Quotes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

To be successful you have to enjoy doing your best while at the same time contributing to something beyond yourself.

One of the surest ways to enrich life is to make experiences less fleeting.

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.

Whatever the dictates of fashion, it seems that those who take the trouble to gain mastery over what happens in consciousness do lead a happier life.

Competition is an easy way to get into flow.

Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful.

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.

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

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.

Flow is hard to achieve without effort. Flow is not 'wasting time.

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.

Take charge of your schedule. Make time for reflection and relaxation.

Find out what you like and what you hate about life. Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate.

I have a naive trust in the universe - that at some level it all makes sense, and we can get glimpses of that sense if we try.

Discipline is not always internalized and actually can breed resentment among children.

If we know what that set point is, we can predict fairly accurately when you will be in flow, and it will be when your challenges are higher than average and skills are higher than average.

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.

And, in fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources do not increase happiness.

Attention is psychic energy, and like physical energy, unless we allocate some part of it to the task at hand, no work gets done.

The germ of an idea doesn't make the sculpture that stands up... so the next stage is hard work

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.

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.

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.

For better or worse, our future is now closely tied to human creativity.