After intently study­ing peo­ple at work in a diverse range of fields, psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi out­lined what he deter­mined to be the five stages of the cre­ative process in his book Cre­ativ­ity:

  1. Prepa­ra­tion: Becom­ing immersed, con­sciously or not, in a set of prob­lem­atic issues that are inter­est­ing and arouse curiosity.
  2. Incu­ba­tion: A period whereby ideas churn around below the thresh­old of con­scious­ness. (It is dur­ing this time that unusual con­nec­tions are likely to be made.)
  3. Insight: When the pieces of the puz­zle fall together.
  4. Eval­u­a­tion: Decid­ing whether the insight is valu­able and worth pursuing.
  5. Elab­o­ra­tion: The slow and often rou­tine work of elab­o­ra­tion (the hard­est and longest stage of the process).

In this work, Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi coined the word ‘flow’ for the state when a per­son is totally absorbed in a cre­ative exer­cise: “an almost auto­matic, effort­less, yet highly focused state of con­scious­ness”. To achieve flow, one’s skills must match the chal­lenge at hand (as you can see in Csikszentmihalyi’s TED talk, when these two don’t align opti­mally you can be con­fronted with anx­i­ety, relax­tion or bore­dom, depend­ing on what is lack­ing: skills or dif­fi­culty of the challenge).

There are some fan­tas­tic notes on Csikszentmihalyi’s TED Talk at Lat­eral Action where they’ve pro­vided his answer to the ques­tion, How does it feel to be in flow? Any­one who has a pas­sion (be it paint­ing, pro­gram­ming or writ­ing) will surely recog­nise this:

  • Com­pletely involved in what we are doing – focused, concentrated.
  • A sense of ecstasy – of being out­side every­day reality.
  • Great inner clar­ity – know­ing what needs to be done, and how well we are doing.
  • Know­ing that the activ­ity is doable – that our skills are ade­quate to the task.
  • A sense of seren­ity – no wor­ries about one­self, and a feel­ing of grow­ing beyond the bound­aries of the ego.
  • Time­less­ness – thor­oughly focused on the present, hours seem to pass by in minutes.
  • Intrin­sic moti­va­tion – what­ever pro­duces flow becomes its own reward.