He heard Carl Jung lecture on UFOs in Switzerland and decided to study psychology.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was born in Fiume, Italy, in 1934, now the Croatian city of Rijeka. His father was a Hungarian diplomat. During the Second World War, one of his older half-brothers was killed in the Siege of Budapest, and the other was sent to a Soviet labor camp in Siberia.1
When communists took control of Hungary in 1949, his father resigned his diplomatic post. The family stayed in Rome as refugees, and the elder Csikszentmihalyi opened a restaurant. Mihaly dropped out of school to help support the family.2
Travelling through Switzerland as a teenager with no money for entertainment, Csikszentmihalyi attended a free lecture. The speaker described how Europeans traumatized by the war were projecting their anxieties as UFO sightings. The speaker was Carl Jung.3 Csikszentmihalyi moved to the United States at 22, earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 1960, and completed his doctorate there in 1965.
While studying the creative process in the late 1960s, he noticed that artists became so immersed in their work that they forgot to eat, drink, or sleep. Some described the experience as being carried along by a current.4
He named the state flow. His 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, defined it as complete absorption in an activity for its own sake, where challenge and skill are in balance and the sense of time disappears.5 The book influenced leaders across fields, from President Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair to Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson, who used it in preparation for the 1993 Super Bowl.6
In 2000, Csikszentmihalyi and Martin Seligman published a foundational article on positive psychology in American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association.7 Csikszentmihalyi died on October 20, 2021, at his home in Claremont, California, at the age of 87.8