Quotes About Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done more than anyone else to study this state of effortless attending, and the name he proposed for it, flow, has become part of the language. People who experience flow describe it as "a state of effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, of their problems

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.

The optimal mental state for training in is called "the flow state", most famously defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his 1988 book Flow. Buy it, read it, you won't regret it. This book made me realise that the thing I was really trying to teach most of my students was how to develop an autotelic personality, which means a person who is able to set their own goals.

Even pain is better than the chaos that seeps into an unfocused mind. Hurting oneself, whether physically or emotionally, ensures that attention can be focused on something that, although painful, is at least controllable—since we are the ones causing it.

This cultural hubris, or overweening presumption about what we are entitled to from a universe that is basically insensitive to human needs, generally leads to trouble.

Flow is important both because it makes the present instant more enjoyable, and because it builds the self-confidence that allows us to develop skills and make significant contributions to humankind.

The "autotelic self" is one that easily translates potential threats into enjoyable challenges, and therefore maintains its inner harmony.

The same effect can be achieved in different ways, either through perfecting a severe mental discipline as in Yoga or through cultivating constant spontaneity as in Zen. But the intended result is identical: to free inner life from the threat of chaos, on the one hand, and from the rigid conditioning of biological urges, on the other, and hence to become independent from the social controls that exploit both.

THE AUTOTELIC SELF: A SUMMARY

When a person's psychic energy coalesces into a life theme, consciousness achieves harmony.

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.

Breaking out of the fatalistic acceptance of genetic or historical programming requires, at the very least, a belief in freedom and self-determination.

It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life.