Work Smarts: What CEOs Say You Need To Know to Get Ahead

Chapter 8

Flow

The man who created the pioneering video game company Atari prefers to play old-fashioned chess.

When Nolan Bushnell got on the phone with me, that was the first thing he said: “When I play chess, I have a complete tree of moves, five or six moves in advance. For any move [my opponent] makes, I’ve thought through that move for three, four more moves. So if I wanted to, I could immediately move after he moves. Now if you move fast, I move fast, then he moves fast and then we stop and recalculate. I play all-in about an hour a day.”

Nolan is describing something that happens to him when he plays chess that also happens to millions of teenagers who play video games. They get in the flow. Flow is a term first coined by a Hungarian psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who described it simply as the moment when a person is completely immersed in what they are doing. I can say that in various moments of writing this book, I have been in the flow. You lose track of time. Your world is narrowed into the task at hand and in my case, it was translating my thoughts onto the computer screen.

Mihaly studied many people who easily slip into the flow—­composers, artists, and athletes. But everybody enjoys a state of flow, whether it’s gardening, cycling, or writing. Even companies enjoy a state of flow. Sometimes you can feel the energy of a company that’s on a core mission, like Apple. Apple under Steve Jobs had a flow. So does Starbucks under Howard Schultz. Flow is not only ...