How Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow rewired my life as a creator and founder
What Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow taught me about building a life and business that feel fully alive.
When I finished reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, it felt less like I had discovered a new framework and more like someone had finally given language to the quiet system I had been building within myself over the past few years.
As a queer, gender-fluid parent raising a neurodiverse daughter while running a one-person business, my days often swing between chaos and calm, between control and surrender.
However, Flow showed me how to turn even those extremes into alignment. It taught me that fulfilment is found in the state of absorption where meaning, challenge, and skill converge.
Here are 10 ways I have been applying its lessons.
1. I define success through internal goals, not external validation
Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of setting clear and intrinsic goals gave me the courage to walk away from traditional career markers.
My goal is no longer tied to promotions or titles but to building a life spacious enough to raise my daughter with presence and to create work that outlasts algorithms.
Every choice, like my four-hour workday, the H.A.L.O. Masterclass, and the Human Algorithm newsletter, exists to serve that internal compass.
2. I design flow into my mornings
Cycling my daughter to school used to feel like a logistical task, but now it’s a ritual of rhythm and gratitude, where motion becomes a form of meditation.
It is the first pocket of flow in my day, a reminder that joy can be designed.
3. I turn constraint into creative freedom
By limiting my work hours, I created natural boundaries that sharpen my focus. When time is scarce, attention becomes sacred as every minute counts, and every task matters.
Paradoxically, the less I work, the more meaningful and profitable my work has become.
4. I treat boredom as a teacher
When Csikszentmihalyi wrote that any activity can become enjoyable if we adjust its structure, I began experimenting with admin work, emails, and research by gamifying them.
I set timers, tracked progress, and rewarded completion, so what was once drudgery became a form of mastery.
5. I embrace challenge as the gateway to growth
The balance between skill and challenge is where flow lives. Keynoting events, coaching executives, or navigating public spaces as a gender-fluid parent all stretch me beyond comfort. The discomfort is data because it tells me I am evolving, not regressing.
6. I practice the art of the autotelic self
I create for the sake of creating. Likes and followers don’t drive me; the act of transforming lived experience into language does. When I write about queerness, parenthood, or business, the process itself is the reward.
That is what Csikszentmihalyi calls an autotelic personality, a person who derives joy from the act of doing, not the outcome.
7. I reframe adversity into structure
The book’s insight that chaos can become a creative force helped me reinterpret my own pain. From teenage arrests to corporate burnout to the ongoing challenges of parenting, I have learned to build systems that turn disruption into design.
Flow is not the absence of struggle; it is the art of staying intact while moving through it.
8. I build relationships that cultivate flow
Flow thrives where trust and challenge coexist. My marriage works because my partner and I evolve together. We celebrate change instead of fearing it, and the same applies to friendships and collaborations.
If we can think deeply, laugh loudly, and hold silence comfortably, that’s flow.
9. I find unity in my contradictions
For years, I thought my life was fragmented as a writer, parent, founder, and advocate. Csikszentmihalyi refers to this fragmentation as the absence of a “life theme.”
Realising that all my work serves one throughline, like creating space for authenticity, turned noise into harmony.
10. I measure days by depth, not duration
A day filled with shallow busyness leaves me drained, while a single hour in a state of flow feels like expansion. That’s the quiet metric I live by now: not how much I did, but how fully I was there while doing it.
Reading Flow validated the structure of a life I had been intuitively building. It taught me that true success is not about avoiding chaos but dancing with it gracefully, and it reminded me that in every story I write, every client I coach, and every bedtime routine with my daughter, I can enter that timeless current of full presence.
See you next Sunday.
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