Happiness does not simply happen to us. It's something that we make happen.

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.

When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.

Jane Fonda, who divided her life into three acts, decided after her sixtieth birthday that she was now facing the final act, and came to the following conclusion: "I thought to myself, well if that's the case and if what I'm scared of isn't death, but getting to the end with regrets, then I've got to figure out what would be the things that I would regret when I got to the last act if I hadn't done them or achieved them by then. And they were: having an intimate relationship and having made a difference."

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.

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.

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