A paycheck is a sufficient impetus to motivate some employees to do the minimum amount to get by, and for others, the challenge of getting ahead in the organization provides a satisfactory focus for a while. But these incentives alone are rarely strong enough to inspire workers to give their best to their work. For this a vision is needed, an overarching goal that gives meaning to the job, so that an individual can forget himself in the task and experience flow without doubts or regrets. The most important component of such a vision is an ingredient we call soul.

If a leader demonstrates that his purpose is noble, that the work will enable people to connect with something large - more permanent than their material existence - people will give the best of themselves to the enterprise

To know oneself is the first step toward making flow a part of one's entire life. But just as there is no free lunch in the material economy, nothing comes free in the psychic one. If one is not willing to invest psychic energy in the internal reality of consciousness, and instead squanders it in chasing external rewards, one loses mastery of one's life, and ends up becoming a puppet of circumstances.

And, in fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources do not increase happiness.

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

A self that is only differentiated - not integrated - may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centered egotism. By the same token, a person who self is based exclusively on integration will be well connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of psychic energy in these two processes and avoids both selfishness and conformity is the self likely to reflect complexity.

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.