Personally, I think that my most important conceptual contribution to science might turn out to be the work I have done trying to adapt evolutionary theory to human development, and particularly to creativity; and in terms of methodology, the work with the Experience Sampling Method, or ESM, which has resulted in the beginnings of a systematic phenomenology that I expect will be widely used in psychology. I must repeat, however, that this is only my personal opinion. In terms of how others evaluate my work, I am quite sure that those who have heard about it at all would single out the concept of flow as being my main contribution – however small. As defined here, flow is complete absorption in what one is doing.

So let's talk about flow. I think flow is important mainly for two reasons: because it is (a) an essential aspect of life that almost everyone recognizes as being something they have experienced, yet they had no name for it or way to understand it; and (b) the recognition of the phenomenon I ended up calling “flow” helped to add a new perspective to understanding human behavior, a perspective that eventually helped establish the subfield of Positive Psychology.

My original interest in this phenomenon probably started when, as a child, I was caught up in the tragic events of World War II. The stupid cruelty around me was hard to tolerate and impossible to understand. My two older brothers disappeared – the oldest snatched away from his family to spend years in Soviet prison camps, the younger one drafted out of college and killed in the defense of Budapest. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Powerful, wealthy, well-educated men acted like frightened children. Daily air raids chased us into basement shelters, and buildings crumbled in flames up and down the streets. I was ten years old while all this was going on, and could not figure out how grown-up people I had assumed to be rational and in control of their lives could suddenly become so clueless.

One small remaining island of rationality was that I had just learned how to play chess.