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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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: September 29
Professor
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
University Teacher
Fiume
Ends
Predictably
Feels
Preferences
Long
Exploit
Good
Exploits
Preference
Respond
Easy
Others
More quotes by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
..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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Happiness does not simply happen to us. It's something that we make happen.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
If you're alone with nothing to do, the quality of your experience really plummets.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
There are two main strategies we can try to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
I have a naive trust in the universe - that at some level it all makes sense, and we can get glimpses of that sense if we try.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Goals transform a random walk into a chase.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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
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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi