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For a person to become deeply involved in any activity it is essential that he knows precisely what tasks he must accomplish, moment by moment.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: September 29
Professor
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
University Teacher
Fiume
Person
Essentials
Must
Activity
Involved
Focus
Precisely
Moment
Deeply
Moments
Tasks
Become
Essential
Persons
Accomplish

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A person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free.
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One must develop skills that stretch capacities, that make one more than what one is.
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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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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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Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful.
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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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We shape our life by deciding to pay attention to it. It is the direction of our attention and its intensity that will determines what we accomplish and how well.
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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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Purpose provides activation energy for living.
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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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Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment.
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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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Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.
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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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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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..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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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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Problems are solved only when we devote a great deal of attention to them and in a creative way...to have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong with it. We also need a positive goal, otherwise why keep going? Creativity is one answer to that question - It provides one of the most exciting models for living.
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The mood state Americans are in, on average, when watching television is mildly depressed.
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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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi