David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

I can retire.

I can sit back.

I can just relax.

And you find out that that kind of relaxation is actually hell.

It's hell for creative people to squander time.

their God-given creative juices and capacities.

And I was really lucky to read the book Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi early on.

I had to practice that with AI over the last few days because I knew I was going to cite him, and I butchered his name several times.

So AI taught me how to pronounce that, at least somewhat correctly.

But his...

Main work over his career was essentially the concept of flow that came out of a search for understanding happiness.

Why are some people happy?

When are they happy?

And what he learned was quite illuminating.

He learned that people aren't happy when they sit on Mojito Island.

They're not happy when they're free of all obligations and responsibilities.

No, they're happy in these moments where they're reaching and stretching their capacities just beyond what they can currently do.

In those moments of flow, they can forget time and space.

They can sit in front of the keyboard, program a hard problem, think 20 minutes have passed, and suddenly it's been three hours.

They look back upon those moments with the greatest amount of joy, and that is what peak happiness is.