Quotes About Activity

Consuming culture is never as rewarding as producing it.

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

Among the many intellectual pursuits available, reading is currently perhaps the most often mentioned flow activity around the world. Solving

In our studies, we found that every flow activity, whether it involved competition, chance, or any other dimension of experience, had this in common: It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex. In

A person can feel pleasure without any effort, if the appropriate centers in his brain are electrically stimulated, or as a result of the chemical stimulation of drugs. But it is impossible to enjoy a tennis game, a book, or a conversation unless attention is fully concentrated on the activity.

We have seen earlier that when an activity is thoroughly engrossing, there is not enough attention left over to allow a person to consider either the past or the future, or any other temporarily irrelevant stimuli. One item that disappears from awareness deserves special mention, because in normal life we spend so much time thinking about it: our own self.

The record seems to suggest that a society begins to rely heavily on leisure-and especially on passive leisure-only when it has become incapable of offering meaningful productive occupation to its members.

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. The largest part of free time—almost half of it for American adults—is spent in front of the television set. The

Everything the body can do is potentially enjoyable. Yet many people ignore this capacity, and use their physical equipment as little as possible, leaving its ability to provide flow unexploited.

I developed a theory of optimal experience based on the concept 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.

How we feel at any given moment of a flow activity is strongly influenced by the objective conditions; but consciousness is still free to follow its own assessment of the case.

The challenges of the activity are what force us to concentrate.

Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed.

As a result, one of the most universal and distinctive features of optimal experience takes place: people become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing.

Although, as we have seen, people generally long to leave their places of work and get home, ready to put their hard-earned free time to good use, all too often they have no idea what to do there.

the worst moods are reported when one is alone and there is nothing that needs to be done.

The normal condition of the mind is chaos. Only when involved in a goal-directed activity does it acquire order and positive moods.

without concentration, a complex activity breaks down into chaos.

Any activity contains a bundle of opportunities for action, or "challenges," that require appropriate skills to realize. For those who don't have the right skills, the activity is not challenging; it is simply meaningless.

Scientists often describe the autotelic aspects of their work as the exhilaration that comes from the pursuit of truth and of beauty. What they seem to describe, however, is the joy of discovery, of solving a problem, of being able to express an observed relationship in a simple and elegant form. So what is rewarding is not a mysterious and ineffable goal but the activity of science itself. It is the pursuit that counts, not the attainment.

It sounds somewhat ridiculous to say that one of the problems we face at this point in history is that we haven't learned how to spend free time in a sensible way.

Passive leisure becomes a problem when a person uses it as the principal-or the only-strategy to fill up free time.

rest from our activities is listed in God's Top Ten. The commandment to keep the Sabbath is right up there with "don't kill," "don't steal," and "don't commit adultery." In other words, being a workaholic is, to God, just as bad as being a murderer or adulterer.

IMPAIRMENT: Lacking part or all of…or having a defective limb, organism or mechanism of the body DISABILITY: The disadvantage or restriction of activity caused by a contemporary social organization which takes no or little account of people who have physical [and/or cognitive/developmental/mental] impairments and thus excludes them from the mainstream of society. ~