QUOTES by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time... Creative individuals have a combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk-the curiosity that leads to creativity belongs to this set. But whereas the first tendency requires little encouragement or support from outside to motivate behaviour, the second can wilt if not cultivated.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Problems are solved only when we devote a great deal of attention to them and in a creative way...to have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong with it. We also need a positive goal, otherwise why keep going? Creativity is one answer to that question - It provides one of the most exciting models for living.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude. Like the color white that includes all colors, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves. Creativity allows for paradox, light, shadow, inconsistency, even chaos -and creative people experience both extremes with equal intensity.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Studying creativity is not an elite distraction, but provides one of the most exciting models for living.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one What counts is whether the novelty he or she produces is accepted for inclusion in the domain.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. If I had to express in one word what makes their 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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They become rigid and defensive, and their self stops growing.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
..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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Socializing is more positive than being alone, that’s why meetings are so popular. People don’t like being alone. That would be, however, an important skill to learn...
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Good design is a visual statement that maximizes the life goals of the people in a given culture (or, more realistically, the goals of a certain subset of people in the culture) that draws on a shared symbolic expression for the ordering of such goals.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Sir John Templeton: "My ethical principle in the first place was: 'Where could I use my talents that God gave me to help the most people?'"
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
In knowledge-intensive business settings, where every manager has to oversee massive amounts of information as well as people, facilitating the use of psychic energy becomes a primary concern.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
I think that evolution has had a hand in selecting people who had a sense of doing something beyond themselves.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
People enter Web sites hoping to be led somewhere, hoping for a payoff.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
However, a good life consists of more than simply the totality of enjoyable experiences. It must also have a meaningful pattern, a trajectory of growth that results in the development of increasing emotional, cognitive, and social complexity.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
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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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
It is as if evolution has built a safety device in our nervous system that allows us to experience full happiness only when we are living at 100%-when we are fully using the physical and mental equipment we have been given.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
There are managers so preoccupied with their e-mail messages that they never look up from their screens to see what's happening in the nondigital world
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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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We can either help to make this world a more incredible place than it has ever been, or we can hasten its return to inorganic dust.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Our jobs determine to a large extent what our lives are like. Is what you do for a living making you ill? Does it keep you from becoming a more fully realized person? Do you feel ashamed of what you have to do at work? All too often, the answer to such questions is yes. Yet it does not have to be like that. Work can be one of the most joyful, most fulfilling aspects of life. Whether it will be or not depends on the actions we collectively take.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
...perhaps the most distinguishing trait of visionary leaders is that they believe in a goal that benefits not only themselves, but others as well. It is such vision that attracts the psychic energy of other people, and makes them willing to work beyond the call of duty for the organization.
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Jane Fonda, who divided her life into three acts, decided after her sixtieth birthday that she was now facing the final act, and came to the following conclusion: "I thought to myself, well if that's the case and if what I'm scared of isn't death, but getting to the end with regrets, then I've got to figure out what would be the things that I would regret when I got to the last act if I hadn't done them or achieved them by then. And they were: having an intimate relationship and having made a difference."
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Attention is psychic energy, and like physical energy, unless we allocate some part of it to the task at hand, no work gets done.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Through learning we grow, becoming more than we were before, and in that sense learning is unselfish, because it results in the transformation of what we were before, a setting aside of the old self in favor of a more complex one.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The downside, of course, is that over time religions become encrusted with precepts and ideas that are the antithesis of soul, as each faith tries to protect its doctrines and institution instead of nurturing the evolution of consciousness. If one is not careful to distinguish the genuine insights of a religion from its irrelevant accretions, one can go through life following an inappropriate moral compass.
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...if we expended all our energies solely on taking care of our own needs we would stop growing. In that respect what we call "soul" can be viewed as the surplus energy that can be invested into change and transformation. As such, it is the cutting edge of evolution.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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.
Quote by -Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi