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.