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One must develop skills that stretch capacities, that make one more than what one is.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: September 29
Professor
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
University Teacher
Fiume
Make
Capacities
Stretch
Develop
Skills
Capacity
Must

More quotes by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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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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Knowing oneself is not so much a question of discovering what is present in one's self, but rather the creation of who one wants to be.
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It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.
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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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..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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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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Other things equal, a life filled with complex flow activities is more worth living than one spent consuming passive entertainment.
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The mood state Americans are in, on average, when watching television is mildly depressed.
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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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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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Some individuals have developed such strong internal standards that they no longer need the opinion of others to judge whether they have performed a task well or not. The ability to give objective feedback to oneself is in fact the mark of the expert.
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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 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
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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.
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.
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Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.
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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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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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Find out what you like and what you hate about life. Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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Goals transform a random walk into a chase.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi