Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes

Purpose provides activation energy for living.

Develop what you lack.

If you're alone with nothing to do, the quality of your experience really plummets.

Participate as fully as possibly in the world around you.

To gain control over the quality of experience, one needs to learn how to build enjoyment into what happens day in, day out.

Look at problems from as many viewpoints as possible. Figure out the implications of the problem. Implement the solution.

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there

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.

The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment.

Happiness does not simply happen to us. It's something that we make happen.

It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.

If we are so rich, why aren't we happy?

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.

There will be no good business unless the majority comes to agree that we should demand more from business than large quarterly returns.

Happiness is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated , and defended privately by each person.

A typical day is full of anxiety and boredom. Flow experiences provide the flashes of intense living against this dull background.

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.

People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media.

Find a way to express what moves you.

Perform with elan, brilliance and dash - at concert pitch.

Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment.

One of the surest ways to enrich life is to make experiences less fleeting.

Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.

It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow.

Socializing is more positive than being alone, that's why meetings are so popular. People don't like being alone. That would be, however, an important skill to learn.

Studying creativity is not an elite distraction, but provides one of the most exciting models for living.

Happiness is not something that happens ... It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them.

When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They become rigid and defensive, and their self stops growing.

The germ of an idea doesn't make the sculpture that stands up... so the next stage is hard work

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.

Whatever the dictates of fashion, it seems that those who take the trouble to gain mastery over what happens in consciousness do lead a happier life.

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.

We cannot deny the facts of nature, but we should certainly try to improve on them.

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.

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.

Competition is an easy way to get into flow.

To play the trumpet well, a musician can not let more than a few days pass without practicing.

Other things equal, a life filled with complex flow activities is more worth living than one spent consuming passive entertainment.

As long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.

Since the purpose of business is to satisfy existing desires, or stimulate new ones, if everyone were genuinely happy, there would be no need for business any longer.

Often we don't have a good notion of what our talents are, because we have never had a chance to try them out.

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 world

To be overcome with the ultimate goal often interferes with performance.

The mood state Americans are in, on average, when watching television is mildly depressed.

I think that evolution has had a hand in selecting people who had a sense of doing something beyond themselves.

We have learned how to develop five-minute and even one-minute managers. But we would do better to ask ourselves what it takes to be an executive who helps build a better future.

People enter Web sites hoping to be led somewhere, hoping for a payoff.

Those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works.

The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.

Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.