Following through on my accepting the challenge of Are You Ready to Succeed, I 've been reading Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience (1991) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I thought it was time that I broadened my perspective on self-realization, and the book was on Rao's required reading list for his course. The book is written with the rigor of academic research and scientific methodology, and the author (I don't want to write his last name too often in this entry) has a big academic reputation. But I was surprised that in the second chapter he describes the qualities of consciousness and flow in terms that come straight out of yogic and Buddhist thought. That realization allowed me to plow through the remainder of the book from a different angle.

He's currently teaching at the Quality of Life Research Center (QLRC) at the Drucker School of Management in California.