Have you read any of the books on ‘flow’ by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Transylvanian guy who heads the psychology department at the University of Chicago? What was your impression of them??
Do his books offer any new insights that are actually useful to everyday people, or is he just another Stephen R. Covey with his own buzzword/weird unpronounceable name?
Thanks.
I’ve read a couple.
The overall impression I got: interesting, and a somewhat unique field of study, but he doesn’t seem to understand that no matter how many anecdotes you string together, you still can’t call them “data.”
Oh, and I heard his name pronounced once, and it was something like “sick-shent-mee-yolli.”
In Hungarian, his name would be pronounce, approximately:
“MEE-hi CHEEK-sent-mee-hi-yee”
cs = ch
sz = s
ly = y (as in ‘yellow’)
We should call him, “Bob”.
Well, former football coach Jimmy Johnson, himself a former psych major in college, swears by him. Johnson was known to use Dr. M’s [ 
] ideas when he was at the U. of Miami (leading the program to two national championships), and presumably as the Dallas Cowboys coach (one Super Bowl victory and two or three appearances – I think; 'Boys fans can chime in with the details) after that.
Too bad for Johnson that not even Dr. M could ensure that his relationship with temperamental Cowboys owner Jerry Jones could stay on an even keel… :rolleyes:
Call him Bob? Why not call him Luxury Yacht?
Crazy, I was listening to an audiobook of Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness and Csikszentmihalyi is quoted a lot. The narrator pronounced it cheek sent me high.
That’s a good way of explaining it. “Cheek sent me high” is pretty damn close. Closer yet is “Cheek sent me high-ee”
Pronounced, of course, “throat-warbler mangrove”.
Well, you also need to keep in mind that he pretty much keeps writing the same book over and over again. Optimal Experience is essentially the core of his work, and most of his later works seem to be popularizations of the notions presented there. Creativity is kinda interesting, but about twice as long as it needs to be.
That being said, his ideas are interesting (if untestable), and are worth going through if you can find a used copy at a decent price. If you’re looking for practical advice, Covey is a better bet–but bear in mind that a lot of these people are getting at a similar set of issues, just from different directions.
on a tangent: what’s the “csik-” root? Other than that, I get “Michael ___-St. Michael”.