Whether we like it or not, each of us is constrained by limits on what we can do and feel. To ignore these limits leads to denial and eventually to failure. To achieve excellence, we must first understand the reality of the everyday, with all its demands
One of the surest ways to enrich life is to make experiences less fleeting.
A typical day is full of anxiety and boredom. Flow experiences provide the flashes of intense living against this dull background.
A business is successful to the extent that it provides a product or service that contributes to happiness in all of its forms.
We cannot deny the facts of nature, but we should certainly try to improve on them.
When a religion or ideology becomes dominant, the lack of controls will result in widening spirals of license leading to degradation and corruption.
Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out. But in flow there is no need to reflect, because the action carries us forward as if by magic.
Why is it that, despite having achieved previously undreamed-of miracles of progress, we seem more helpless in facing life than our less privileged ancestors were? The answer seems clear: while humankind collectively has increased its material powers a thousandfold, it has not advanced very far in terms of improving the content of experience.
Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person's skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding.
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.
Control over consciousness cannot be institutionaliz ed. As soon as it becomes part of a set of social rules and norms, it ceases to be effective in the way it was originally intended to be.
...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.
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.
Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.
Competition is an easy way to get into flow.
Other things equal, a life filled with complex flow activities is more worth living than one spent consuming passive entertainment.
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."
To play the trumpet well, a musician can not let more than a few days pass without practicing.
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".
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.
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
It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow.
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.
..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.
People enter Web sites hoping to be led somewhere, hoping for a payoff.
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