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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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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: September 29
Professor
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
University Teacher
Fiume
Solitude
Alone
Quality
Experience
Nothing
Really

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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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Find out what you like and what you hate about life. Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate.
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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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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 who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free.
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Often we don't have a good notion of what our talents are, because we have never had a chance to try them out.
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Try to be inspired by something every day. Try to inspire at least one person every day.
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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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Those periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times.
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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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Perform with elan, brilliance and dash - at concert pitch.
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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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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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The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.
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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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Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment.
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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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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.
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Shift often from openness to closure.
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Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.
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