Tag Archives: leisure

RIP Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: author of the ground-breaking book, Flow

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Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi (YouTube.com)

Late in October, bestselling author and pyschologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi passed away in California at age 87. You can read the obituary in the Washington Post here.

Czikszentmihalyi — pronounced “chick-SENT-me-high” — was a university professor who built a mini empire around the nebulous concept of Flow. See this Wikipedia entry for more on his life and work.

Back in 2015, the Hub reviewed the original Flow as well as Creativity and Flow in 2016. He explored this further with Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement With Everyday Life.  It has the virtue of brevity when compared to the earlier two books on Flow: it runs just 180 pages, or 147 if you don’t count end matter.

Implications for Encore Careers

As noted in the earlier reviews, I’m intrigued by the concept of Flow as it applies to Encore Careers and life after corporate employment. As many blogs in the Hub’s Victory Lap section have pointed out, aging baby boomers still have a potentially long and creative period ahead of them that lies between the traditional career and what used to be called Retirement.

So it seems to me that if late-bloomer Boomerpreneurs are going to make a success of this new stage of life, they’d better tap into the concept of Flow. It’s all tied in with passion and mastery, which is why I went to the well one last time with Czikszentmihalyi.

He begins with a quotation from W.H. Auden: Continue Reading…

How to achieve “Flow” — or optimal experience

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flowBy Jonathan Chevreau,

Financial Independence Hub

In a book on happiness we reviewed here recently, I came across a book called Flow, billed in the subtitle as “The psychology of optimal experience.”

This book, first published as a hardcover way back in 1990, became a New York Times bestseller and has spawned several followup titles elaborating on the concept of flow and creativity. The author’s name is not easily recalled: Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor at California’s Drucker School of Management and also director of the Quality of Life Research Center at Drucker. (Incidentally, if you find the name unpronounceable and unmemorable, as I do, one of his books helpfully suggests the surname can be pronounced “chick-SENT-me-high.”)

Here’s what Wikipedia says about Flow and the author who coined the term.

I must say that I was a bit skeptical about the term at first: Continue Reading…

Let’s give the word Retirement an early Retirement

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Here’s a piece I did recently for Money Magazine, entitled Let’s retire the word Retirement. For the convenience of one-stop shopping and archival purposes, I’ve also reproduced the piece below, with a few changes and links added since it was originally published in the current issue of the magazine.

By Jonathan Chevreau

This magazine, like its sister web site and its competitors, is devoted to the topic of money. That’s an obvious statement but stay with me.

We all need money to live, both in the present and the future. This basic fact has created the entire financial industry, dedicated to the notion of saving for a rainy day so we’ll have enough money both for today’s needs as well as tomorrow’s. And the week after, the year after that and so on, bringing us ultimately to the concept of Retirement.

Retirement is the greatest marketing bonanza ever conceived for the financial industry. If a mutual fund company, bank, insurance firm or ETF maker runs an ad, what is the major concept behind its marketing?

senior couple of old man and woman sitting on the beach watching
How Advertising portrays Retirement

Typically, it features a mature couple frolicking on a beach or golf course, care-free, active, smiling, still in love and doing nothing that resembles work.

I don’t know when work acquired such a bad reputation but I’d venture  to say that in Canada, this phenomenon started to gather steam when London Life popularized its Freedom 55 campaign. Continue Reading…

Worried about money in Retirement? The best parts are free!

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happy mature couple relaxing baltic sea dunes
Walking by the lake? Priceless!

 

By Jonathan Chevreau

Here’s my latest MoneySense blog, entitled The Cost of Leisure Activities in Retirement. Given the media fuss today over Sun Life’s latest “Unretirement” survey — see Barry Critchley’s piece at the FP and my subsequent blog here at the Hub — you may find some solace in the MoneySense blog, which suggests that many common activities in retirement just don’t cost that much.

As for the prospect of more of us working until age 66, I don’t think that’s all that tragic: this web site focuses on longevity and the concurrent idea that the longer we stay active and productive the better — both for our financial situations and our sanity, or that of our significant other!

By the way, I expressed my views about the Sun Life survey and “Unretirement” Wednesday evening on CTV TV, which you can find here.

Here’s the blog: Continue Reading…