Tag Archives: work

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

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | November 3, 2021

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…

Work while you play, play while you work

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | October 8, 2016

“Playing” at Dublin’s oldest pub (photo J. Chevreau)

As I write an early draft of this blog, I am in Dublin, Ireland, at the midpoint of the second week of a two-week holiday. Readers may recognize this blog’s headline as the subtitle of the new book I’ve recently published, Victory Lap Retirement. It was written with ex-banker Mike Drak, whose blogs have been regularly posted or republished here at the Hub.

I believe it was our editor, Karen Milner, who came up with this inspiring subtitle but whoever first articulated it, we all agreed on it once it came up. I often think of it when I’m working and really playing, or vice versa.

“Working” CIFFA executives at FIATA 2016 World Congress in Dublin this week.

For example, right now I’m working on writing this blog while officially “Playing” at being on holiday. The ostensible reason for the trip was to tack on a week’s vacation to a business trip my wife took to attend the FIATA 2016 World Congress in Dublin. That’s Ruth on the extreme right of the photo, along with colleagues and a spouse at a reception at Dublin’s Trinity College.

Such “Work” came at the end of a solid week of being a tourist elsewhere in Ireland, with the couple with whom we’ve been travelling.

I suggested to them in jest that the job of being a “tourist” would be a tough one if it meant 49 weeks a year, eight hours a day of “touristing,” however much it might seem to be a dream job. Come the end of any week of touring historical sites, art galleries and such – much of it on one’s feet, either walking or standing – you’d greet the arrival of the weekend and the cessation of tourism for a few days with some relief! (If you happen to be a Facebook friend, you can see about 40 photos of the trip under Ireland, here.)

It’s all relative really: if you were a writer for a Tourist guide book like Lonely Planet, you’d no doubt regard tourism as “work.”

Playing while you Work

How the Age of Longevity will change your life and mine

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | July 2, 2016

100-plus-book — 100 Plus by Sonia Arrison (SingularityHub.com)

One of dozens of books I read for a talk I gave on how Longevity Changes Everything is entitled 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity will Change Everything, from Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith.

The author, Sonia Arrison, challenges the reader to at least open one’s mind to the possibility of human beings reaching the age of 150, which of course is a good 30 years longer than the age reached by modern centenarians, although still much less than the biblical Methusalah, Noah et al.

Certainly, as I was reading at the same time Moshe Milevsky’s new second edition of Pensionize Your Nest Egg, I was conscious of the financial implications of breakthroughs in human longevity. Milevsky’s preferred form of “Longevity Insurance” is life annuities and new hybrid variations of Variable Annuities that provide both stock market exposure and some guarantees and mortality credits provided by insurance companies.

Financial implications of Longevity

Is it Work or is it Passion?

Posted By Financial Independence Hub | January 23, 2016

Work or Passion 2 — Billy and Akaisha Kaderli

By Billy and Akaisha Kaderli

Special to the Financial Independence Hub

While taking a break from the sun and surf, relaxing in my hotel room in a tiny beach town on Mexico’s rugged Pacific Coast, my cell phone rang.

“Howdy, Beautiful!” my friend of four decades shouted from snow country, thousands of miles away. “Been watchin’ your website for years and I read all your stories. Love ‘em. But I thought you were retired!”

How many times over the twenty-plus years since we left the conventional work force have we heard that challenge? Our responses have ranged from surprised silence to justification of our volunteer work, to just laughing out loud.

We run a popular website, photograph our travels and share our lifestyle adventures with people like you. Some think that by doing this, we have somehow become unfit to call ourselves “retired.”

Once findependent, you’re free to choose how to spend your time

Today I would like to pose this question to you: “Once you leave the mainstream labor-for-paycheck world and become financially independent, aren’t you free to choose what you do with your time? When is something considered work, and when are you pursuing a passion?” Continue Reading…

How to achieve “Flow” — or optimal experience

Posted By Jonathan Chevreau | May 8, 2015

By 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…