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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.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: September 29
Professor
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
University Teacher
Fiume
Feelings
Peculiar
Able
Condition
Human
Accomplish
Humans
Allow
Conditions
Entropy
Seeing
Psychic
Feeling
Psychics
Actually
Involves

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Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason.
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It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.
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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.
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Try to be surprised by something every day.
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If you're alone with nothing to do, the quality of your experience really plummets.
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..Such practices and beliefs, which interfere with happiness, are neither inevitable nor necessary they evolved by chance, as a result of random responses to accidental conditions. But once they become part of the norms and habits of a culture, people assume that this is how things must be they come to believe they have no other options.
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But shortcuts are dangerous we cannot delude ourselves that our knowledge is further along than it actually is.
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Other things equal, a life filled with complex flow activities is more worth living than one spent consuming passive entertainment.
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Happiness is not something that happens ... It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them.
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Participate as fully as possibly in the world around you.
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...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.
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People generally report higher levels of stress, depression, and tension after watching TV. It seems that TV's main virtue is that it occupies the mind undemandingly.
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Purpose provides activation energy for living.
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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.
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If I had to express in one word what makes their [creative individuals'] 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.
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Whether we like it or not, each of us is constrained by limits on what we can do and feel. To ignore these limits leads to denial and eventually to failure. To achieve excellence, we must first understand the reality of the everyday, with all its demands
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Produce as many ideas as possible. Try to produce unlikely ideas.
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Some individuals have developed such strong internal standards that they no longer need the opinion of others to judge whether they have performed a task well or not. The ability to give objective feedback to oneself is in fact the mark of the expert.
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When each of these three elements of vision-concern for excellence, for people and for the wider environment-are present, business is transformed from a tool for making profits into a creative, humane experiment for improving life.
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Look at problems from as many viewpoints as possible. Figure out the implications of the problem. Implement the solution.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi