Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can't be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical knowledge immersion in a particular field.Collection: Knowledge
Goals transform a random walk into a chase.
If we know what that set point is, we can predict fairly accurately when you will be in flow, and it will be when your challenges are higher than average and skills are higher than average.
People enter Web sites hoping to be led somewhere, hoping for a payoff.
And, in fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources do not increase happiness.
Discipline is not always internalized and actually can breed resentment among children.
A Web site that promotes flow is like a gourmet meal. You start off with the appetizers, move on to the salads and entrees, and build toward dessert. Unfortunately, most sites are built like a cafeteria. You pick whatever you want. That sounds good at first, but soon it doesn't matter what you choose to do. Everything is bland and the same.
Competition is an easy way to get into flow.
Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.Collection: Fall
The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times...the best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to it's limited in voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.Collection: Effort
The happiest people spend much time in a state of flow - the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.Collection: Inspirational
We shape our life by deciding to pay attention to it. It is the direction of our attention and its intensity that will determines what we accomplish and how well.Collection: Attention
A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.Collection: Freedom
What I "discovered" was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.Collection: Happiness
Try to be inspired by something every day. Try to inspire at least one person every day.Collection: Inspiration
If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.Collection: Nature
Flow is the process of achieving happiness through control over one's inner life. The optimal state of inner experience is order in consciousness. This happens when we focus our attention (psychic energy) on realistic goals and when our skills match the challenges we face.Collection: Order
Try to be surprised by something every day.Collection: Trying
If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable. To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity.Collection: Joy
People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.Collection: People
Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives...most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity...when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.Collection: Art
To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.Collection: Independent
Find out what you like and what you hate about life. Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate.Collection: Life
It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.Collection: Stress
Purpose provides activation energy for living.Collection: Energy
Produce as many ideas as possible. Try to produce unlikely ideas.Collection: Ideas
Unless a person knows how to give order to her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment.Collection: Order
The ability to take misfortune and make something good come of it is a rare gift. Those who possess it are ..said to have resilience or courage.Collection: Teaching
Contrary to what most of us believe, happiness does not simply happen to us. It's something that we make happen, and it results from doing our best. Feeling fulfilled when we live up to our potentialities is what motivates differentiation and leads to evolution.Collection: Happiness
Find a way to express what moves you.Collection: Moving
A paycheck is a sufficient impetus to motivate some employees to do the minimum amount to get by, and for others, the challenge of getting ahead in the organization provides a satisfactory focus for a while. But these incentives alone are rarely strong enough to inspire workers to give their best to their work. For this a vision is needed, an overarching goal that gives meaning to the job, so that an individual can forget himself in the task and experience flow without doubts or regrets. The most important component of such a vision is an ingredient we call soul.Collection: Strong
It is not the hearing that improves life, but the listening.Collection: Listening
We cannot deny the facts of nature, but we should certainly try to improve on them.Collection: Trying
When a religion or ideology becomes dominant, the lack of controls will result in widening spirals of license leading to degradation and corruption.Collection: Degradation
Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person's skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding.Collection: Skills
A typical day is full of anxiety and boredom. Flow experiences provide the flashes of intense living against this dull background.Collection: Boredom
Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out. But in flow there is no need to reflect, because the action carries us forward as if by magic.Collection: Magic
Why is it that, despite having achieved previously undreamed-of miracles of progress, we seem more helpless in facing life than our less privileged ancestors were? The answer seems clear: while humankind collectively has increased its material powers a thousandfold, it has not advanced very far in terms of improving the content of experience.Collection: Miracle
Good design is a visual statement that maximizes the life goals of the people in a given culture (or, more realistically, the goals of a certain subset of people in the culture) that draws on a shared symbolic expression for the ordering of such goals.Collection: Expression
Control over consciousness cannot be institutionaliz ed. As soon as it becomes part of a set of social rules and norms, it ceases to be effective in the way it was originally intended to be.Collection: Way
A business is successful to the extent that it provides a product or service that contributes to happiness in all of its forms.Collection: Happiness
...if we expended all our energies solely on taking care of our own needs we would stop growing. In that respect what we call "soul" can be viewed as the surplus energy that can be invested into change and transformation. As such, it is the cutting edge of evolution.Collection: Change
We can either help to make this world a more incredible place than it has ever been, or we can hasten its return to inorganic dust.Collection: Business
Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.Collection: Creative
Other things equal, a life filled with complex flow activities is more worth living than one spent consuming passive entertainment.Collection: Happiness
To play the trumpet well, a musician can not let more than a few days pass without practicing.Collection: Teaching
Jane Fonda, who divided her life into three acts, decided after her sixtieth birthday that she was now facing the final act, and came to the following conclusion: "I thought to myself, well if that's the case and if what I'm scared of isn't death, but getting to the end with regrets, then I've got to figure out what would be the things that I would regret when I got to the last act if I hadn't done them or achieved them by then. And they were: having an intimate relationship and having made a difference."Collection: Regret
I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. [...] If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual", each of them is a "multitude".Collection: Years
There are managers so preoccupied with their e-mail messages that they never look up from their screens to see what's happening in the nondigital worldCollection: Business
Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one What counts is whether the novelty he or she produces is accepted for inclusion in the domain.Collection: Creativity