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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
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Working
Psychiatrist
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Attained
Happiness
Wanting
Half
Wrote
Happy
Consequence
Business
Oneself
Cannot
Century
Austrian
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Unintended
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One must develop skills that stretch capacities, that make one more than what one is.
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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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Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.
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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 is not something that happens ... It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them.
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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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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.
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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.
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The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.
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Try to be inspired by something every day. Try to inspire at least one person every day.
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Goals transform a random walk into a chase.
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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.
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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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Entropy is the normal state of consciousness - a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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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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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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It is not the hearing that improves life, but the listening.
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We can either help to make this world a more incredible place than it has ever been, or we can hasten its return to inorganic dust.
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