Quote

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

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: September 29
Professor
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
University Teacher
Fiume
Better
Conditions
Strategies
Firsts
Second
Match
First
Quality
External
Trying
Goal
Improve
Make
Making
Goals
Life
Experience
Main
Two
Strategy
Change
Fit

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Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to.
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An ideal organization is one in which each worker's potentialities find room for expression.
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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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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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It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were.
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It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow.
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It is not the hearing that improves life, but the listening.
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Those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works.
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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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Shift often from openness to closure.
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Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful.
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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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But shortcuts are dangerous we cannot delude ourselves that our knowledge is further along than it actually is.
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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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Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.
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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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Happiness is not something that happens ... It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable. To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity.
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You yourself are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don't exist. I've experienced this time and again. My hand seems devoid of myself, and I have nothing to do with what is happening. I just sit there watching in a state of awe and wonderment. And it just flows out by itself.
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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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