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If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable. To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: September 29
Professor
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
University Teacher
Fiume
Enjoy
Keep
Anything
Enjoyable
Wells
Enjoying
Well
Complexity
Need
Increase
Needs
Joy
Something
Becomes

More quotes by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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Few things are sadder than encountering a person who knows exactly what he should do, yet cannot muster enough energy to do it. He who desires but acts not, wrote Blake with his accustomed vigor, Breeds pestilence.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times...the best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to it's limited in voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
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If a leader demonstrates that his purpose is noble, that the work will enable people to connect with something large - more permanent than their material existence - people will give the best of themselves to the enterprise
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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If you're alone with nothing to do, the quality of your experience really plummets.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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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When a religion or ideology becomes dominant, the lack of controls will result in widening spirals of license leading to degradation and corruption.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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To be overcome with the ultimate goal often interferes with performance.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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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Goals transform a random walk into a chase.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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Other things equal, a life filled with complex flow activities is more worth living than one spent consuming passive entertainment.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi