An "autotelic" activity or person is oriented around intrinsic reward — doing something because the doing itself is worthwhile, not primarily for an external payoff like money or status. Csikszentmihalyi's research found genuine, documented examples of people in physically demanding, low-status jobs who described their work in exactly these terms: work they said they'd keep doing even if external necessity were removed entirely, because the activity itself, done with real skill and attention, was the reward.
This matters because it decouples job satisfaction from job status or difficulty in a way that runs against common intuition — the autotelic quality of work seems to depend less on what the work is and more on whether the person doing it has found a way to bring genuine skill, attention, and personally meaningful structure to it, which is at least partly something a person can cultivate rather than something only certain jobs can offer.
Joe Kramer, a welder in his sixties at a harsh, deafening South Chicago railroad-car plant, had mastered every job in the factory and genuinely enjoyed being called on to fix any broken machine, applying the same curiosity he'd had as a child taking apart a broken toaster; at home he built an elaborate rock garden with self-rigged floodlights and sprinklers so he could generate artificial rainbows in his backyard at night. Separately, a 76-year-old Alpine dairywoman, Serafina Vinon, worked sixteen-hour days milking cows and tending an orchard and orchard and described this labor as the most enjoyable part of her life, saying she'd keep doing the same activities even with unlimited money and free time. Csikszentmihalyi pairs these modern cases with a roughly 2,300-year-old Taoist parable of a butcher named Ting, whose mastery of the ox's anatomy made his movements look like a dance, describing his skill as having moved beyond mere technique into an intuitive, effortless state.