Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Lore & Background

Csikszentmihalyi was born on 29 September 1934 in Fiume, now Rijeka, then part of the Kingdom of Italy. His family name derives from the village of Csíkszentmihály in Transylvania. He was the third son of a career diplomat at the Hungarian consulate in Fiume. In 1944, when he was ten, one of his two older half-brothers was killed in the Siege of Budapest, and the other, Moricz, was sent to labor camps in Siberia. Decades later, Mihaly and Moricz were reunited in Budapest. His father was appointed Hungarian Ambassador to Italy after WWII, moving the family to Rome. When Communists took over Hungary in 1949, his father resigned; the regime expelled him and stripped the family of their Hungarian citizenship. His father opened a restaurant in Rome, and Csikszentmihalyi dropped out of school to help. He immigrated to the United States at age 22, working nights to support himself while studying at the University of Chicago. He received a B.A. in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1965, both from the University of Chicago. He then taught at Lake Forest College before becoming a professor at the University of Chicago in 1969. He married Isabella Selega in 1961. He had two sons: Christopher Csíkszentmihályi, an artist and professor at Cornell University, and Mark Csikszentmihalyi, chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. He died on 20 October 2021 of cardiac arrest at his home in Claremont, California.

Reader's Guide

Csikszentmihalyi is best known as the architect of the notion of flow. In his seminal work, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, he outlined his theory that people are happiest when they are in a state of flow—a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand. He characterized nine component states of achieving flow: challenge-skill balance, merging of action and awareness, clarity of goals, immediate and unambiguous feedback, concentration on the task at hand, paradox of control, transformation of time, loss of self-consciousness, and autotelic experience. To achieve flow, a balance must be struck between the challenge of the task and the skill of the performer. He also researched autotelic personalities, where a person performs acts because they are intrinsically rewarding. He identified intrinsic motivation as a powerful trait, and his final works focused on motivation and factors that contribute to motivation, challenge, and overall success.

Did You Know?

• Csikszentmihalyi saw Carl Jung give a talk on the psychology of UFO sightings when he was traveling in Switzerland as a young man.
• He was awarded the Clifton Strengths Prize in 2009, the Széchenyi Prize in 2011, and the Hungarian Order of Merit in 2014.
• He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of both the National Academy of Education and the Academy of Leisure Sciences.
• On 29 September 2023, Csikszentmihalyi's 89th birthday was remembered with a Google Doodle.
• The Just Dance character Mihaly is named after Csikszentmihalyi.

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