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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.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: September 29
Professor
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
University Teacher
Fiume
Lives
Find
Detail
Look
Directly
Looks
Details
Trying
Fully
Every
Involved
Good
Happiness
Whether

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Those periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times.
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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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If a leader demonstrates that his purpose is noble, that the work will enable people to connect with something large - more permanent than their material existence - people will give the best of themselves to the enterprise
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.
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Through learning we grow, becoming more than we were before, and in that sense learning is unselfish, because it results in the transformation of what we were before, a setting aside of the old self in favor of a more complex one.
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Purpose provides activation energy for living.
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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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How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.
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Happiness does not simply happen to us. It's something that we make happen.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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Attention is psychic energy, and like physical energy, unless we allocate some part of it to the task at hand, no work gets done.
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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.
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Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create a new order in consciousness.
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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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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.
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Flow is hard to achieve without effort. Flow is not 'wasting time.
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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.
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