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. 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. Csikszentmihalyi dropped out of school to help at his father's restaurant in Rome. 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 taught at Lake Forest College before becoming a professor at the University of Chicago in 1969. He married Isabella Selega in 1961 and had two sons: Christopher and Mark. He died on 20 October 2021 of cardiac arrest at his home in Claremont, California.

In Their Own Story

The petals drift upward, caught in an invisible current. There is no score to keep, only the sensation of motion itself. The player becomes one with the wind, moving effortlessly through valleys of green and gold. In this silence, the boundary between controller and consciousness dissolves, achieving the state he described.

Reader's Guide

Csikszentmihalyi is best known for the concept of flow, which he outlined in his seminal work Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Flow is a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand, where people are so involved that nothing else seems to matter. 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; if the task is too easy or too difficult, flow cannot occur. He also researched autotelic personalities—people who perform acts because they are intrinsically rewarding—and intrinsic motivation, which he identified as a powerful trait to optimize positive experience and well-being.

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 the National Academy of Education and the Academy of Leisure Sciences.
• On 29 September 2023, his 89th birthday was remembered with a Google Doodle.
• The Just Dance character Mihaly is named after Csikszentmihalyi.

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