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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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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: September 29
Professor
Psychiatrist
Psychologist
University Teacher
Fiume
Higher
Report
Levels
Reports
Technology
Tension
Virtue
Depression
Seems
Main
Generally
Mind
Stress
People
Watching
Occupies

More quotes by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

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If we agree that the bottom line of life is happiness, not success, then it makes perfect sense to say that it is the journey that counts, not reaching the destination.
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Shift often from openness to closure.
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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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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.
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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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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
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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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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.
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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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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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It is not the hearing that improves life, but the listening.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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And, in fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources do not increase happiness.
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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Produce as many ideas as possible. Try to produce unlikely ideas.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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If you're alone with nothing to do, the quality of your experience really plummets.
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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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..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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An ideal organization is one in which each worker's potentialities find room for expression.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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Half a century ago, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy - it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi