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A person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: September 29
Professor
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
University Teacher
Fiume
Never
Symbolic
Skills
Free
Use
Persons
Person
Really

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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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Whether we like it or not, each of us is constrained by limits on what we can do and feel. To ignore these limits leads to denial and eventually to failure. To achieve excellence, we must first understand the reality of the everyday, with all its demands
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A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening 'outside,' just by changing the contents of consciousness.
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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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It does not seem to be true that work necessarily needs to be unpleasant. It may always have to be hard, or at least harder than doing nothing at all. But there is ample evidence that work can be enjoyable, and that indeed, it is often the most enjoyable part of life.
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It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.
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Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to.
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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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The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.
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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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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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Those periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times.
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Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.
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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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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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It is not the hearing that improves life, but the listening.
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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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..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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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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