Quotes from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Without interest in the world, a desire to be actively related to it, a person becomes isolated into himself.

Our perceptions about our lives are the outcome of many forces that shape experience, each having an impact on whether we feel good or bad.

Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever information in consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met.

Compared to people living only a few generations ago, we have enormously greater opportunities to have a good time, yet there is no indication that we actually enjoy life more than our ancestors did. Opportunities alone, however, are not enough. We also need the skills to make use of them.

Many people give up on learning after they leave school because thirteen or twenty years of extrinsically motivated education is still a source of unpleasant memories.

Having a record of the past can make a great contribution to the quality of life. It frees us from the tyranny of the present, and makes it possible for consciousness to revisit former times.

If you win these battles enough, that battle against yourself, at least for a moment, it becomes easier to win the battles in the world.

A more substantive potential use of words to enhance our lives is the lost art of conversation.

THE AUTOTELIC SELF: A SUMMARY

The reason it is possible to achieve such complete involvement in a flow experience is that goals are usually clear, and feedback immediate.

el más alto bien, que llamaba alegría, y frecuentemente confianza, es una mente desprovista de temor». En otras palabras, disfrutó de la vida porque había aprendido a controlar su conciencia. Demócrito no fue ni el primer ni el último pensador que se perdió en el flujo de la mente. Frecuentemente

As Democritus said so simply many centuries ago: "Water can be both good and bad, useful and dangerous. To the danger, however, a remedy has been found: learning to swim." To swim in this case involves learning to distinguish the useful and the harmful forms of flow, and then making the most of the former while placing limits on the latter. The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.

AT CERTAIN TIMES in history cultures have taken it for granted that a person wasn't fully human unless he or she learned to master thoughts and feelings.

Unless consumed in highly skilled ritual contexts, as is practiced in many traditional societies, what drugs in fact do is reduce our perception of both what can be accomplished and what we as individuals are able to accomplish, until the two are in balance. This

The most detailed information about who we are as individuals comes from those we communicate with, and from the way we accomplish our jobs.

Thoughts have to follow each other, or they get jumbled. While we are thinking about a problem we cannot truly experience either happiness or sadness. We cannot run, sing, and balance the checkbook simultaneously, because each one of these activities exhausts most of our capacity for attention.

the past can never be literally true in memory: it must be continuously edited, and the question is only whether we take creative control of the editing or not.

Because our present social arrangements, however, do not provide adequate challenges for the skills teenagers have, they must discover opportunities for action outside those sanctioned by adults. The only outlets they find, all too often, are vandalism, delinquency, drugs, and recreational sex.

The important thing is that the energy is under their own control

the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; it in, in fact, what determines the content and quality of life.

Every piece of information we process gets evaluated for its bearing on the self. Does it threaten our goals, does it support them, or is it neutral?

mientras que la humanidad ha incrementado colectivamente sus poderes materiales cientos de veces, no ha avanzado mucho en términos de mejorar el contenido de su experiencia.

starting point would be to say that one society is "better" than another if a greater number of its people have access to experiences that are in line with their goals.

But even when there is nothing else pressing occupying their minds, most people fall far below the peak capacity for processing information. In the roughly one-third of the day that is free of obligations, in their precious "leisure" time, most people in fact seem to use their minds as little as possible.