Flow

Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, Professor of Psychology & Management at the Drucker School of Claremont Graduate University is perhaps the world's best-known expert on Creativity.

At one point in his research he asked a lot of people when they were most creative at work. The answers were surprising.

It turns out that people who have the most intense experience of being creative at work know the rules and have the skill to work with these limitations, at the same time as being challenged to rise above them. And where people don't have enough structure, the most creative make up their own rules and then make a game of beating themselves in each subsequent repetition. Ultimately, these people experience a state where things seem to happen by themselves, without conscious effort. And they all report that state as an optimal experience - a kind of joy, pleasure or happiness in which they transcend their limitations by being fully involved in them. 

Csikzentmihalyi coined the word ‘flow’ for that experience.

Workers aren't the only ones to feel it. Atheletes who report that tennis balls seem to hit themselves over the net, or that legs seem to run a marathon by themselves, call this experience 'being in the zone'. In Zen Buddhism, the experience where a question answers itself, equates to an advanced realisation about 'the way things really are'.

Essentially we could say that the people who feel flow marry some kind of strict discipline with freedom. Both are key ingredients in cultures that experiences high levels of novelty, productivity and personal happiness. For, as Csikzentmihalyi points out, all 'historically creative’ periods in human history were marked by an interplay of rigorous structure and freedom to experiment, play, bend or supercede the rules.

The Renaissance period in Italy, for instance, would not have flourished like it did, if ancient techniques and rules of sculpture had not been uncovered in archeological digs in Rome. At the same time, money and time were abundant and the rediscoveries could be playfully tested in their new environment. Putting the two together led to innovative advances in both materials and methods of making art.