Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening 'outside,' just by changing the contents of consciousness.Collection: Consciousness
Flow is hard to achieve without effort. Flow is not 'wasting time.Collection: Effort
The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.Collection: People
There are two main strategies we can try to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.Collection: Change
Even without success, creative persons find joy in a job well done. Learning for its own sake is rewarding.Collection: Life
Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time... Creative individuals have a combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.Collection: Smart
It is better to look suffering straight in the eye, acknowledge and respect it’s presence, and then get busy as soon as possible focusing on things we choose to focus on.Collection: Eye
It does not seem to be true that work necessarily needs to be unpleasant. It may always have to be hard, or at least harder than doing nothing at all. But there is ample evidence that work can be enjoyable, and that indeed, it is often the most enjoyable part of life.Collection: Joy
For original ideas to come about, you have to let them percolate under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction. Their random combinations are driven by forces we don't know about.Collection: Ideas
For better or worse, our future will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.Collection: Motivational
the self expands through acts of self forgetfulness.Collection: Self
A leader will find it difficult to articulate a coherent vision unless it expresses his core values, his basic identity...one must first embark on the formidable journey of self-discovery in order to create a vision with authentic soul.Collection: Leadership
Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to.Collection: Morning
Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk-the curiosity that leads to creativity belongs to this set. But whereas the first tendency requires little encouragement or support from outside to motivate behaviour, the second can wilt if not cultivated.Collection: Encouragement
For better or worse, our future is now closely tied to human creativity.Collection: Creativity
The foremost reason that happiness is so hard to achieve is that the universe was not designed with the comfort of human beings in mind...It seems that every time a pressing danger is avoided a new and more sophisticated threat appears on the horizon...Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universeCollection: Spiritual
Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it. "He who desires but acts not," wrote Blake with his accustomed vigor, "Breeds pestilence.Collection: Desire
Competition is enjoyable only when it is a means to perfect one’s skills; when it becomes an end in itself, it ceases to be fun.Collection: Fun
The more a person feels skilled, the more her moods will improve; while the more challenges that are present, the more her attention will become focused and concentrated.Collection: Focus
But it is impossible to enjoy a tennis game, a book, or a conversation unless attention is fully concentrated on the activity.Collection: Book
The rules themselves are clear enough, and within everyone’s reach. But many forces, both within ourselves and in the environment, stand in the way. It is a little like trying to lose weight: everyone knows what it takes, everyone wants to do it, yet it is next to impossible for so many.Collection: Trying
Take charge of your schedule. Make time for reflection and relaxation.Collection: Reflection
It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.Collection: Trying
Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work is dissipated. We create ourselves by how we use this energy. Memories, thoughts and feelings are all shaped by how use it. And it is an energy under control, to do with as we please; hence attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.Collection: Memories
To live means to experience-through doing, feeling, thinking. Experience takes place in time, so time is the ultimate scarce resource we have. Over the years, the content of experience will determine the quality of life. Therefore one of the most essential decisions any of us can make is about how one's time is allocated or invested.Collection: Life
However, a good life consists of more than simply the totality of enjoyable experiences. It must also have a meaningful pattern, a trajectory of growth that results in the development of increasing emotional, cognitive, and social complexity.Collection: Meaningful
We can transform reality to the extent that we influence what happens in consciousness and thus free ourselves from the threats and blandishments of the outside world.Collection: Reality
I have a naive trust in the universe - that at some level it all makes sense, and we can get glimpses of that sense if we try.Collection: Trying
Optimal experience is that rare occasion when we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.Collection: Memories
When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.Collection: Creativity
...perhaps the most distinguishing trait of visionary leaders is that they believe in a goal that benefits not only themselves, but others as well. It is such vision that attracts the psychic energy of other people, and makes them willing to work beyond the call of duty for the organization.Collection: Inspirational
Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment.Collection: Overcoming
The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment.Collection: Important
Participate as fully as possibly in the world around you.Collection: World
It is as if evolution has built a safety device in our nervous system that allows us to experience full happiness only when we are living at 100%-when we are fully using the physical and mental equipment we have been given.Collection: Happiness
An ideal organization is one in which each worker's potentialities find room for expression.Collection: Work
Attention is psychic energy, and like physical energy, unless we allocate some part of it to the task at hand, no work gets done.Collection: Business
If you're alone with nothing to do, the quality of your experience really plummets.Collection: Solitude
If we agree that the bottom line of life is happiness, not success, then it makes perfect sense to say that it is the journey that counts, not reaching the destination.Collection: Life
To gain control over the quality of experience, one needs to learn how to build enjoyment into what happens day in, day out.Collection: Quality
One must develop skills that stretch capacities, that make one more than what one is.Collection: Skills
Look at problems from as many viewpoints as possible. Figure out the implications of the problem. Implement the solution.Collection: Looks
A person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free.Collection: Skills
The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one's own powers. This is not to say that we should abandon every goal endorsed by society; rather, it means that, in addition to or instead of the goals others use to bribe us with, we develop a set of our own.Collection: Mean
Our jobs determine to a large extent what our lives are like. Is what you do for a living making you ill? Does it keep you from becoming a more fully realized person? Do you feel ashamed of what you have to do at work? All too often, the answer to such questions is yes. Yet it does not have to be like that. Work can be one of the most joyful, most fulfilling aspects of life. Whether it will be or not depends on the actions we collectively take.Collection: Jobs
Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only thereCollection: Pain
A thoroughly socialized person is one who desires only the rewards that others around him have agreed he should long for - rewards often grafted onto genetically programmed desires.A person who cannot override genetic instructions when necessary is always vulnerable..The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one's own powers.Collection: Long
Entropy is the normal state of consciousness - a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.Collection: Normal
Shift often from openness to closure.Collection: Finishing