Life, Psychology

Marseillaise

Reading Csikszentmihalyi on a family Bank Holiday in sunny France, I was reminded of the tyranny of progress and performance. 

Not that it was Csikszentmihalyi’s fault. We’d been talking with friends the night before going away about learning musical instruments and the merits of lessons and regular practice. 

Now I firmly believe that the best way to improve at anything is to practice regularly – the action of water on a stone is gradual, but inexorable. I have also learnt that the best way to practice anything regularly is to integrate it your daily routine. The problem is there are only so many hours in the day. What to do? More, less often?

I remember from my time working in advertising in France in the 1990s that people have predictable daily and weekly habits. But we do not generally form monthly habits and signally fail to form fortnightly habits. This gave rise to the unspoken rule, never buy an an Ad next to a monthly or worse a fortnightly TV show – they never pull in a regular audience and generally fail. Even if they are well liked once, people forget to tune in ever again. We are creatures of routine.

So where does that leave us with practice, hobbies and busy lives. My conclusion is the only practical options are dedicating daily or weekly slots. My daily slots are all pretty much full: kids, work, kids, eat, dishwasher, potter briefly, bed. 

The brief evening pottering – which recently was when I walked our ageing dog – is the remaining ‘purposeable’ slot. But a few minutes spinning the wheels, albeit aimlessly, seems a very small concession to relaxation. It’d take something ‘light’ and ‘fun’ to fit in edgeways in that small nook in a way that didn’t feel like a chore. 

The ukulele used to be that thing. And for nearly a year I played five songs nearly every night and went from hopeless and tuneless to strumming comparatively competently. Then the dog got incontinent and the habit got broken. So I could go back to the uke. But here’s where the tyranny of progress kicks in. Our friends feel I should have lessons, improve, look to play publicly or at least in private duets and preferably drop the four strings and migrate to a proper six string guitar. 

Phew. Where’s the eudaimonia in all that – the pressure to rapidly improve my skill to meet the challenge of musical excellence feels most unappealing. I said ‘no thanks’. They looked at me like I was mad – what’s the point of strumming the same five songs and never playing them with, or for, someone. Where’s the progress, where’s the performance. The point though – I think – is I quite enjoy it as a personal exercise for me, for ten minutes at night. The simple challenge I set myself is met by my rudimentary and very slowly improving strumming skill: producing modest, low-impact, private, musical ‘flow’.

Separately, on hols I was congratulated twice on my French – one woman said “Vous parlez très très bien Monsieur”. Another asked me if I was a French teacher in England. 

I had given up keeping up my French. I’d given up listening to ‘intermediate French’ audio magazines I subscribed to when I first came back from France. There were no opportunities to match my once reasonable skill with any worthwhile challenge at home. Talking about nothing much in French, just to speak French, seemed pretty pointless. And over time I felt myself going backwards which made matters worse.

But ‘flow’ in French has returned. Family holidays now provide me the perfect opportunity to navigate the modest but important challenges of travelling, accommodating, feeding and entertaining my little family. And they seem quietly impressed and genuinely grateful for my efforts. Now I have a stage on which to perform, some modest (daily?) investment in progress and improvement suddenly seems worthwhile – I’ll be looking at what the web has to offer for ‘intermediate French’ these days.

‘Flow’, progress and performance are closely intertwined, so much Csikszentmihalyi amply demonstrates. But I conclude the recipe and mix aren’t always the same. There are things we do well, some we may do very well and many we could do better. I believe good day-to-day ‘flow’ lies in accepting that not everything we do has to be excelled at. Sometimes the only audience that matters is ourselves. 

Aristotle, Life, Psychology

Fluid Dynamics

A good friend put me onto the ‘flow’ psychology of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. As is not uncommon with names with unfamiliar spellings, it’s easy to glide over Csikszentmihalyi in text while subconsciously logging him as unpronounceable. But if you are going to commend him to others it’s good to get your mouth round his name. Broken up it’s not so hard ‘Chick-sent-me-hi-yee’. And there is modest satisfaction to be had in mastering the unpronounceable – a theme I will return to…

Csikszentmihalyi’s thesis is beguilingly simple. ‘Flow’ is the exhilarating feeling of meeting ‘high challenge’ with ‘high skill’. When challenge is low, and our skills are too, we slump into boredom and apathy. When challenge is too high we suffer worry and anxiety. Where our skills comfortably exceed our challenges we are relaxed or in control. When a challenge threatens to stretch us we are alert and ‘aroused’. Finally, ‘flow’ is that feeling of achievement, fulfilment and flourishing which comes with doing a difficult thing well.

In the classic ‘flow’ diagram (above), there are eight segments: control, relaxation, boredom, apathy, worry, anxiety, arousal and ‘flow’ with a point of intersection in the middle. Some people add a ‘subject mean’ as a central zone around the point of intersection which is our personal average zone for a given activity or situation.

When I first looked at one of these diagrams I more or less cottoned on to the eight segments. But I couldn’t decide what to make of the point of intersection – is it a good place? Or a bad place? Or is it a completely neutral place?

Over last weekend, playing football, then watching it, a children’s film, my mother and thinking about ageing bodies and minds, I conclude the ‘subject mean’ or ‘point of intersection’ is a moveable feast. And therein lies the rub, it seems to me. With ‘flow’, the goalposts are constantly moving – and not just one way.

How so? One of the great lessons of adult life is that aptitude usually comes a poor second to application and practice. Almost everything gets easier with practice. Equally, no-one from Einstein to Nijinsky achieved great skill without hours and hours (or if you believe Malcolm Gladwell more or less 10,000 hours) of practice. Watching my kids trying new things they readily assume – as I did when I was young – that they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at something due to early luck or accidents of fate.

Certainly some kids learn faster than others, some are more physical some have greater dexterity. But like everything with nature and nurture, these basic skills and aptitudes are developed or not developed by the hours spent at a blackboard, in ballet shoes… or in football boots.

On Saturday I was kicking a football about with my son. I was a decent footballer in my day, but very one footed. No left peg. But trying it, within the space of a dozen passes concentrating uniquely on using my left foot, I went from feeling completely off balance to passing comparatively cleanly, crisply and accurately. Not exactly ‘flow’, but some ‘arousal’ and less ‘anxiety’ than the first clumsy attempt. My point of equilibrium had shifted a little.

Later in the day, I watched one of the most talented midfielders of the last 15 years demonstrate the opposite. Paul Scholes saw red in the all Manchester FA Cup Semi-Final at Wembley. A lunging high tackle earned him a sending off. His immensely gifted feet, and the quickness to single-handedly turn a game, now were fractionally too slow to ‘flow’ at the highest level. He was ‘aroused’ to futile anger instead.

From a footballer’s inexorable decline, to the sad story of 1970s Prime Minister Harold Wilson which preys on my mind from time to time. We all hope that when the body falters the mind will stay sharp. Poor Harold Wilson, who went to the same Oxford College as me, was allegedly the first to realise his hitherto razor sharp brain was slipping. He felt the need to resign quickly before anyone else noticed. From Paul Scholes and Harold Wilson I infer our ability to ‘flow’ can diminish with physical and mental decline – and our ability to cope with it too.

But perhaps inexorable decline is not the way to think about ‘flow’. Watching my mother play with my kids on Sunday, she showed them a yoga stretch which her yoga teacher recently described as ‘awesome’. She won her first ever lawn bowls team trophy last year and took the individual ladies prize this year. She is 67. Perhaps we need to be kind to ourselves and move our interests and our ‘mean points’ so we don’t lose our own joy as we age. I think of this on my bike some days when cycling to work feels like a chore. In a decade or two I will dream of the physicality and strength I take completely for granted in those moments. It changes my perspective.

But even if we are kind to ourselves over the long haul, finding ‘flow’ every day is a new challenge each and every day. On Saturday morning I watched ‘Night at the Museum’ with my boy. It’s a jolly Ben Siller romp in a New York museum where all the exhibits come to life and brawl with each other at night. It’s my son’s current favourite. As with so many of the US kids genre, there are plenty of worthwhile homilies and invariably a good moral to the story.

After twists and turns and trials and tribulations this one ends with father and son reunited and Attilla the Hun, Christopher Columbus and assorted cowboys, animals, Romans and great Americans dancing together in one big non-alcoholic all night party. The moral of the story? If we all pull together, everyone can get along. But in the real world, once the ‘flow’ of a romping script’s worth of challenges had been briefly toasted, they’d all have been ‘bored’ and ‘apathetic’ by morning – and fighting again the following night. With ‘flow’, unlike fairy stories, there are no “happily ever afters”. Every day needs filling. No challenge, no ‘flow’.

So Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘flow’ is both blessing and curse – like Aristotle’s Eudaimonia, it’s a life’s work, and there is no easy solution. To paraphrase Csikszentmihalyi himself: life is “what we experience from morning to night, seven days a week, for about seventy years if we are lucky, for even longer if we are very fortunate… there are no gimmicks, no easy shortcuts. It takes a total commitment to a fully experienced life, one in which no opportunities are left unexplored and no potential undeveloped, to achieve excellence.”

So every day, whether it’s kicking a ball with my left foot, unevenly strumming a ukulele or lashing together another blog post, all are opportunities to ‘flow’. The art of ‘flow’, I think, is recognising it is there to be had in small things as well as large, in things we are objectively very ‘good’ at. But also in things we aren’t but are prepared to give a try.

And if ‘flow’ is an internal ‘feeling’ then we substantially have the power to judge it and feel it for ourselves. So I’ve decided the art is in choosing well the things we invest time in doing, being kind to ourselves in setting the bar and not being too hard on ourselves as we progress. Like a personal pacemaker in our own race of life, ‘flow’ runs only as fast and as far ahead of us as we let it.

Aristotle, Life, Work

Laughter

As I wrote the other week, I now know the cognitive cost of self-control is ‘ego depletion’. In Wired’s less technical terms, acts of self-control ‘piss the ego off’ and attract us to angry thoughts, words and deeds.

‘Ego depletion’ has sometimes caused me to undo my good works with an ‘unnecessary’ withering remark or ‘unduly’ bleak assessment. But whilst these may seem ‘unnecessary’ or ‘undue’ in the eyes of others – and damaging certainly – experience, and now evidence, show a ‘depleted ego’ demands its redress. Is there a better way? This week, I discovered, that laughter works just as well as scything remarks in topping up the cognitive cost of self-control.

I was in an absolutely packed three day management meeting in Madrid. Travel, time differences, lots of people, lots of subjects, lots of personalities and inevitably a certain amount of self-control required to navigate with aplomb. Surely the perfect tee up for one of my incongruous blasts. But this week I didn’t do it.

Of course I was tempted. Tired, hot, periodically irritated and regularly in receipt of the ‘gift’ of feedback, a good put down or an acerbic ‘reality check’ was sorely tempting for a sore ego. But I didn’t do it. Instead, I applied what I have learned in recent months and years: watch my energy, leave other people’s stuff alone if it doesn’t really concern me, avoid tangling unnecessarily. Best of all though, I stumbled upon some humour.

Humour in big meetings is a delicate balance. People are often more ready to laugh ‘at’ you than ‘with’ you. As Aristotle rightly points out there is a fine line between ‘boor’ and ‘buffoon’. But a winning smile and an amusing turn of phrase was sometimes all it took to lift the mood when the whole room was just as ‘ego depleted’ as I was.

The net result? I left with the job done – feeling tired, but cheerful – and with smiling goodbyes all round. Much better than angry with myself, diffident and apologetic for unnecessary barbs.

In sum, a moment of laughter tops up a depleted ego far more effectively than a verbal headbut – however tempting…

Life, Work

Indirectness

I read a fascinating article this week which gives the theoretical underpinnings – and even an equation – to make transparent why we are opaque.

Indirectness, innuendo, plausible deniability and nuance are all tricks of language we learn. But on the face of it they seem inefficient, unclear and downright unprofessional.

I’ve often felt put out – particularly at work – when people pull me up and say ‘what exactly do you mean’, or ‘what exactly are you suggesting?’ I sometimes find these sorts of questions irritating – even scalding. When the topic is complex or involves others, being suddenly pulled up can leave me feeling undermined, impugned or misunderstood. What’s going in feels far worse than a simple accusation of imprecision or rambling. Now I know why.

Steven Pinker of Harvard explains it all very straightforwardly in his 2007 paper ‘The logic of indirect speech’ which is vividly brought to life in an RSAnimation. Paraphrased in a [I admit large] nutshell, he writes:

Humans employ several, mutually incompatible, modes of cooperation and, as a result, are extremely touchy about their relationships. With some (typically family, lovers, and friends), they freely share and do favours; with others, they jockey for dominance; with still others, they trade goods and favours.

The ‘dominance’ relationship is governed by the ethos, “Don’t mess with me.” It has a basis in the dominance hierarchies common in the animal kingdom, although in humans, it is based not just on brawn or seniority but on social recognition: how much others are willing to defer to you.

The ‘communality’ relationship conforms to the ethos, “What’s mine is thine; what’s thine is mine.” It naturally arises among kin bound by shared genes, within monogamous pair-bonds, bound by their shared children and by close friends and allies bound by shared interests. It can be extended to others by nonverbal cues of solidarity such as physical contact, communal meals, and shared experiences.

The ‘reciprocity’ relationship obeys the ethos, “You scratch my back; I’ll scratch yours.” It has an evolutionary basis in reciprocal altruism. It is usually signaled by fair exchanges or division into equal portions but, unlike the other two relationship types, can be negotiated by people via explicit verbal contracts.

People distinguish these relationships sharply, and when one person breaches the logic of a relationship with another, they both suffer an emotional cost. Nonetheless, humans often have to risk these breaches to get on with the business of life, and they often use language to do so. In exploring the boundaries of relationship types, humans anticipate what other humans think about the relationship: what the other party in the relationship thinks; what any gossipers think; and what the other party thinks about what they think about what the other party thinks about what they think, and so on.

The need to preserve our relationships while transacting the business of our lives can thus explain humans’ tendency to fill their lives with innuendo, hypocrisy, and taboo.

So now I understand why I sometimes say things in less than transparent ways at work – and feel put out when people don’t get my subtle drift. There’s always a complex interplay of ‘dominance’, ‘communality’ and ‘reciprocity’ in the workplace. It’s the most obvious place where the constantly shifting balance of cooperation and competition between humans means clarity isn’t always appropriate, realistic or welcome.

As Pinker shows, human relations are too just complex for plain speaking, sometimes we have to take the indirect route.

Life

Thrones

Important to give credit where it is due, so here’s a plug for Sarah Bakewell’s ‘How to live: A life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer’.

I’ve found it a very good introduction to Montaigne the man, but I’m also enjoying finding out about his era of pre-enlightenment/renaissance France and how views of Montaigne changed in later centuries as people judged him and read him through the prism of their own times.

Robert Graves’ ‘Count Belisarius’, the last great Roman General I’ve written about before, was similarly (if fictionally) revealing of the era of Constantinople at the head of the Holy Roman Empire and the many fractious tribes of Europe and Asia Minor. These are periods and places which aren’t always part of the simplified historical narrative of why the world is currently as it is.

Several of Bakewell’s references are worth reprising – first a Spanish theologian (I wonder who?) opined that no state could be at peace “…if everyone considers his own God to be the only true God… and everyone else to be blind and deluded.” Surely, as true of our own personal opinions and beliefs as it is of nations.

But the pick of Montaigne for me is:

“On the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own rump.”

A reminder to let go of status, do as one would be done by and to live simply and well.