"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."
What do the activities that make you lose track of time have in common? What does that tell you about yourself?
A boy amid the ruins of war, absorbed in a chessboard
Csikszentmihalyi spent his childhood in Europe during World War II, watching adults who had lost everything lose their sense of meaning and fall apart. That experience led him to spend his life studying what makes life worth living.
He recalled that only when he was absorbed in chess as a child could he forget the terror of war. Later, studying painters, he noticed they forgot hunger and fatigue while painting, yet quickly lost interest in the finished canvas—the starting point of his research on 'flow.'