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Half a century ago, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy - it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: September 29
Professor
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
University Teacher
Fiume
Happy
Consequence
Business
Oneself
Cannot
Century
Austrian
Come
Greater
Unintended
Must
Working
Psychiatrist
Goal
Attained
Happiness
Wanting
Half
Wrote

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To be overcome with the ultimate goal often interferes with performance.
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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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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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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.
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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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To be creative, a person has to internalize the entire system that makes creativity possible. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals.
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Flow is hard to achieve without effort. Flow is not 'wasting time.
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One must develop skills that stretch capacities, that make one more than what one is.
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Entropy is the normal state of consciousness - a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.
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If we are so rich, why aren't we happy?
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I think that evolution has had a hand in selecting people who had a sense of doing something beyond themselves.
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The mood state Americans are in, on average, when watching television is mildly depressed.
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It is not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel but the ones we think we have.
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Goals transform a random walk into a chase.
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Participate as fully as possibly in the world around you.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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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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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Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful.
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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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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.
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