Quotes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to.

For better or worse, our future will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.

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?'"

There will be no good business unless the majority comes to agree that we should demand more from business than large quarterly returns.

A business is successful to the extent that it provides a product or service that contributes to happiness in all of its forms.

Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.

The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings."--(psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the state of being he calls "flow")

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.

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.

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

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.

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.

When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.

Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create a new order in consciousness.

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.

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

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

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