Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes

...in the words of Max DePree: "Management has a lot to do with answers. But leadership is a function of questions. And the first question for a leader always is: 'Who do we intend to be?' Not 'What are we going to do?' but 'Who do we intend to be?'"

A person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free.

Discipline is not always internalized and actually can breed resentment among children.

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.

A leader will find it difficult to articulate a coherent vision unless it expresses his core values, his basic identity...one must first embark on the formidable journey of self-discovery in order to create a vision with authentic soul.

Sir John Templeton: "My ethical principle in the first place was: 'Where could I use my talents that God gave me to help the most people?'"

An ideal organization is one in which each worker's potentialities find room for expression.

To be overcome with the ultimate goal often interferes with performance.

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.

Whatever the dictates of fashion, it seems that those who take the trouble to gain mastery over what happens in consciousness do lead a happier life.

Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment.

One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself.

Goals transform a random walk into a chase.

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.

Today many American corporations spend a great deal of money and time trying to increase the originality of their employees, hoping thereby to get a competitive edge in the marketplace. But such programs make no difference unless management also learns to recognize the valuable ideas among the many novel ones, and then finds ways of implementing them.

One of the surest ways to enrich life is to make experiences less fleeting.

To play the trumpet well, a musician can not let more than a few days pass without practicing.

I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. [...] If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual", each of them is a "multitude".

The mood state Americans are in, on average, when watching television is mildly depressed.

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.

Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.

It is when we act freely, for the sake of the action itself rather than for ulterior motives, that we learn to become more than what we were.

The rules themselves are clear enough, and within everyone’s reach. But many forces, both within ourselves and in the environment, stand in the way. It is a little like trying to lose weight: everyone knows what it takes, everyone wants to do it, yet it is next to impossible for so many.

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there

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.

Unless a person knows how to give order to her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment.

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.

Participate as fully as possibly in the world around you.

Those periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times.

To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.

The more a person feels skilled, the more her moods will improve; while the more challenges that are present, the more her attention will become focused and concentrated.

Enjoyment, on the other hand, is not always pleasant, and it can be very stressful at times. A mountain climber, for example, may be close to freezing, utterly exhausted, and in danger of falling into a bottomless crevasse, yet he wouldn't want to be anywhere else. Sipping a piña colada under a palm tree at the edge of the turquoise ocean is idyllic, but it just doesn't compare to the exhilaration he feels on the windswept ridge.

A business is successful to the extent that it provides a product or service that contributes to happiness in all of its forms.

Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time... Creative individuals have a combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.

To be successful you have to enjoy doing your best while at the same time contributing to something beyond yourself.

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.

We have all experienced times when, instead of being buffeted by anonymous forces, we do feel in control of our actions, masters of our own fate. On the rare occasions that it happens, we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.. moments like these are not the passive, receptive, relaxing timesthe best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

There are managers so preoccupied with their e-mail messages that they never look up from their screens to see what's happening in the nondigital world

Competition is an easy way to get into flow.

The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people's chances to enjoy theirs.

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.

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.

Control over consciousness cannot be institutionaliz ed. As soon as it becomes part of a set of social rules and norms, it ceases to be effective in the way it was originally intended to be.

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 psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.

It is not the hearing that improves life, but the listening.

Competition is enjoyable only when it is a means to perfect one’s skills; when it becomes an end in itself, it ceases to be fun.

Try to be surprised by something every day.