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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
Come
Greater
Unintended
Must
Working
Psychiatrist
Goal
Attained
Happiness
Wanting
Half
Wrote
Happy
Consequence
Business
Oneself
Cannot
Century
Austrian
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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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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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When a religion or ideology becomes dominant, the lack of controls will result in widening spirals of license leading to degradation and corruption.
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Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.
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Purpose provides activation energy for living.
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If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.
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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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I think that evolution has had a hand in selecting people who had a sense of doing something beyond themselves.
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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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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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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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One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself.
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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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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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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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