Top 100 Mihaly Quotes
#1. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has done
Daniel Kahneman
#2. He [Mihaly Babits] hoped that some god might offer a bed to the river of words which rose to his lips, so that it might flow between ordered banks to the sea, there to vanish.
Claudio Magris
#3. Research by Harvard's Howard Gardner, Stanford's William Damon, and Claremont's Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi zeroed in on what they call "good work," a potent mix of what people are excellent at, what engages them, and their ethics - what they believe matters.18
Daniel Goleman
#4. In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to flow as the time when you become lost in your actions, whether climbing a mountain peak, painting or playing soccer.
Beth Whitman
#5. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience BY MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI
Daniel H. Pink
#6. Why Resilience? Of all the virtues we can learn, no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge. - MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI Walker,
Eric Greitens
#7. The key to flow is to pursue an activity for its own sake, not for the rewards it brings."
(psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the state of being he calls "flow")
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#9. Often we don't have a good notion of what our talents are, because we have never had a chance to try them out.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#10. An ideal organization is one in which each worker's potentialities find room for expression.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#11. Work as we know it now is a very recent historical development. It didn't exist before the great agricultural revolutions that made intensive farming possible about twelve thousand years ago.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#13. Much has been written about what makes families work. The consensus is that families that support the emotional well-being and growth of their members combine two almost opposite traits. They combine discipline with spontaneity, rules with freedom, high expectations with unstinting love.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#14. The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a goal, and not longer. And the person who can do this usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#16. All too often those who extol most loudly the virtues of selflessness turn out to be motivated by greed and ambition.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#18. The solution is to gradually become free of societal rewards and learn how to substitute for them rewards that are under one's own powers.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#19. If an enterprise does not aspire to be the best of its kind, it will attract second-rate employees, and it will be soon forgotten.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#20. It was found that the more often people report reading books, the more flow experiences they claim to have, while the opposite trend was found for watching television.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#22. The flow experience, like everything else, is not "good" in an absolute sense. It is good only in that it has the potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful; it is good because it increases the strength and complexity of the self.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#24. The other danger in becoming involved with culinary delights - and here again the parallels with sex are obvious - is that they can become addictive. It
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#26. Many business leaders today view their jobs as entailing responsibility for the welfare of the wider community. These individuals do not define themselves as profit-making machines whose only reason for existing is to satisfy escalating expectation for immediate gain.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#27. When each of these three elements of vision-concern for excellence, for people and for the wider environment-are present, business is transformed from a tool for making profits into a creative, humane experiment for improving life.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#28. Goals justify the effort they demand at the outset, but later it is the effort that justifies the goal.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#29. And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can't be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical knowledge immersion in a particular field.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#30. As J. S. Mill wrote, No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#31. The foremost reason that happiness is so hard to achieve is that the universe was not designed with the comfort of human beings in mind.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#33. They make us dependent on a social system that exploits our energies for its own purposes ... If a person learns to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself, the burden of social controls automatically falls from one's shoulders.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#34. Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out. But in flow there is no need to reflect, because the action carries us forward as if by magic.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#35. 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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#36. Whatever the composition of a firm, if it is to do good business it should be a place where everyone is encouraged to progress toward complexity- or at the very least a place that does not make it more difficult to achieve personal growth.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#37. For a person to become deeply involved in any activity it is essential that he knows precisely what tasks he must accomplish, moment by moment.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#40. You could say that I worked every minute of my life, or you could say with equal justice that I never worked a day.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#41. It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#43. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#44. Assimilating the style of predecessors is necessary before one can develop one's own. Only by immersing oneself in the domain can one find out whether there is room left for contributing creatively to it, and whether one is capable of doing so.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#45. It is how we choose what we do, and how we approach it, that will determine whether the sum of our days adds up to a formless blur, or to something resembling a work of art.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#47. There are two main strategies we can try to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#48. Pleasure is an important component of the quality of life, but by itself it does not bring happiness. Pleasure helps to maintain order, but by itself cannot create a new order in consciousness.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#50. Some individuals have developed such strong internal standards that they no longer need the opinion of others to judge whether they have performed a task well or not. The ability to give objective feedback to oneself is in fact the mark of the expert.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#52. THE GOOD THINGS IN LIFE do not come only through the senses. Some of the most exhilarating experiences we undergo are generated inside the mind, triggered by information that challenges our ability to think, rather than from the use of sensory skills. As
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#53. It is precisely because the unknowns are so great and dangerous that we require some manner of faith to choose our path and to give us courage.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#54. 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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#56. It is better to look suffering straight in the eye, acknowledge and respect it's presence, and then get busy as soon as possible focusing on things we choose to focus on.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#58. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed, and still kept within the bounds of reason. If a person learns to control his instinctual desires, not because he has to, but because he wants to, he can enjoy himself without becoming addicted. A
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#59. The germ of an idea doesn't make the sculpture that stands up ... so the next stage is hard work
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#60. Painters must want to paint above all else. If the artist in front of the canvas begins to wonder how much he will sell it for, or what the critics will think of it, he won't be able to pursue original avenues. Creative achievements depend on single-minded immersion.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#61. 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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#63. A business is successful to the extent that it provides a product or service that contributes to happiness in all of its forms.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#65. Those periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#66. One of the most frequently mentioned dimensions of the flow experience is that, while it lasts, one is able to forget all the unpleasant aspects of life.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#67. To pursue mental operations to any depth, a person has to learn to concentrate attention. Without focus, consciousness is in a state of chaos.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#68. To transform the biological necessity of feeding into a flow experience, one must begin by paying attention to what one eats. It is astonishing - as well as discouraging - when guests swallow lovingly prepared food without any sign of having noticed its virtues. What
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#69. Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person's skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#71. Wealth, status, and power have become in our culture all too powerful symbols of happiness ... And we assume that if only we could acquire some of those same symbols, we would be nuch happier.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#73. The gods of the Greeks were like helpless children compared to humankind today and the powers we now wield.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#74. How to avoid the danger of polarizing life into work that is meaningless because it is unfree, and leisure that is meaningless because it has no purpose?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#75. To realize the body's potential for flow is relatively easy. It does not require special talents or great expenditures of money. Everyone can greatly improve the quality of life by exploring one or more previously ignored dimensions of physical abilities. Of
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#76. The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#77. To play the trumpet well, a musician can not let more than a few days pass without practicing.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#79. 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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#80. Whether we like it or not, each of us is constrained by limits on what we can do and feel. To ignore these limits leads to denial and eventually to failure. To achieve excellence, we must first understand the reality of the everyday, with all its demands
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#81. It is essential to learn to enjoy life. It really does not make sense to go through the motions of existence if one does not appreciate as much of it as possible.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#83. Those who seek consolation in existing churches often pay for their peace of mind with a tacit agreement to ignore a great deal of what is known about the way the world works.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#84. Second, to have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong from it. We also need a positive goal, otherwise why keep going?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#85. The traits that mark an autotelic personality are most clearly revealed by people who seem to enjoy situations that ordinary persons would find unbearable. Lost
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#86. Unless a person knows how to give order to her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#88. Half a century ago, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy - it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#89. 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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#90. It is as if evolution has built a safety device in our nervous system that allows us to experience full happiness only when we are living at 100%-when we are fully using the physical and mental equipment we have been given.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#91. To be creative, a person has to internalize the entire system that makes creativity possible. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#92. For original ideas to come about, you have to let them percolate under the level of consciousness in a place where we have no way to make them obey our own desires or our own direction. Their random combinations are driven by forces we don't know about.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#93. Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#94. The ability to take misfortune and make something good come of it is a rare gift. Those who possess it are ..said to have resilience or courage.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#95. Gioacchino Rossini, the composer of William Tell and many other operas, had a good grasp of the relationship between music and food: "What love is to the heart, appetite is to the stomach. The stomach is the conductor that leads and livens up the great orchestra of our emotions." If
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#96. Perhaps the most distinguishing trait of visionary leaders is that they believe in a goal that benefits not only themselves, but others as well. It is such vision that attracts the psychic energy of other people, and makes them willing to work beyond the call of duty for the organization.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#97. The second reason creativity is so fascinating is that when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#98. Will you ever be anything more than a vessel transmitting the genes and memes of previous generations on to the next?
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#99. Someone who is motivated solely by the desire to become rich and famous might struggle hard to get ahead but will rarely have enough inducement to work beyond what is necessary, to venture beyond what is already known.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#100. 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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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