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.
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 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.
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.
A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe.
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.
Try to be inspired by something every day. Try to inspire at least one person every day.
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.
If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable. To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Purpose provides activation energy for living.
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.
Act as if the future of the universe depends on what you do, while laughing at yourself for thinking that your actions make any difference.
Find out what you like and what you hate about life. Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate.
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.
Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.
When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They become rigid and defensive, and their self stops growing.
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.
Find a way to express what moves you.
To be successful you have to enjoy doing your best while at the same time contributing to something beyond yourself.
Goals transform a random walk into a chase.
Unless a person knows how to give order to her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment.
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