on archetypes and that's what got you into psychology.

MC: Yeah.

Rob: Great Go ahead.

MC: But I couldn't study psychology in Europe, A, because I didn't have a high school diploma, and B, because I didn't have the money. And so I thought maybe if I came to the US I knew that here psychology was a driving kind of science or discipline. So I applied for a visa and left after about a year of during which I worked in Italy. A year later I got a visa and then after awhile I was able to come and I had to go to Chicago because that's where the sponsor that agreed to cover my expenses if couldn' t work there was an old Hungarian worker I didn't know, but he volunteered a religious group to be sponsor for immigrants from Hungary. So he sponsored my trip to -- or my coming to, immigration to the United States.. I arrived to Chicago with a dollar twenty-five cents, which I had with and I then I discovered when I arrived that this guy had passed away while I was in the airplane. So I had to find immediately some other arrangement and I started working nights at a hotel as an auditor, adding up each room's expense, you know so that if the guest checked out, his bill was ready for him to go and that was done at night between eleven in the evening and nine in the morning. And then I passed the equivalence exams for entering the university and so I worked at night and I went to the university of Illinois during the day and that was like five years of working at night and doing the school, it wasn't too easy, but then after that I transferred to the University of Chicago where they gave me some fellowships to be there and so I can quit the night work.

But I was really disillusioned about psychology here because it was the heyday of behaviorism and it was all about what you could learn from rats running in mazes and that was a long shot from Carl Jung and I didn't see how I could really -- I was looking frankly for some other work to do.

By the way, during that period I took a course in English as a second language at the university, actually it's called the rhetoric one or something and it was essentially what now would be ESL course. And the end of the term assignment was that you choose one American periodical from a list of five and then read them carefully, several issues and then try to describe what the magazine was about. It's a literary magazine so it was the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Paris Review and a couple other things like. And I chose the New Yorker and a couple other things like that and then I asked the professor if I could, instead of writing the assignment, whether I could send a story to the New Yorker and see if they'd publish it and the teacher, of course, laughed at me and said well okay, that's kind of crazy, but why don't you do that. . So I did it and, low and behold they accepted it for a publication. And that was before I knew English really. I mean all I knew before coming here was what I learned from comic strips that were published in the American Daily in Rome, in Italy, which was an American Newspaper and they had the comic strips, mostly Pogo strips and they were very interesting and I loved that strip, but again that was kind of a disillusionment because it turned out that nobody spoke like those critters from the swamp.

Rob: So what is the article about that you got in?

MC: Oh, it was a short story, just a few pages, based on my experience of the end of the World War. And it was autobiographical, kind of, but it wasn't a raw account. it was more of like a dramatic description of how it felt like and so forth. So it was . So it was over fifty years ago, I re-read it. it wasn't bad. And after that I wrote another one a couple of years later for the the New Yorker, which they published, but -- so I thought I could have other directions than psychology. I took courses in design at the University of Illinois with a very nice guy who was a very good artist. He has work at the Museum of Modern Art , MOMA, in New York and so forth. And I always liked to draw, so I worked on design things with him, but it didn't feel as good as psychology in many ways. And I did psychology that I liked.

So after moving to the University of Chicago, I got some teachers there who were much more broad minded than the ones I encountered earlier at Illinois and who kind of helped me to work on issues that I was interested in. And so I worked and I did my dissertation on creativity, the artist and, by studying students at the Art Institute of Chicago and trying to see what was different about them and compare to normal so-called normal students. But, there was one thing that I really kind of -- now in retrospect, I knew that it was a big issues, although at that time I couldn't put my finger on it very clearly, but it was that all of psychology, at the time, was focused on essentially pathological issues and nobody was interested in the kind of thing that simply make life worthwhile. And creativity was one of those and that's why I liked to do my dissertation, but most people who studied creativity were interested in the cognitive aspects, not in how it made it people feel and how it contributed to a sense of meaning and mission in life and so forth. And that's why I was interested because that's what was missing, at the end of the war from people an internal compass or a feeling that despite everything life had purpose of meaning and significance and so forth.

So, anyway, when I then finished my degree then I started teaching in a college, Lake Forest College] as you mentioned before, and then I talked to the department of sociology and anthropology because they were really interesting people. One of my classmates from Chicago had been teaching there in that department and I thought that would be a more interesting place than the psychology department, and so in fact I became chairman of that department after three years at Lake Forest, but I didn't know anything. I never took a course in sociology and anthropology, but I figured I could learn and I was always one step ahead of the students in learning the book so I could teach it and it was fun and so forth.

But, at the end, after five years at Lake Forest -- I was teaching a senior seminar for the students and I gave them two or three topics that interested me to choose from and that's what we would be holding the seminar on and one of the topics was play among adults, not children, but adults, and that's the one that the students chose. So we started the seminar and there each of the students to go and studied some people -- adults -- who were doing something that they didn't have to do but that they did it simply for the pleasure of doing it. And so one student studied a hockey team, one student looked at a soccer team, another one looked at a musical group and so forth. So they looked at people -- adults -- and interviewed and put it all down-- a similar set of questions. And when they came back we put their findings on a blackboard, it took several hours to put it all down, and then we looked at it and we tried to see what's common to them. And we were very surprised, I more than any of the kids, but I was surprised how similar the accounts of people who were doing very different things, essentially, how they described how it felt-- music, hockey, swimming, soccer, whatever. They all mentioned more or less the same things about how it felt like focused attention and forgetting your troubles and forgetting yourself and they mentioned that what was making all this possible is that they have a challenge, a clear goal, and they got feedback as they proceeded and so -- and as I was looking at that, I remembered that, gee, that's what I -- when I was a kid during the end of world war, one of the things that helped me a lot was that one of my uncles taught me to play chess. I was nine years old and I loved to play chess. And when the war really came close and the buildings collapsed around us and there were fire bombs and this and that, that if I played chess I wouldn't actually notice that; or if I noticed it, I wouldn't care about it.

And so I knew that there was this kind of experience that you could get when you're focused on something that had a clear goal and it was somewhat difficult to achieve and you have to use all of your capacities to achieve that goal and so forth. So that kind of seemed very familiar after awhile, and so at that point we called that the auto-telic experience, which meant -- the auto-telic is Greek word which means self contained or self goals- goal is inside what you're doing. And the Greek philosophers wrote about that and I -- so -- in a sense it was a rediscovery of what some of the Greek philosophers had noticed before, but they then let it go whereas I kept kept working at it And then after awhile, because somebody knew what an auto-telic experience was, I changed and said well let's call it Flow Experience because so many of the interviews we had described it as being carried away by a current, by being spontaneous, effortlessly moving with what's going on; even though it was n'tan effortless and it was difficult, but it felt kind of -- well like flow, so we called it flow experience.

And then everybody said oh yeah, flow sure, I have that experience, and it was really amazing how just switching that term made it suddenly accessible to almost everybody. And anyway, so that was -- I started writing this up with one or two of the students in that course, we wrote one the first article on flow was actually published in the American Anthropologist, which is the best anthropology journal,,because there we included examples from different play forums and different cultures and different ages and so forth. And that anthropologist was the first who picked it up and then slowly psychologists began to say hmm, that's maybe interesting. And then slowly became essentially one of the foundations of what since then has became positive psychology, which actually started only about seventeen years ago when Martin Seligman and I ran into each other on a beach in Hawaii and he stopped me and said are you Mike Csikszentmihalyi? I said yes, so he introduced himself and we walked back to the hotel and we had four days overlap there, and during those four days we decided to start positive psychology because he was just about ready to become the next president of the APA and the American Psychological Association. And he was thinking of leaving a legacy at the end of his -- not the end, but a combination of his career to make a difference for the future and he knew about my work and he thought that we could do something together and we wrote the first introductory article to positive psychology; which was published in the American Psychologist in 2000.. And after that, positive psychology became a big hit all over the world and it's growing -- almost too fast I think that it's growing. And -- so it's all a lot of coincidences in all of this from -

Rob: I think that you guys must have gotten together before that because he was some president of APA in 1998 and I know that there was a lot going on in the previous four or five years before that with the akumal conference and things like that.

MC: Yeah, that Akumal conference was something we organized together, yep and that was -- I think I had a hand in that. We thought we would bring together people what could be done and I insisted that if we did that we should invite people who were less than thirty years old because according to many studies, you -- new ideas are really being picked up by those who are not committed to old conceptual or theoretical methodological frameworks and who are still looking for something new and so forth. And so because Seligman was much better known than I, and he was already on the cusp of becoming president of APA. He wrote to fifty of the most established psychologists in the country and said, could you nominate young people that have worked with you whom you think would be interested in these ideas and he just summarized them in a few sentences, and who you think has a chance of becoming a chair of a psychology department by age fifty. And, so that was kind of an interesting recommendation, and that we worked out that out that kind of double-edged requirement together and low and behold, all of the people he wrote to answered and sent us names. So we then wrote to those young people who none of use really knew personally, but were recommended by the best in the country.

So we wrote to them and said well would you like to come to a place in Mexico where we could find -- we would give you food and lodging and we would have a week to talk together about this issue? And could you send us a a CV and kind of a declaration of where you want to go. So, okay, so after these fifty people who sent us recommendations, we chose twenty who seemed the most promising and we invited these twenty young people to a set of kind of villas that were on the seashore in Akumai, and this belonged to the Grateful Dead-- the band, you know the rock group and they didn't use it year round so they rented it for most of the year and we could get those at the end of -- generally of -- I guess it was 1999 . So they all came and we had a great, great week. We never put on a pair of shoes or a jacket or anything, which Jerry Garcia's -- a big room where in this house. and then whenever we got tired we would go into the Cenote, which is kind of a --

Rob: Underground cavern with an underground river. Cenote.

MC: What?

Rob: It's an underground cavern and underground river.

MC: Yeah. Well this was underground for a certain extent, and then just before reaching the ocean it would come out and flow freely, but only for about half a mile or so. Before that it's underground and then it comes out and -- but what was beautiful about it is you could sit in the water with a mask and watch when the tide came in, all of the fish around would -- there's schools of seafish who moved in with the south water. And they -- you know they did their business around for a couple of hours and then the tide would move back out and then the sweet water fish, who lived in the Cenote come in and they were completely different. But they were coming from inland out. And so we had these two groups of fish constantly moving and different types of fish, but you could -- anyway. "

Rob: Just for history, did Templeton help fund that meeting?

Rob: One of the early supporters of positive psychology was Templeton.

MC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Templeton --

Rob: Did he support the meeting?

MC: He supported the meeting; yeah he gave some to Marty. Marty was able to get some support. I don't remember now whether it all came from Templeton or some of it came also from another foundation, which was called the Atlantic Philanthropy. I'm not sure how, but yeah Templeton was a very strong supporter. In fact we -- after that, a few years after that, we had a meeting at his place in the Cayman Islands and that's when I met him before he passed away, but anyway. Yeah, he was very interested in supporting it.

Rob: I think he played a key role in the early stages of supporting. Templeton played a key role in supporting the early stages of positive psychology.

MC: Yes, that's true.

Rob: So, this has been some great history, but I don't want to run out of time and not talk about all your ideas because we haven't even gotten to that yet. So, let's jump into that now, okay?

MC: Okay, okay.

continued in the second half of the interview.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

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