? Why do people working at computers become such experts at Freecell? More importantly, if we can understand why, can we use the knowledge to make productive work more attractive?
Saying that video games are more fun does not convey enough information. It's the kind of fun that matters.
Video games are absorbing. For insight into absorbing activities, let's look at Professor Csikszentmihalyi's research into what he called "flow" Flow is that condition in which you are totally occupied with the task you are doing. It has its name because people interviewed about it most frequently described the experience as being "in the flow." A flow experience has two benefits:
First, it promotes your happiness. This is a bit strange, because while you're in the flow you are not happy -- indeed you're not feeling any emotion. You are totally absorbed in your activity. You are not conscious of yourself. Nevertheless, people who spend a lot of time in the flow are happier the rest of the time.
Second, flow promotes your growth. As we shall see in a moment, to remain in the flow you must keep increasing your competence.
There are four conditions for flow. First, the activity you are involved in cannot be too complex. If it is too difficult for you, you will become anxious and drop out of the flow state.
Second, the activity cannot be too simple. If it is too simple, you will become bored and drop out of the flow state.
Third, you must always know what to do next. If you must pause to ponder what your next move is, that in itself will get you out of the flow.
Fourth, you must get immediate feedback on how well you are doing. You must be occupied with current activity and not looking back wondering how well you did nor looking ahead wondering how well you will have done.
While you're in the flow, you are practicing an activity, and as you practice the activity, you are gaining competence. That means that in order to remain in the flow, the activity must be getting more complex; otherwise, it would become too simple, you would become bored, and you would fall out of the flow. This is the way flow leads to growth.
Flow is a most satisfying state to be in. People seek it out. Given the opportunity, people will gravitate towards flow activities.
Flow is like a secular mystical state. The "Eighth Step" on the Buddhist eight-fold path is "right absorption." These games might be considered "wrong absorption," but absorption they are nonetheless.
In the current economic situation, many people are in a state very unlike flow: looking for jobs. For one thing, if you are looking for a job, you do not get immediate feedback. Indeed, if you're sending out resumes, for most of them you will get no feedback at all. You may not know what to do next: what kind of job to look for, where to look for it, how to apply, how wide an area to search in, whether to consider relocating. Some of the activities in job hunting are incredibly boring. On the other hand, some of the things you may need to do you are utterly unskilled at. It's no wonder that online job hunters spend so much time at video games -- video games are flow activities, and job hunting most assuredly is not.
This indicates how you can improve your performance in other activities -- plan them to promote flow.
When you're embarking on a new activity, it would be good if you could organize it so that you will always be in the flow. If you're taking a course, let us hope that it has been arranged so that you can be in the flow while learning. If you're going to have to teach yourself things, right at the beginning it will certainly look too complex: you don't know how little you can get away with knowing. But as soon as you know some of the most vital elements to include in your activity, you can try to work out a schedule that will make it possible for you to be in the flow.
In arranging a schedule, try to arrange to do simple activities that will give you a complete product or at least a complete part of a product, a complete something you can point to. Producing something will give you satisfaction. It is an indication that you are succeeding. That gives you feedback.
As you repeat the activity, combat boredom by including more aspects or making it more complex. Don't concentrate on the end result of your activity. Don't insist that other people see you as a success immediately. That will only delay feedback and promote anxiety. Instead, as you plan out the new activity, focus on the individual parts of it and ways to judge how well you're doing on those.
If you can plan out a new activity so that you can do it in the flow, it will be satisfying, promote your happiness, and develop your skills much more quickly than trying to force yourself to do it.
| About Author Thomas Christopher : |
|
Dr. Christopher is offering a growing collection of online income stream courses and ebooks directed at speakers, writers, and self-employed professionals. See them at http://www.createincomestreams.com/ Dr. Christopher, a Colorado public speaker and seminar leader, prepared these in response to requests from the Speakers In Colorado group.
| |
Article Source: http://www.bharatbhasha.net
Article Url: http://www.bharatbhasha.net/self_improvement.php/142909
Article Added on Friday, July 10, 2009
| Other Articles by Thomas Christopher | |
•How to Find Long Tail Keywords
Long tail keyword tools are essential for small web entrepreneurs. You cannot compete for the most searched keywords -- by now they have insurmountable competition. You must put together collections of micro niches which you can dominate. Each niche needs keywords by which people can find it. You need to do long tail keyword research to find those niches of low-competition keywords.
You need to find a large number of keywords, the number of searches for them per day or month, and the amount...
•Opt in List Building For Growing Your Online Income
You need an email list of people who are interested in what you are offering. You need to be able to get in touch with them in order to build relationships and pitch your products and services to them. A great deal of success on the Internet depends upon maintaining relationships with people. In order to build and use an email list, you need an autoresponder.
An autoresponder is a Web service that does three things:
It takes sign-ups from people to get on your email list. You post a sign-up...
•How To Offer a Teleseminar
You can use teleseminars to get people to join your email list. You can offer them as a benefit of your members-only web site. You can use them to pitch your products or those of a joint venture partner. You can sell admission to them. You can use the audio recordings in a variety of products.
Here are the steps you can take to offer a teleseminar.
Decide when to hold the teleseminar, what information to give, what product or service, if any, to pitch to the attendees.
Prepare your shopping...
•Increase Unique Web Site Traffic Six Tips
So what if you get 100,000 hits each month, if they were all by one person? Web site traffic alone is not enough. You need to get unique web site traffic to attract new customers.
Web site traffic can be measured two ways. Page views or hits are the requests for a page. The web server can easily count those.
Unique visitors are the distinct IP addresses requesting for a page over some period of time. Naturally, this requires keeping the addresses in a data base.
Google Analytics keeps track...
•Long Tail Keyword Choice for Niche Marketing
Selling small quantities each of many products or services, niche marketing to a great many niches, is sometimes called long tail marketing. It calls for search engine optimization using long tail keywords. Where does the term long tail come from?
Chris Anderson popularized the long tail in an October 2004 Wired magazine article. Long tail keywords and niche marketing go together on the Internet. To see the long tail, get a spreadsheet of related keywords with their monthly searches, sort...
•What Should I Offer People To Sign Up For My Email List
? Question: I know I need to build an email list of prospects, but why would people give me their email addresses?
Answer: Email lists are of utmost importance in Internet marketing. They allow you to build relationships of trust, and people are not likely to buy from you until they have evolved a sense of trust. One way to view the importance of email lists is that they allow you to do pre-selling. It typically takes seven to 12 interactions before people buy the first time. The...
•What Is Breast Augmentation What Are the Alternatives
What Is Breast Augmentation? What Are the Alternatives? One important achievement for a woman is to look her best. If you look your best, self-confidence and self-esteem follow. A larger breast size is currently appealing to American men. For a woman who was born with a deficit in that area, a common solution is to have breast augmentation surgery, but breast augmentation costs a lot, and there are alternatives to consider.
Depending on your location and the hospital chosen for that...
•Achieve the Goal of Breast Enlargement Without Surgery Pain or Expense
Before trying plastic surgery for breast enlargement, you should consider what you wish to accomplish. There are ways you may accomplish what you wish without the breast-enlargement cost and pain. You may not have to do anything to your breasts if you symbolize the feminine to men in other ways.
What are you trying to accomplish? If you need big breasts for professional reasons -- if you are an actress for example -- then you already know if you need big breasts. If you are in sports, you...
•You Need To Count And Cloak Affiliate Links
If you see a picture of a book cover on somebody's page with the title and Amazon price beneath it, you can click and buy the item. The owner of the page will get a piddling little share of the money that you spend at Amazon -- 4% or 6% of the purchase price. That linked picture is called an affiliate link. Most affiliate programs offer a robust 30%-50% of sales. Other kinds of affiliate links lead to pages where you can sign-up for more information. Again, whoever placed the link on his or...
•What to Advertise for to Find a Freelance Writer
Are you looking to outsource writing? You can place ads on the web either through the freelancing sites or classified ad sites.
What should you ask for? Here are things that people ask for in their advertisements:
Perfect spelling, grammar, and punctuation. You do not want to take your own time correcting the articles. (And viewing the ads, many of those advertising can not correct the articles nor write correct English themselves.)
Writing samples. It is common to ask for two or three...
| | Click here to see More Articles by Thomas Christopher
|
| |
