The Fun of Hard Things

"What is really great is working at something really hard and getting it. When things come easy, just like with anything, it is not as fun."
(from my tweets, 2015)

I had a slightly unusual idea of fun back then. I tweeted that drinking was not how I had fun, that I had fun by achieving difficult things, and that anyone can have a good time drinking but I would rather have fun by winning.

That can sound like a workaholic's excuse. But the core idea, that the best enjoyment often comes from doing something hard and doing it well, is one of the best-supported findings in the psychology of happiness.

The psychology of flow

The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying what he called flow: the state of being so absorbed in an activity that you lose track of time and self-consciousness. He interviewed rock climbers, chess players, surgeons, dancers and factory workers, and found that they described their best moments in remarkably similar ways.

In his 1990 book Flow, he summed up the conditions. Flow tends to happen when:

• The challenge matches your skill. Too easy and you get bored. Too hard and you get anxious. Just right, slightly beyond what you can comfortably do, and you get absorbed.
• There are clear goals. You know what you are trying to do.
• You get immediate feedback. You can tell how you're doing as you go.

Csikszentmihalyi wrote that "the best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." That is almost exactly what my tweet was trying to say.

The paradox of work

In a 1989 study, Csikszentmihalyi and Judith LeFevre gave workers pagers that beeped at random times during the week. Each time, people wrote down what they were doing and how they felt.

The results were surprising. People reported flow far more often at work than during leisure. Free time was often spent in passive activities like watching television, which rarely produced flow. Yet when asked, people still said they wished they were doing something other than working. Csikszentmihalyi called this the paradox of work: we often enjoy challenge more than we think, while assuming relaxation is what will make us happy.

The point isn't that work is better than leisure. It's that active, challenging leisure, like sports, music, games, crafts or learning, tends to feel better than passive leisure.

We value what we struggle for

There is also evidence that effort makes the result feel more valuable. In 2012, Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Dan Ariely described what they called the IKEA effect. People who assembled furniture or folded origami themselves valued their creations much more than identical items made by someone else. They even valued them about as highly as items made by experts.

The effect disappeared when people failed to finish. Effort made things feel more valuable, but only when it led to success.

This matches the second half of my tweet. Getting something easily is pleasant. Getting something you worked hard for feels like yours.

What the philosophers said

The French writer and philosopher Albert Camus wrote about the hardest task imaginable. In Greek myth, Sisyphus is condemned to push a boulder up a hill forever, only to watch it roll back down each time.

At the end of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Camus reaches a surprising conclusion: "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Camus wasn't saying that pointless toil is good. He was saying that the meaning and satisfaction are found in the striving itself, not only in where it ends. It's a fitting idea for a blog with "the rise and the climb" in its name.

Some honest caveats

Flow is not always healthy. People can get absorbed in gambling or video games in ways that harm the rest of their lives, and some researchers have pointed out that people prone to workaholism can use challenge to avoid rest and relationships. As another of my old tweets put it, being a workaholic is no joke.

Rest and easy pleasures matter too. The goal isn't to make everything hard. It's to make sure that some of your time goes to challenges you've chosen and care about.

How to find more flow

• Pick something just beyond your skill. If an activity bores you, make it harder. If it overwhelms you, make it easier.
• Set a clear goal. "Practice guitar" is vague. "Learn the first verse of this song" gives you something to aim for.
• Get feedback fast. Choose activities where you can tell right away how you're doing.
• Swap some passive leisure for active leisure. Replace one evening of scrolling or TV with a game, a sport, a craft or a project.
• Finish things. The IKEA effect only works when you complete what you start.
• Rest, too. Hard things are most enjoyable when they're balanced with real recovery.

Today's reflection

When was the last time you were so absorbed in something difficult that you lost track of time? What would it take to get back there this week?

Sources

• Camus, A. (1942). The Myth of Sisyphus (J. O'Brien, Trans., 1955). Hamish Hamilton.
• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
• Csikszentmihalyi, M., & LeFevre, J. (1989). Optimal experience in work and leisure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56(5), 815–822.
• Norton, M. I., Mochon, D., & Ariely, D. (2012). The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 22(3), 453–460.