Top 177 Quotes & Sayings by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

A Web site that promotes flow is like a gourmet meal. You start off with the appetizers, move on to the salads and entrees, and build toward dessert. Unfortunately, most sites are built like a cafeteria. You pick whatever you want. That sounds good at first, but soon it doesn't matter what you choose to do. Everything is bland and the same.

Discipline is not always internalized and actually can breed resentment among children.

People enter Web sites hoping to be led somewhere, hoping for a payoff.

Goals transform a random walk into a chase.

Competition is an easy way to get into flow.

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.

If we know what that set point is, we can predict fairly accurately when you will be in flow, and it will be when your challenges are higher than average and skills are higher than average.

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.

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.

How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.

Competition is enjoyable only when it is a means to perfect one’s skills; when it becomes an end in itself, it ceases to be fun.

Write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others. When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it.

It is not the hearing that improves life, but the listening.

The happiest people spend much time in a state of flow - the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

Optimal experience is that rare occasion when we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.

Take charge of your schedule. Make time for reflection and relaxation.

For a person to become deeply involved in any activity it is essential that he knows precisely what tasks he must accomplish, moment by moment.

One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself.

The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment.

To be successful you have to enjoy doing your best while at the same time contributing to something beyond yourself.

Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.

The ability to take misfortune and make something good come of it is a rare gift. Those who possess it are ..said to have resilience or courage.

To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.

Enjoyment, on the other hand, is not always pleasant, and it can be very stressful at times. A mountain climber, for example, may be close to freezing, utterly exhausted, and in danger of falling into a bottomless crevasse, yet he wouldn't want to be anywhere else. Sipping a piña colada under a palm tree at the edge of the turquoise ocean is idyllic, but it just doesn't compare to the exhilaration he feels on the windswept ridge.

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.

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

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.

Try to be inspired by something every day. Try to inspire at least one person every day.

Even without success, creative persons find joy in a job well done. Learning for its own sake is rewarding.

What I "discovered" was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

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.

The germ of an idea doesn't make the sculpture that stands up... so the next stage is hard work

the self expands through acts of self forgetfulness.

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives...most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity...when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.

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.

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.

Unless a person knows how to give order to her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment.

Happiness is not something that happens ... It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them.

But it is impossible to enjoy a tennis game, a book, or a conversation unless attention is fully concentrated on the activity.

For original ideas to come about, you have to let them percolate under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction. Their random combinations are driven by forces we don't know about.

People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media.

A paycheck is a sufficient impetus to motivate some employees to do the minimum amount to get by, and for others, the challenge of getting ahead in the organization provides a satisfactory focus for a while. But these incentives alone are rarely strong enough to inspire workers to give their best to their work. For this a vision is needed, an overarching goal that gives meaning to the job, so that an individual can forget himself in the task and experience flow without doubts or regrets. The most important component of such a vision is an ingredient we call soul.

Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work is dissipated. We create ourselves by how we use this energy. Memories, thoughts and feelings are all shaped by how use it. And it is an energy under control, to do with as we please; hence attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.

A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.

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.

If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.

Purpose provides activation energy for living.

To know oneself is the first step toward making flow a part of one's entire life. But just as there is no free lunch in the material economy, nothing comes free in the psychic one. If one is not willing to invest psychic energy in the internal reality of consciousness, and instead squanders it in chasing external rewards, one loses mastery of one's life, and ends up becoming a puppet of circumstances.

It is better to look suffering straight in the eye, acknowledge and respect it’s presence, and then get busy as soon as possible focusing on things we choose to focus on.

Flow is the process of achieving happiness through control over one's inner life. The optimal state of inner experience is order in consciousness. This happens when we focus our attention (psychic energy) on realistic goals and when our skills match the challenges we face.

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.

A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening 'outside,' just by changing the contents of consciousness.

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.

It is how we choose what we do, and how we approach it, that will determine whether the sum of our days adds up to a formless blur, or to something resembling a work of art.

It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.

Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.

Find out what you like and what you hate about life. Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate.

Happiness does not simply happen to us. It's something that we make happen.

When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They become rigid and defensive, and their self stops growing.

Those periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times.