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Saturday, December 8, 2007

Finding REAL 'Flow' at work ... And a Tribute to Mark Polino

My coworker and friend - Rubal, is reading the book "FLOW" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  Its one of my favorite books, great content,  and partly because I love asking people to read the name of the author ;-).

Mr. Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high-ee) , former chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, has been the Thinker of the Year 2000.

According to one of the studies in the book - they track how people feel at various times during the day. The studies say that people say - "I wish I was doing something else", most when they are *working*. Our culture and media have somehow lead to this outlook. You would rather be watching TV or relaxing on a beach, than working.

The irony is that people report real happiness and flow the most during *work*. The don't report real happiness while relaxing, or doing nothing. Though, there is a chance that you might report real happiness watching your team win a thrilling match, however their is a greater chance of finding the same happiness at work.

The moments when somebody is in a high-challenge, high skill situation accompanied by feelings of creativity, concentration and satisfaction -were reported more often at *work* than at home. 

Ever since I read the book few years back, I have believed the key ingredient is "HIGH SKILL". If you are skilled, you will be happy at work.

Now consider this - Mark is the CFO of Transit TV, his day job. He uses Dynamics GP at work, and I am sure he excels at his job. He knows GP so well.

However, there's a ton more -

1. He hosts DynamicAccounting.Net - which is the best and biggest unbiased Dynamics GP resource on the web,

2. He has a podcast on GP - GP Rocks

3. He has a video series "Dynamic Sherpa Videos",

4. He regularly posts replies in Dynamics GP Newsgroups,

5. He's been interviewed by Steve Bragg of Accounting Best Practices,

6. He regularly promotes new bloggers and community efforts related to Dynamics GP

and I don't even know Mark personally. That's just the stuff I ran into while working with Dynamics GP. There might be a ton more.

The only way somebody can do all that is - with very high skill. He excels at GP and doesn't mind working hard to make sure his skills always match up with changing technology. 

In his recent post - "A Whack at My Ego" - he writes about how he discovered something new. I can imagine Mark reading about the new views and then going into Flow .... "Do I have these views in my installation?", "When did they come out?", "What can I do with this new information?"

Check out any of his posts and you'll know what I mean.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Thanks for the kind words Jivtesh but another word for what I do is "crazy". Fortunately, I have a very understanding family and apparently, very little fear.

Keep up the nice work on your site. Nobody knows more than me how much work it is to post something regularly!

Mark