Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: For original ideas to come about, you have to...

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.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

time-flies ego fall

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

effort body mind

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.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

focus nature interesting

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.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

happy discovery happiness

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.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

punishment anxiety independent

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

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

increase joy needs

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

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

freedom recipes joy

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

what-you-love hate life

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.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

cost inspirational people

Goals transform a random walk into a chase.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

walks goal

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.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

shapes pay attention

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.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

focus eye suffering

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.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

psychics business reality

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.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

psychics skills order

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

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

attention giving order

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

business happiness believe

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

business goal happiness

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.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

regret strong jobs

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

creativity hands art

It is essential to learn to enjoy life. It really does not make sense to go through the motions of existence if one does not appreciate as much of it as possible.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

enjoy-life appreciate essentials

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.