Quotes About Experience

These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives (chapter 3).

Setting goals. Becoming immersed in the activity. Paying attention to what is happening. Learning to enjoy the immediate experience.

How can it help a person learn to rid himself of anxieties and fears and thus become free of the controls of society, whose rewards he can now take or leave? As suggested before, the way is through control over consciousness, which in turn leads to control over the quality of experience. Any small gain in that direction will make life more rich, more enjoyable, more meaningful.

Even when children are taught music, the usual problem often arises: too much emphasis is placed on how they perform, and too little on what they experience.

Although average Americans have plenty of free time, and ample access to leisure activities, they do not, as a result, experience flow often. Potentiality does not imply actuality, and quantity does not translate into quality.

Since what we experience is reality, as far as we are concerned, we can transform reality to the extent that we influence what happens in consciousness and thus free ourselves from the threats and blandishments of the outside world.

attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.

The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow.

It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life. When we are in flow, we are not happy, because to experience happiness we must focus on our inner states, and that would take away attention from the task at hand.

Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. "Ask yourself whether you are happy," said J. S. Mill, "and you cease to be so." It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.

The autotelic self transforms potentially entropic experience into flow.

In any case, an individual can experience only so much. Therefore, the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; it is, in fact, what determines the content and the quality of life.

How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how to the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. [...] To do that we must learn to achieve mastery over consciousness itself.

A similar distinction is that between discovered life themes, when a person writes the script for her actions out of personal experience and awareness of choice; and accepted life themes, when a person simply takes on a predetermined role from a script written long ago by others. Both

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.

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.

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.

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.

We tried to answer these questions with the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), the procedure I developed at the University of Chicago to study the quality of experience.

They disregard the quality of immediate experience, and base their motivation instead on the strongly rooted cultural stereotype of what work is supposed to be like.

This fact brings us to the second condition that affects whether an optimal experience will occur or not: an individual's ability to restructure consciousness so as to make flow possible.

Each biblical parable, for instance, tries to encode the hard-won experience of many individuals over unknown eons of time.

Two terms describing states of social pathology apply also to conditions that make flow difficult to experience: anomie and alienation. Anomie—

To improve life one must improve the quality of experience.