Writelife

There’s a fascinating book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and it helps to explain why the more successful you become in today’s world of work, the more your work becomes a nightmare from which you wonder if you’ll ever wake up.

It relates, in part, to something Seth Godin wrote about a while back in a post called Godin’s Leveraged Effort Curve. His post, and Csikszentmihalyi’s book, are related. In Seth’s post, he says:

Among highly-compensated workers, the amount of work you get paid for actually goes down as you get paid more.

He talks about how as you succeed, becoming more valued by the company, the less you do of the actual work you were hired for. A designer designs less. A programmer programs less. A writer writes less. Why? Because you increasingly spend time on what Seth calls “overhead,” which I take to mean meetings, “processes,” e-mail, PowerPoint presentations and all those other pains that gobble up time like some great, voracious mouth.

You are pulled from the worker fringes of the corporation closer toward the centre where the job seems to be more of a pointless soft-shoe routine than anything else. You do less of the work you enjoy doing and spend much more time managing - which could be enjoyable too if so much of the managing wasn’t concerned with personalities, politics and seemingly irrational processes.

In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi describes the state people get into when they are working well and happily – “flow,” where all the pistons are firing, one idea spawns another and … well, you just work. He describes autotelic work, jobs and workers (autotelic relating to purpose). He explains the term “autotelic,” saying:

The term “autotelic” derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward.

He also talks about some of the characteristics of this kind of activity, finding it is closely related to games. For example, some of the characteristics include clear goals, feedback (usually immediate) and increasing complexity.

It strikes me that those characteristics are experienced less the more you succeed. Goals become obscure or contradictory, feedback is vague and hesitant and complexity resides more in the processes and structure of the company than in the ostensible work you were initially hired to do.

While I would never argue that a person should do a job simply for the sake of the job itself – you do need to make a buck – I do think Csikszentmihalyi’s book helps to explain why the longer many of us are in companies, particularly as we succeed, the less satisfying our work becomes and the more frustrated we feel. I think we move further away from the work we enjoy as we are steered into work that offers little satisfaction - no flow. But as Csikszentmihalyi says, “… work can either be brutal and boring, or enjoyable and exciting.”

I think Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience is a book well worth reading for anyone who is in a job, especially a job they are doing fairly well in, yet finding themselves discontented. If nothing else, it should help put a few things in perspective.

You might also want to consider picking up Danger Quicksand - Have A Nice Day by David St. Lawrence, “If your career is losing ground under the pressures and uncertainties of today’s corporate employment …”

Tag: Career, Employment, Work

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