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Getting in the flow state is crucial to living a happy, fulfilled life. It is possible to change things in your life and environment to make this state more achievable.

Notebook for Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Citation (APA): Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com Chapter 1 Highlight (yellow) - Introduction > Page 2 What I “discovered” was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. 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. Highlight (yellow) - Introduction > Page 2 “Don’t aim at success— the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side- effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.” Highlight (yellow) - Introduction > Page 3 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. This is what we mean by optimal experience. Highlight (yellow) - Introduction > Page 3 The 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. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. Highlight (yellow) - Introduction > Page 5 flow is not just an academic subject. Only a few years after it was first published, the theory began to be applied to a variety of practical issues. Whenever the goal is to improve the quality of life, the flow theory can point the way. Highlight (yellow) - Overview > Page 6 Everything we experience— joy or pain, interest or boredom— is represented in the mind as information. If we are able to control this information, we can decide what our lives will be like. Highlight (yellow) - Overview > Page 7 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. The stakes here are higher, however. It is not just a matter of losing a few extra pounds. It is a matter of losing the chance to have a life worth living. Highlight (yellow) - Overview > Page 8 Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment- by- moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment. Highlight (yellow) - The Roots of Discontent > Page 9 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.” Highlight (yellow) - The Roots of Discontent > Page 9 How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe. Highlight (yellow) - The Roots of Discontent > Page 10 The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment. Highlight (yellow) - Reclaiming Experience > Page 16 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. Highlight (yellow) - Reclaiming Experience > Page 19 The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment. Chapter 2 Highlight (yellow) - Reclaiming Experience > Page 25 Although it sounds like indecipherable academic jargon, the most concise description of the approach I believe to be the clearest way to examine the main facets of what happens in the mind, in a way that can be useful in the actual practice of everyday life, is “a phenomenological model of consciousness based on information theory.” Highlight (yellow) - Reclaiming Experience > Page 25 This representation of consciousness is phenomenological in that it deals directly with events—phenomena—as we experience and interpret them, rather than focusing on the anatomical structures, neurochemical processes, or unconscious purposes that make these events possible. Of course, it is understood that whatever happens in the mind is the result of electrochemical changes in the central nervous system, as laid down over millions of years by biological evolution. But phenomenology assumes that a mental event can be best understood if we look at it directly as it was experienced, rather than through the specialized optics of a particular discipline. Yet in contrast to pure phenomenology, which intentionally excludes any other theory or science from its method, the model we will explore here adopts principles from information theory as being relevant for understanding what happens in consciousness. These principles include knowledge about how sensory data are processed, stored, and used—the dynamics of attention and memory. Highlight (yellow) - Reclaiming Experience > Page 26 we might think of consciousness as intentionally ordered information. Highlight (yellow) - Reclaiming Experience > Page 26 while consciousness is a mirror that reflects what our senses tell us about what happens both outside our bodies and within the nervous system, it reflects those changes selectively, actively shaping events, imposing on them a reality of its own. The reflection consciousness provides is what we call our life: the sum of all we have heard, seen, felt, hoped, and suffered from birth to death. Although we believe that there are “things” outside consciousness, we have direct evidence only of those that find a place in it. Highlight (yellow) - Reclaiming Experience > Page 27 We may call intentions the force that keeps information in consciousness ordered. Intentions arise in consciousness whenever a person is aware of desiring something or wanting to accomplish something. Intentions are also bits of information, shaped either by biological needs or by internalized social goals. They act as magnetic fields, moving attention toward some objects and away from others, keeping our mind focused on some stimuli in preference to others. We often call the manifestation of intentionality by other names, such as instinct, need, drive, or desire. But these are all explanatory terms, telling us why people behave in certain ways. Intention is a more neutral and descriptive term; it doesn’t say why a person wants to do a certain thing, but simply states that he does. Highlight (yellow) - Reclaiming Experience > Page 28 show that goals are quite flexible. Individuals who depart from the norms—heroes, saints, sages, artists, and poets, as well as madmen and criminals—look for different things in life than most others do. The existence of people like these shows that consciousness can be ordered in terms of different goals and intentions. Each of us has this freedom to control our subjective reality. Highlight (yellow) - The Limits of Consciousness > Page 28 It seems we can manage at most seven bits of information—such as differentiated sounds, or visual stimuli, or recognizable nuances of emotion or thought—at any one time, and that the shortest time it takes to discriminate between one set of bits and another is about 1/18 of a second. Highlight (yellow) - The Limits of Consciousness > Page 29 Over a lifetime of seventy years, and counting sixteen hours of waking time each day, this amounts to about 185 billion bits of information. It is out of this total that everything in our life must come—every thought, memory, feeling, or action. It seems like a huge amount, but in reality it does not go that far. Highlight (yellow) - The Limits of Consciousness > Page 29 The optimists claim that through the course of evolution the nervous system has become adept at “chunking” bits of information so that processing capacity is constantly expanded. Simple functions like adding a column of numbers or driving a car grow to be automated, leaving the mind free to deal with more data. We also learn how to compress and streamline information through symbolic means—language, math, abstract concepts, and stylized narratives. Each biblical parable, for instance, tries to encode the hard-won experience of many individuals over unknown eons of time. Consciousness, the optimists argue, is an “open system”; in effect, it is infinitely expandable, and there is no need to take its limitations into account. Highlight (yellow) - The Limits of Consciousness > Page 30 the information we allow into consciousness becomes extremely important; it is, in fact, what determines the content and the quality of life. Note - The Limits of Consciousness > Page 30 Pull information, don't be pushed. In more general terms, exercise choice. Choose what, who, where matters to you. Highlight (yellow) - Attention as Psychic Energy > Page 31 It is attention that selects the relevant bits of information from the potential millions of bits available. It takes attention to retrieve the appropriate references from memory, to evaluate the event, and then to choose the right thing to do. Highlight (yellow) - Attention as Psychic Energy > Page 31 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. Highlight (yellow) - Attention as Psychic Energy > Page 31 Not one minute of E.’s life is wasted. Usually she is writing, solving problems, reading one of the five newspapers or the earmarked sections of books on her daily schedule—or just asking questions, watching curiously what is going on, and planning her next task. Very little of her time is spent on the routine functions of life. Chatting or socializing out of mere politeness is done graciously, but avoided whenever possible. Each day, however, she devotes some time to recharging her mind, by such simple means as standing still for fifteen minutes on the lakeshore, facing the sun with eyes closed. Or she may take her hounds for a walk in the meadows on the hill outside town. E. is so much in control of her attentional processes that she can disconnect her consciousness at will and fall asleep for a refreshing nap whenever she has a moment free. Note - Attention as Psychic Energy > Page 32 I want this. Be like E. Highlight (yellow) - Attention as Psychic Energy > Page 33 Each person allocates his or her limited attention either by focusing it intentionally like a beam of energy—as do E. and R. in the previous examples—or by diffusing it in desultory, random movements. The shape and content of life depend on how attention has been used. Entirely different realities will emerge depending on how it is invested. The names we use to describe personality traits—such as extrovert, high achiever, or paranoid—refer to the specific patterns people have used to structure their attention. At the same party, the extrovert will seek out and enjoy interactions with others, the high achiever will look for useful business contacts, and the paranoid will be on guard for signs of danger he must avoid. Attention can be invested in innumerable ways, ways that can make life either rich or miserable. Note - Attention as Psychic Energy > Page 33 It is how we INVEST intention! Highlight (yellow) - Attention as Psychic Energy > Page 33 Because attention determines what will or will not appear in consciousness, and because it is also required to make any other mental events—such as remembering, thinking, feeling, and making decisions—happen there, it is useful to think of it as psychic energy. Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work it is dissipated. We create ourselves by how we invest this energy. Memories, thoughts, and feelings are all shaped by how we use it. And it is an energy under our control, to do with as we please; hence, attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience. Note - Attention as Psychic Energy > Page 33 So for organizations it's about focusing this psychic energy towards a singular goal or vision. Highlight (yellow) - Enter the Self > Page 34 more than anything else, the self represents the hierarchy of goals that we have built up, bit by bit, over the years. Note - Enter the Self > Page 34 That's why it's important to have a herirarchy of goals, and personal principles like what Ray Dalio says. Highlight (yellow) - Enter the Self > Page 34 If attention, or psychic energy, is directed by the self, and if the self is the sum of the contents of consciousness and the structure of its goals, and if the contents of consciousness and the goals are the result of different ways of investing attention, then we have a system that is going round and round, with no clear causes or effects. At one point we are saying that the self directs attention, at another, that attention determines the self. In fact, both these statements are true: consciousness is not a strictly linear system, but one in which circular causality obtains. Attention shapes the self, and is in turn shaped by it. Note - Enter the Self > Page 34 So any improvements to the loop have recurring gains. Could this be greater than linear? Who knows. Highlight (yellow) - Disorder in Consciousness: Psychic Entropy > Page 36 One of the main forces that affects consciousness adversely is psychic disorder—that is, information that conflicts with existing intentions, or distracts us from carrying them out. We give this condition many names, depending on how we experience it: pain, fear, rage, anxiety, or jealousy. All these varieties of disorder force attention to be diverted to undesirable objects, leaving us no longer free to use it according to our preferences. Psychic energy becomes unwieldy and ineffective. Highlight (yellow) - Disorder in Consciousness: Psychic Entropy > Page 37 The basic pattern is always the same: some information that conflicts with an individual’s goals appears in consciousness. Depending on how central that goal is to the self and on how severe the threat to it is, some amount of attention will have to be mobilized to eliminate the danger, leaving less attention free to deal with other matters. Note - Disorder in Consciousness: Psychic Entropy > Page 37 This is very very important in personal life as well as management. Protect your (and your team's) psyche!! Highlight (yellow) - Disorder in Consciousness: Psychic Entropy > Page 37 Whenever information disrupts consciousness by threatening its goals we have a condition of inner disorder, or psychic entropy, a disorganization of the self that impairs its effectiveness. Prolonged experiences of this kind can weaken the self to the point that it is no longer able to invest attention and pursue its goals. Highlight (yellow) - Disorder in Consciousness: Psychic Entropy > Page 38 The outside event appears in consciousness purely as information, without necessarily having a positive or negative value attached to it. It is the self that interprets that raw information in the context of its own interests, and determines whether it is harmful or not. Note - Disorder in Consciousness: Psychic Entropy > Page 38 One of the tenets of stoicism. Highlight (yellow) - Disorder in Consciousness: Psychic Entropy > Page 39 Every piece of information we process gets evaluated for its bearing on the self. Does it threaten our goals, does it support them, or is it neutral? News of the fall of the stock market will upset the banker, but it might reinforce the sense of self of the political activist. A new piece of information will either create disorder in consciousness, by getting us all worked up to face the threat, or it will reinforce our goals, thereby freeing up psychic energy. Note - Disorder in Consciousness: Psychic Entropy > Page 39 So a good question to reflect on daily, what is eating up my psychic energy and is there anything in my power I can do to solve it? If not, just let it go. Highlight (yellow) - Order in Consciousness: Flow > Page 39 The opposite state from the condition of psychic entropy is optimal experience. When the information that keeps coming into awareness is congruent with goals, psychic energy flows effortlessly. Highlight (yellow) - Order in Consciousness: Flow > Page 40 optimal experience. They are situations in which attention can be freely invested to achieve a person’s goals, because there is no disorder to straighten out, no threat for the self to defend against. Note - Order in Consciousness: Flow > Page 40 Interesting. No threat to defend against. So fear is a blocker to flow. Makes sense. In order for flow to happen, one must mitigate fear perhaps by becoming so used to the activity or so proficient that one can assure oneself that nothing bad will happen. Highlight (yellow) - Order in Consciousness: Flow > Page 40 One of our respondents, a well-known West Coast rock climber, explains concisely the tie between the avocation that gives him a profound sense of flow and the rest of his life: “It’s exhilarating to come closer and closer to self-discipline. You make your body go and everything hurts; then you look back in awe at the self, at what you’ve done, it just blows your mind. It leads to ecstasy, to self-fulfillment. If you win these battles enough, that battle against yourself, at least for a moment, it becomes easier to win the battles in the world.” Highlight (yellow) - Complexity and the Growth of the Self > Page 41 Following a flow experience, the organization of the self is more complex than it had been before. It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow. Complexity is the result of two broad psychological processes: differentiation and integration. Differentiation implies a movement toward uniqueness, toward separating oneself from others. Integration refers to its opposite: a union with other people, with ideas and entities beyond the self. A complex self is one that succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies. Highlight (yellow) - Complexity and the Growth of the Self > Page 42 The self becomes complex as a result of experiencing flow. Paradoxically, 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. Chapter 3 Highlight (yellow) - Complexity and the Growth of the Self > Page 43 THERE ARE TWO MAIN STRATEGIES we can adopt 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. Highlight (yellow) - Complexity and the Growth of the Self > Page 43 Changing external conditions might seem to work at first, but if a person is not in control of his consciousness, the old fears or desires will soon return, reviving previous anxieties. One cannot create a complete sense of inner security even by buying one’s own Caribbean island and surrounding it with armed bodyguards and attack dogs. Highlight (yellow) - Pleasure and Enjoyment > Page 47 Complexity requires investing psychic energy in goals that are new, that are relatively challenging. It is easy to see this process in children: During the first few years of life every child is a little “learning machine” trying out new movements, new words daily. The rapt concentration on the child’s face as she learns each new skill is a good indication of what enjoyment is about. And each instance of enjoyable learning adds to the complexity of the child’s developing self. Note - Pleasure and Enjoyment > Page 47 Beginner's mind Highlight (yellow) - Pleasure and Enjoyment > Page 47 Unfortunately, this natural connection between growth and enjoyment tends to disappear with time. Perhaps because “learning” becomes an external imposition when schooling starts, the excitement of mastering new skills gradually wears out. It becomes all too easy to settle down within the narrow boundaries of the self developed in adolescence. But if one gets to be too complacent, feeling that psychic energy invested in new directions is wasted unless there is a good chance of reaping extrinsic rewards for it, one may end up no longer enjoying life, and pleasure becomes the only source of positive experience. Note - Pleasure and Enjoyment > Page 47 What happens to a lot of people after college. Highlight (yellow) - The Elements of Enjoyment > Page 49 the phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components. When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following. First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. Highlight (yellow) - The Elements of Enjoyment > Page 51 In a healthy culture, productive work and the necessary routines of everyday life are also satisfying. Highlight (yellow) - The Elements of Enjoyment > Page 52 Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act. Highlight (yellow) - The Elements of Enjoyment > Page 53 one of the most universal and distinctive features of optimal experience takes place: people become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing. Highlight (yellow) - The Elements of Enjoyment > Page 54 “The mystique of rock climbing is climbing; you get to the top of a rock glad it’s over but really wish it would go on forever. The justification of climbing is climbing, like the justification of poetry is writing; you don’t conquer anything except things in yourself…. The act of writing justifies poetry. Climbing is the same: recognizing that you are a flow. The purpose of the flow is to keep on flowing, not looking for a peak or utopia but staying in the flow. It is not a moving up but a continuous flowing; you move up to keep the flow going. There is no possible reason for climbing except the climbing itself; it is a self-communication.” Highlight (yellow) - The Elements of Enjoyment > Page 59 Thus the flow experience is typically described as involving a sense of control—or, more precisely, as lacking the sense of worry about losing control that is typical in many situations of normal life. Note - The Elements of Enjoyment > Page 59 Psychological safety as a condition for flow. Highlight (yellow) - The Elements of Enjoyment > Page 61 Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “The Luchin Defense” describes a young chess genius so involved in the game that the rest of his life—his marriage, his friendships, his livelihood—is going by the boards. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Experience > Page 67 The term “autotelic” derives from two Greek words, auto meaning self, and telos meaning goal. It refers to a self-contained activity, one that is done not with the expectation of some future benefit, but simply because the doing itself is the reward. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Experience > Page 70 Jefferson’s uncomfortable dictum “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” applies outside the fields of politics as well; it means that we must constantly reevaluate what we do, lest habits and past wisdom blind us to new possibilities. Chapter 4 Highlight (yellow) - Flow and Culture > Page 78 If we assume, however, that the desire to achieve optimal experience is the foremost goal of every human being, the difficulties of interpretation raised by cultural relativism become less severe. Each social system can then be evaluated in terms of how much psychic entropy it causes, measuring that disorder not with reference to the ideal order of one or another belief system, but with reference to the goals of the members of that society. A starting point would be to say that one society is “better” than another if a greater number of its people have access to experiences that are in line with their goals. A second essential criterion would specify that these experiences should lead to the growth of the self on an individual level, by allowing as many people as possible to develop increasingly complex skills. Note - Flow and Culture > Page 78 To play devil's advocate, this could lead to Huxley's "Brave New World" Highlight (yellow) - Flow and Culture > Page 81 Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed to reduce the impact of randomness on experience. They are adaptive responses, just as feathers are for birds and fur is for mammals. Cultures prescribe norms, evolve goals, build beliefs that help us tackle the challenges of existence. In so doing they must rule out many alternative goals and beliefs, and thereby limit possibilities; but this channeling of attention to a limited set of goals and means is what allows effortless action within self-created boundaries. Highlight (yellow) - Flow and Culture > Page 81 When a culture succeeds in evolving a set of goals and rules so compelling and so well matched to the skills of the population that its members are able to experience flow with unusual frequency and intensity, the analogy between games and cultures is even closer. In such a case we can say that the culture as a whole becomes a “great game.” Note - Flow and Culture > Page 81 Building a great culture: empowering people to enter and stay in the flow state. This is also a signal for hiring: find people who want the role for fun. Select for fun! Highlight (yellow) - Flow and Culture > Page 81 A culture that enhances flow is not necessarily “good” in any moral sense. The rules of Sparta seem needlessly cruel from the vantage point of the twentieth century, even though they were by all accounts successful in motivating those who abided by them. Highlight (yellow) - Flow and Culture > Page 82 when a group of people embraces goals and norms that will enhance its enjoyment of life there is always the possibility that this will happen at the expense of someone else. The flow of the Athenian citizen was made possible by the slaves who worked his property, just as the elegant life-style of the Southern plantations in America rested on the labor of imported slaves. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 84 A less drastic obstacle to experiencing flow is excessive self-consciousness. A person who is constantly worried about how others will perceive her, who is afraid of creating the wrong impression, or of doing something inappropriate, is also condemned to permanent exclusion from enjoyment. So are people who are excessively self-centered. A self-centered individual is usually not self-conscious, but instead evaluates every bit of information only in terms of how it relates to her desires. For such a person everything is valueless in itself. A flower is not worth a second look unless it can be used; a man or a woman who cannot advance one’s interests does not deserve further attention. Consciousness is structured entirely in terms of its own ends, and nothing is allowed to exist in it that does not conform to those ends. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 85 Attentional disorders and stimulus overinclusion prevent flow because psychic energy is too fluid and erratic. Excessive self-consciousness and self-centeredness prevent it for the opposite reason: attention is too rigid and tight. Neither extreme allows a person to control attention. Those who operate at these extremes cannot enjoy themselves, have a difficult time learning, and forfeit opportunities for the growth of the self. Paradoxically, a self-centered self cannot become more complex, because all the psychic energy at its disposal is invested in fulfilling its current goals, instead of learning about new ones. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 86 Anomie—literally, “lack of rules”—is the name the French sociologist Emile Durkheim gave to a condition in society in which the norms of behavior had become muddled. When it is no longer clear what is permitted and what is not, when it is uncertain what public opinion values, behavior becomes erratic and meaningless. People who depend on the rules of society to give order to their consciousness become anxious. Note - The Autotelic Personality > Page 86 Takeaway here is for flow to happen, there must be rules. These rules can be internal or external (e.g. Self-principles or rules as those of games) Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 86 Alienation is in many ways the opposite: it is a condition in which people are constrained by the social system to act in ways that go against their goals. A worker who in order to feed himself and his family must perform the same meaningless task hundreds of times on an assembly line is likely to be alienated. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 86 When a society suffers from anomie, flow is made difficult because it is not clear what is worth investing psychic energy in; when it suffers from alienation the problem is that one cannot invest psychic energy in what is clearly desirable. Note - The Autotelic Personality > Page 86 Should note to create a culture and environment where both anomie and alienation aren't present. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 86 It is interesting to note that these two societal obstacles to flow, anomie and alienation, are functionally equivalent to the two personal pathologies, attentional disorders and self-centeredness. At both levels, the individual and the collective, what prevents flow from occurring is either the fragmentation of attentional processes (as in anomie and attentional disorders), or their excessive rigidity (as in alienation and self-centeredness). At the individual level anomie corresponds to anxiety, while alienation corresponds to boredom. Note - The Autotelic Personality > Page 86 So flow is balance, yin and yang. Deep work and collaborative work. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 86 Dr. Jean Hamilton’s research with visual perception and cortical activation patterns lends support to such a claim. One set of her evidence is based on a test in which subjects had to look at an ambiguous figure (a Necker cube, or an Escher-type illustration that at one point seems to be coming out of the plane of the paper toward the viewer and the next moment seems to recede behind the plane), and then perceptually “reverse” it—that is, see the figure that juts out of the surface as if it were sinking back, and vice versa. Dr. Hamilton found that students who reported less intrinsic motivation in daily life needed on the average to fix their eyes on more points before they could reverse the ambiguous figure, whereas students who on the whole found their lives more intrinsically rewarding needed to look at fewer points, or even only a single point, to reverse the same figure. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 87 These findings suggest that people might vary in the number of external cues they need to accomplish the same mental task. Individuals who require a great deal of outside information to form representations of reality in consciousness may become more dependent on the external environment for using their minds. They would have less control over their thoughts, which in turn would make it more difficult for them to enjoy experience. By contrast, people who need only a few external cues to represent events in consciousness are more autonomous from the environment. They have a more flexible attention that allows them to restructure experience more easily, and therefore to achieve optimal experiences more frequently. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 87 In another set of experiments, students who did and who did not report frequent flow experiences were asked to pay attention to flashes of lights or to tones in a laboratory. While the subjects were involved in this attentional task, their cortical activation in response to the stimuli was measured, and averaged separately for the visual and auditory conditions. (These are called “evoked potentials.”) Dr. Hamilton’s findings showed that subjects who reported only rarely experiencing flow behaved as expected: when responding to the flashing stimuli their activation went up significantly above their baseline level. But the results from subjects who reported flow frequently were very surprising: activation decreased when they were concentrating. Instead of requiring more effort, investment of attention actually seemed to decrease mental effort. A separate behavioral measure of attention confirmed that this group was also more accurate in a sustained attentional task. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 87 The most likely explanation for this unusual finding seems to be that the group reporting more flow was able to reduce mental activity in every information channel but the one involved in concentrating on the flashing stimuli. This in turn suggests that people who can enjoy themselves in a variety of situations have the ability to screen out stimulation and to focus only on what they decide is relevant for the moment. While paying attention ordinarily involves an additional burden of information processing above the usual baseline effort, for people who have learned to control consciousness focusing attention is relatively effortless, because they can shut off all mental processes but the relevant ones. It is this flexibility of attention, which contrasts so sharply with the helpless overinclusion of the schizophrenic, that may provide the neurological basis for the autotelic personality. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 88 The neurological evidence does not, however, prove that some individuals have inherited a genetic advantage in controlling attention and therefore experiencing flow. The findings could be explained in terms of learning rather than inheritance. The association between the ability to concentrate and flow is clear; it will take further research to ascertain which one causes the other. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 88 The family context promoting optimal experience could be described as having five characteristics. The first one is clarity: the teenagers feel that they know what their parents expect from them—goals and feedback in the family interaction are unambiguous. The second is centering, or the children’s perception that their parents are interested in what they are doing in the present, in their concrete feelings and experiences, rather than being preoccupied with whether they will be getting into a good college or obtaining a well-paying job. Next is the issue of choice: children feel that they have a variety of possibilities from which to choose, including that of breaking parental rules—as long as they are prepared to face the consequences. The fourth differentiating characteristic is commitment, or the trust that allows the child to feel comfortable enough to set aside the shield of his defenses, and become unselfconsciously involved in whatever he is interested in. And finally there is challenge, or the parents’ dedication to provide increasingly complex opportunities for action to their children. Note - The Autotelic Personality > Page 89 We could apply Kahneman's system to these traits and ask children to self-rate how you are doing as a parent. I wonder if there are parents who ask feedback from their children. Perhaps having a family culture of "the best ideas win" would be good. This can also be used in 1 on 1's and in Person-Company Fit sessions!! Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 89 The presence of these five conditions made possible what was called the “autotelic family context,” because they provide an ideal training for enjoying life. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 89 Children who know what they can and cannot do, who do not have to constantly argue about rules and controls, who are not worried about their parents’ expectations for future success always hanging over their heads, are released from many of the attentional demands that more chaotic households generate. They are free to develop interests in activities that will expand their selves. In less well-ordered families a great deal of energy is expended in constant negotiations and strife, and in the children’s attempts to protect their fragile selves from being overwhelmed by other people’s goals. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Personality > Page 89 Only when teenagers were with their friends did the differences disappear: with friends both groups felt equally positive, regardless of whether the families were autotelic or not. Note - The Autotelic Personality > Page 89 Speak about autotelic friend groups will you! Highlight (yellow) - The People of Flow > Page 92 When adversity threatens to paralyze us, we need to reassert control by finding a new direction in which to invest psychic energy, a direction that lies outside the reach of external forces. When every aspiration is frustrated, a person still must seek a meaningful goal around which to organize the self. Then, even though that person is objectively a slave, subjectively he is free. Highlight (yellow) - The People of Flow > Page 92 Richard Logan proposes an answer based on the writings of many survivors, including those of Viktor Frankl and Bruno Bettelheim, who have reflected on the sources of strength under extreme adversity. He concludes that the most important trait of survivors is a “nonself-conscious individualism,” or a strongly directed purpose that is not self-seeking. People who have that quality are bent on doing their best in all circumstances, yet they are not concerned primarily with advancing their own interests. Because they are intrinsically motivated in their actions, they are not easily disturbed by external threats. With enough psychic energy free to observe and analyze their surroundings objectively, they have a better chance of discovering in them new opportunities for action. If we were to consider one trait a key element of the autotelic personality, this might be it. Narcissistic individuals, who are mainly concerned with protecting their self, fall apart when the external conditions turn threatening. The ensuing panic prevents them from doing what they must do; their attention turns inward in an effort to restore order in consciousness, and not enough remains to negotiate outside reality. Note - The People of Flow > Page 93 This reminds me of Antifragility. Having enough psychic energy to notice and take advantage of black swans. Highlight (yellow) - The People of Flow > Page 93 Bertrand Russell, one of the greatest philosophers of our century, described how he achieved personal happiness: “Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.” There could be no better short description of how to build for oneself an autotelic personality. Chapter 5 Highlight (yellow) - Higher, Faster, Stronger > Page 97 Even the simplest physical act becomes enjoyable when it is transformed so as to produce flow. The essential steps in this process are: (a) to set an overall goal, and as many subgoals as are realistically feasible; (b) to find ways of measuring progress in terms of the goals chosen; (c) to keep concentrating on what one is doing, and to keep making finer and finer distinctions in the challenges involved in the activity; (d) to develop the skills necessary to interact with the opportunities available; and (e) to keep raising the stakes if the activity becomes boring. Highlight (yellow) - The Flow of Music > Page 111 Plato believed that children should be taught music before anything else; in learning to pay attention to graceful rhythms and harmonies their whole consciousness would become ordered. Highlight (yellow) - The Flow of Music > Page 112 when children are taught music, the usual problem often arises: too much emphasis is placed on how they perform, and too little on what they experience. Parents who push their children to excel at the violin are generally not interested in whether the children are actually enjoying the playing; they want the child to perform well enough to attract attention, to win prizes, and to end up on the stage of Carnegie Hall. By doing so, they succeed in perverting music into the opposite of what it was designed to be: they turn it into a source of psychic disorder. Highlight (yellow) - The Joys of Tasting > Page 115 repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They become rigid and defensive, and their self stops growing. 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. Chapter 6 Highlight (yellow) - The Joys of Tasting > Page 118 A symbolic system is like a game in that it provides a separate reality, a world of its own where one can perform actions that are permitted to occur in that world, but that would not make much sense anywhere else. In symbolic systems, the “action” is usually restricted to the mental manipulation of concepts. Highlight (yellow) - The Mother of Science > Page 123 if control of consciousness is judged to be at least as important as the ability to get things done, then learning complex patterns of information by heart is by no means a waste of effort. A mind with some stable content to it is much richer than one without. It is a mistake to assume that creativity and rote learning are incompatible. Some of the most original scientists, for instance, have been known to have memorized music, poetry, or historical information extensively. Note - The Mother of Science > Page 123 A reminder to improve your memory. Highlight (yellow) - The Mother of Science > Page 123 How can one find more value in memory? The most natural way to begin is to decide what subject one is really interested in—poetry, fine cuisine, the history of the Civil War, or baseball—and then start paying attention to key facts and figures in that chosen area. With a good grasp of the subject will come the knowledge of what is worth remembering and what is not. The important thing to recognize here is that you should not feel that you have to absorb a string of facts, that there is a right list you must memorize. If you decide what you would like to have in memory, the information will be under your control, and the whole process of learning by heart will become a pleasant task, instead of a chore imposed from outside. Note - The Mother of Science > Page 123 So choice as a prerequisite to effective memorization. Highlight (yellow) - The Rules of the Games of the Mind > Page 126 Great thinkers have always been motivated by the enjoyment of thinking rather than by the material rewards that could be gained by it. Highlight (yellow) - The Rules of the Games of the Mind > Page 127 When a person has learned a symbolic system well enough to use it, she has established a portable, self-contained world within the mind. Highlight (yellow) - The Rules of the Games of the Mind > Page 128 having a portable set of rules that the mind can work with is of great benefit even in normal life. People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media. They are easily manipulated by demagogues, pacified by entertainers, and exploited by anyone who has something to sell. If we have become dependent on television, on drugs, and on facile calls to political or religious salvation, it is because we have so little to fall back on, so few internal rules to keep our mind from being taken over by those who claim to have the answers. Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness. It is within each person’s power to decide whether its order will be restored from the outside, in ways over which we have no control, or whether the order will be the result of an internal pattern that grows organically from our skills and knowledge. Highlight (yellow) - The Play of Words > Page 130 It is not for utilitarian reasons alone that breadth of vocabulary and verbal fluency are among the most important qualifications for success as a business executive. Note - The Play of Words > Page 130 Source? Highlight (yellow) - The Play of Words > Page 130 The major creative use of language, already mentioned several times in earlier contexts, is poetry. Because verse enables the mind to preserve experiences in condensed and transformed form, it is ideal for giving shape to consciousness. Reading from a book of poems each night is to the mind as working out on a Nautilus is to the body—a way for staying in shape. It doesn’t have to be “great” poetry, at least not at first. And it is not necessary to read an entire poem. What’s important is to find at least a line, or a verse, that starts to sing. Sometimes even one word is enough to open a window on a new view of the world, to start the mind on an inner journey. Highlight (yellow) - The Play of Words > Page 131 writing gives the mind a disciplined means of expression. It allows one to record events and experiences so that they can be easily recalled, and relived in the future. It is a way to analyze and understand experiences, a self-communication that brings order to them. Highlight (yellow) - Befriending Clio > Page 132 Erik Erikson has held that the last stage of the human life cycle involves the task of achieving “integrity,” or bringing together what one has accomplished and what one has failed to accomplish in the course of one’s life into a meaningful story that can be claimed as one’s own. Highlight (yellow) - Befriending Clio > Page 134 as soon as a person decides which aspects of the past are compelling, and decides to pursue them, focusing on the sources and the details that are personally meaningful, and recording findings in a personal style, then learning history can become a full-fledged flow experience. Note - Befriending Clio > Page 134 Takeaway: anything can trigger flow as long as it's personally meaningful. Is that the gist of being autotelic? Highlight (yellow) - Loving Wisdom > Page 139 As in all other branches of learning, the first step after deciding what area one wants to pursue is to learn what others have thought about the matter. By reading, talking, and listening selectively one can form an idea of what the “state of the art” in the field is. Again, the importance of personally taking control of the direction of learning from the very first steps cannot be stressed enough. If a person feels coerced to read a certain book, to follow a given course because that is supposed to be the way to do it, learning will go against the grain. But if the decision is to take that same route because of an inner feeling of rightness, the learning will be relatively effortless and enjoyable. Highlight (yellow) - Loving Wisdom > Page 139 specialization is for the sake of thinking better, and not an end in itself. Highlight (yellow) - Amateurs and Professionals > Page 140 originally, “amateur,” from the Latin verb amare, “to love,” referred to a person who loved what he was doing. Similarly a “dilettante,” from the Latin delectare, “to find delight in,” was someone who enjoyed a given activity. The earliest meanings of these words therefore drew attention to experiences rather than accomplishments; they described the subjective rewards individuals gained from doing things, instead of focusing on how well they were achieving. Nothing illustrates as clearly our changing attitudes toward the value of experience as the fate of these two words. Note - Amateurs and Professionals > Page 140 Note that Taleb heaps praise on the amateur and dilettante, as he says this is where a lot of innovation comes from. Highlight (yellow) - The Challenge of Lifelong Learning > Page 141 Many people give up on learning after they leave school because thirteen or twenty years of extrinsically motivated education is still a source of unpleasant memories. Their attention has been manipulated long enough from the outside by textbooks and teachers, and they have counted graduation as the first day of freedom. But a person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free. His thinking will be directed by the opinions of his neighbors, by the editorials in the papers, and by the appeals of television. He will be at the mercy of “experts.” Ideally, the end of extrinsically applied education should be the start of an education that is motivated intrinsically. Highlight (yellow) - The Challenge of Lifelong Learning > Page 142 the profound joy of the thinker, like that experienced by the disciples of Socrates that Plato describes in Philebus: “The young man who has drunk for the first time from that spring is as happy as if he had found a treasure of wisdom; he is positively enraptured. He will pick up any discourse, draw all its ideas together to make them into one, then take them apart and pull them to pieces. He will puzzle first himself, then also others, badger whoever comes near him, young and old, sparing not even his parents, nor anyone who is willing to listen….” The quotation is about twenty-four centuries old, but a contemporary observer could not describe more vividly what happens when a person first discovers the flow of the mind. Chapter 7 Highlight (yellow) - Autotelic Workers > Page 151 the mystical heights of the Yu are not attained by some superhuman quantum jump, but simply by the gradual focusing of attention on the opportunities for action in one’s environment, which results in a perfection of skills that with time becomes so thoroughly automatic as to seem spontaneous and otherworldly. Highlight (yellow) - Autotelic Jobs > Page 152 AUTOTELIC JOBS Note - Autotelic Jobs > Page 152 This is a very interesting initiative to take on, to help others transform their jobs into autotelic experiences, especially those who seem to lack flow in their lives. Highlight (yellow) - Autotelic Jobs > Page 152 The more a job inherently resembles a game—with variety, appropriate and flexible challenges, clear goals, and immediate feedback—the more enjoyable it will be regardless of the worker’s level of development. Highlight (yellow) - Autotelic Jobs > Page 154 In theory, any job could be changed so as to make it more enjoyable by following the prescriptions of the flow model. Highlight (yellow) - The Paradox of Work > Page 160 the apathy of many of the people around us is not due to their being physically or mentally exhausted. The problem seems to lie more in the modern worker’s relation to his job, with the way he perceives his goals in relation to it. Highlight (yellow) - The Paradox of Work > Page 160 In our studies we find that American workers tend to mention three main reasons for their dissatisfaction with their jobs, Highlight (yellow) - The Paradox of Work > Page 161 The first and perhaps most important complaint concerns the lack of variety and challenge. This can be a problem for everyone, but especially for those in lower-level occupations in which routine plays a major role. The second has to do with conflicts with other people on the job, especially bosses. The third reason involves burnout: too much pressure, too much stress, too little time to think for oneself, too little time to spend with the family. This is a factor that particularly troubles the higher echelons—executives and managers. Highlight (yellow) - The Paradox of Work > Page 161 Variety and challenge, for instance, are in one sense inherent characteristics of jobs, but they also depend on how one perceives opportunities. Highlight (yellow) - The Paradox of Work > Page 161 Whether a job has variety or not ultimately depends more on a person’s approach to it than on actual working conditions. Highlight (yellow) - The Paradox of Work > Page 161 set the challenge of reaching one’s goals while helping the boss and colleagues reach theirs; it is less direct and more time-consuming than forging ahead to satisfy one’s interests regardless of what happens to others, but in the long run it seldom fails. Highlight (yellow) - The Waste of Free Time > Page 162 Over sixty years ago, the great American sociologist Robert Park already noted: “It is in the improvident use of our leisure, I suspect, that the greatest wastes of American life occur.” Highlight (yellow) - The Waste of Free Time > Page 162 We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action. Highlight (yellow) - The Waste of Free Time > Page 163 Mass leisure, mass culture, and even high culture when only attended to passively and for extrinsic reasons—such as the wish to flaunt one’s status—are parasites of the mind. Chapter 8 Highlight (yellow) - The Waste of Free Time > Page 164 STUDIES ON FLOW have demonstrated repeatedly that more than anything else, the quality of life depends on two factors: how we experience work, and our relations with other people. The most detailed information about who we are as individuals comes from those we communicate with, and from the way we accomplish our jobs. Highlight (yellow) - The Conflict between Being Alone and Being with Others > Page 168 human relations are malleable, and if a person has the appropriate skills their rules can be transformed. Highlight (yellow) - The Pain of Loneliness > Page 171 The ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention. It is relatively easy to become involved with a job, to enjoy the company of friends, to be entertained in a theater or at a concert. But what happens when we are left to our own devices? Alone, when the dark night of the soul descends, are we forced into frantic attempts to distract the mind from its coming? Or are we able to take on activities that are not only enjoyable, but make the self grow? Highlight (yellow) - The Pain of Loneliness > Page 172 the habit of finding challenges that bring out hidden potentials for growth. Highlight (yellow) - Flow and the Family > Page 176 The many small principalities into which Germany had been divided until about a century ago each had laws of inheritance that were based either on primogeniture, where the oldest son was left the entire family estate, or on an equal division of the estate among all sons. Which of these methods for transmitting property was adopted seems to have been due almost entirely to chance, yet the choice had profound economic implications. (Primogeniture led to concentration of capital in the lands that used this method, which in turn led to industrialization; whereas equal sharing led to the fragmentation of property and industrial underdevelopment.) Highlight (yellow) - Flow and the Family > Page 180 differentiated and integrated. Differentiation means that each person is encouraged to develop his or her unique traits, maximize personal skills, set individual goals. Integration, in contrast, guarantees that what happens to one person will affect all others. If a child is proud of what she accomplished in school, the rest of the family will pay attention and will be proud of her, too. If the mother is tired and depressed, the family will try to help and cheer her up. In an integrated family, each person’s goals matter to all others. Highlight (yellow) - Flow and the Family > Page 184 It is much easier for a person to try developing her potential if she knows that no matter what happens, she has a safe emotional base in the family. Note - Flow and the Family > Page 184 Psychological safety Highlight (yellow) - Flow and the Family > Page 184 Unconditional acceptance is especially important to children. If parents threaten to withdraw their love from a child when he fails to measure up, the child’s natural playfulness will be gradually replaced by chronic anxiety. However, if the child feels that his parents are unconditionally committed to his welfare, he can then relax and explore the world without fear; otherwise he has to allocate psychic energy to his own protection, thereby reducing the amount he can freely dispose of. Early emotional security may well be one of the conditions that helps develop an autotelic personality in children. Without this, it is difficult to let go of the self long enough to experience flow. Highlight (yellow) - Flow and the Family > Page 184 Love without strings attached does not mean, of course, that relationships should have no standards, no punishment for breaking the rules. When there is no risk attached to transgressing rules they become meaningless, and without meaningful rules an activity cannot be enjoyable. Children must know that parents expect certain things from them, and that specific consequences will follow if they don’t obey. But they must also recognize that no matter what happens, the parents’ concern for them is not in question. Highlight (yellow) - Enjoying Friends > Page 185 “The worst solitude,” wrote Sir Francis Bacon, “is to be destitute of sincere friendship.” Highlight (yellow) - Enjoying Friends > Page 188 To enjoy such one-to-one relationships requires the same conditions that are present in other flow activities. It is necessary not only to have common goals and to provide reciprocal feedback, which even interactions in taverns or at cocktail parties provide, but also to find new challenges in each other’s company. Highlight (yellow) - Enjoying Friends > Page 189 Just as with the family, people believe that friendships happen naturally, and if they fail, there is nothing to be done about it but feel sorry for oneself. In adolescence, when so many interests are shared with others and one has great stretches of free time to invest in a relationship, making friends might seem like a spontaneous process. But later in life friendships rarely happen by chance: one must cultivate them as assiduously as one must cultivate a job or a family. Highlight (yellow) - The Wider Community > Page 191 Those who try to make life better for everyone without having learned to control their own lives first usually end up making things worse all around. Chapter 9 Highlight (yellow) - Tragedies Transformed > Page 193 Dr. Franz Alexander has so well stated: “The fact that the mind rules the body is, in spite of its neglect by biology and medicine, the most fundamental fact which we know about the process of life.” Highlight (yellow) - Coping with Stress > Page 200 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. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 203 Why are some people weakened by stress, while others gain strength from it? Basically the answer is simple: those who know how to transform a hopeless situation into a new flow activity that can be controlled will be able to enjoy themselves, and emerge stronger from the ordeal. There are three main steps that seem to be involved in such transformations: Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 203 Unselfconscious self-assurance. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 203 the implicit belief that their destiny was in their hands. They did not doubt their own resources would be sufficient to allow them to determine their fate. In that sense one would call them self-assured, yet at the same time, their egos seem curiously absent: they are not self-centered; their energy is typically not bent on dominating their environment as much as on finding a way to function within it harmoniously. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 203 This attitude occurs when a person no longer sees himself in opposition to the environment, as an individual who insists that his goals, his intentions take precedence over everything else. Instead, he feels a part of whatever goes on around him, and tries to do his best within the system in which he must operate. Paradoxically, this sense of humility—the recognition that one’s goals may have to be subordinated to a greater entity, and that to succeed one may have to play by a different set of rules from what one would prefer—is a hallmark of strong people. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 204 Basically, to arrive at this level of self-assurance one must trust oneself, one’s environment, and one’s place in it. A good pilot knows her skills, has confidence in the machine she is flying, and is aware of what actions are required in case of a hurricane, or in case the wings ice over. Therefore she is confident in her ability to cope with whatever weather conditions may arise—not because she will force the plane to obey her will, but because she will be the instrument for matching the properties of the plane to the conditions of the air. As such she is an indispensable link for the safety of the plane, but it is only as a link—as a catalyst, as a component of the air-plane-person system, obeying the rules of that system—that she can achieve her goal. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 204 Focusing attention on the world. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 204 It is difficult to notice the environment as long as attention is mainly focused inward, as long as most of one’s psychic energy is absorbed by the concerns and desires of the ego. People who know how to transform stress into enjoyable challenge spend very little time thinking about themselves. They are not expending all their energy trying to satisfy what they believe to be their needs, or worrying about socially conditioned desires. Instead their attention is alert, constantly processing information from their surroundings. The focus is still set by the person’s goal, but it is open enough to notice and adapt to external events even if they are not directly relevant to what he wants to accomplish. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 205 An open stance makes it possible for a person to be objective, to be aware of alternative possibilities, to feel a part of the surrounding world. Note - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 205 Being in flow helps antifragility. One reads more information off the environment, processes it through some heuristics, and has a higher chance of identifying and capturing black swans. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 205 To experience psychic entropy one must concentrate on the internal disorder; but by paying attention to what is happening around oneself instead, the destructive effects of stress are lessened. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 205 the person whose attention is immersed in the environment becomes part of it—she participates in the system by linking herself to it through psychic energy. This, in turn, makes it possible for her to understand the properties of the system, so that she can find a better way to adapt to a problematic situation. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 206 During the Korean War, G.’s unit was involved in routine parachute training. One day, as the group was preparing for a drop, it was discovered that there were not enough regular parachutes to go around, and one of the right-handed men was forced to take a left-handed chute. “It is the same as the others,” the ordnance sergeant assured him, “but the rip cord hangs on the left side of the harness. You can release the chute with either hand, but it is easier to do it with the left.” The team boarded the plane, went up to eight thousand feet, and over the target area one after the other they jumped out. Everything went well, except for one of the men: his parachute never opened, and he fell straight to his death on the desert below. G. was part of the investigating team sent to determine why the chute didn’t open. The dead soldier was the one who had been given the left-handed release latch. The uniform on the right side of his chest, where the rip cord for a regular parachute would have been, had been completely torn off; even the flesh of his chest had been gouged out in long gashes by his bloody right hand. A few inches to the left was the actual rip cord, apparently untouched. There had been nothing wrong with the parachute. The problem had been that, while falling through that awful eternity, the man had become fixated on the idea that to open the chute he had to find the release in the accustomed place. His fear was so intense that it blinded him to the fact that safety was literally at his fingertips. Note - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 206 Basically, panicking never helps. Fear is only useful as a warning system but once you are alert it loses its utility. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 206 In a threatening situation it is natural to mobilize psychic energy, draw it inward, and use it as a defense against the threat. But this innate reaction more often than not compromises the ability to cope. It exacerbates the experience of inner turmoil, reduces the flexibility of response, and, perhaps worse than anything else, it isolates a person from the rest of the world, leaving him alone with his frustrations. On the other hand, if one continues to stay in touch with what is going on, new possibilities are likely to emerge, which in turn might suggest new responses, and one is less likely to be entirely cut off from the stream of life. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 207 The discovery of new solutions. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 207 Almost every situation we encounter in life presents possibilities for growth. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 207 these transformations require that a person be prepared to perceive unexpected opportunities. Most of us become so rigidly fixed in the ruts carved out by genetic programming and social conditioning that we ignore the options of choosing any other course of action. Note - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 207 Remember there are always other options, other modes of living than the ones touted by your social group, the culture you are in or what you are even aware of. There are unknown unknowns. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 208 how does one go about discovering these alternative strategies? The answer is basically simple: if one operates with unselfconscious assurance, and remains open to the environment and involved in it, a solution is likely to emerge. Highlight (yellow) - The Power of Dissipative Structures > Page 208 an original artist with equal technical training commences with a deeply felt but undefined goal in mind, keeps modifying the picture in response to the unexpected colors and shapes emerging on the canvas, and ends up with a finished work that probably will not resemble anything she started out with. If the artist is responsive to her inner feelings, knows what she likes and does not like, and pays attention to what is happening on the canvas, a good painting is bound to emerge. On the other hand, if she holds on to a preconceived notion of what the painting should look like, without responding to the possibilities suggested by the forms developing before her, the painting is likely to be trite. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 209 The “autotelic self” is one that easily translates potential threats into enjoyable challenges, and therefore maintains its inner harmony. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 209 The term literally means “a self that has self-contained goals,” Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 209 the rules for developing such a self are simple, and they derive directly from the flow model. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 209 1. Setting goals. To be able to experience flow, one must have clear goals to strive for. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 210 One of the basic differences between a person with an autotelic self and one without it is that the former knows that it is she who has chosen whatever goal she is pursuing. What she does is not random, nor is it the result of outside determining forces. Note - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 210 Andy Dufresne from the Shawshank Redemption is autotelic. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 210 knowing them to be her own, she can more easily modify her goals whenever the reasons for preserving them no longer make sense. Note - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 210 Agile. Also, like Taleb says rational flaneurs aren't stuck in narratives. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 210 2. Becoming immersed in the activity. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 210 After choosing a system of action, a person with an autotelic personality grows deeply involved with whatever he is doing. Whether flying a plane nonstop around the world or washing dishes after dinner, he invests attention in the task at hand. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 211 Only when a person’s actions are appropriately matched with the opportunities of the action system does he truly become involved. Note - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 211 The book gives an example of being at a party and rather than withdrawing to a corner or being loud, you "read the room". I recall the big breakthrough in socializing was reading Carnegie and treating interactions as a game. I converted something I dreaded into a flow activity by knowing the rules of the system (Carnegie book), devising self-contained rules for myself (seeing how many interesting things I could pull out of people) and not thinking about myself at all (full investment of psychic energy). Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 211 3. Paying attention to what is happening. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 211 The same pitfalls threaten anyone who participates in a complex system: to stay in it, he must keep investing psychic energy. Note - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 211 What is quite difficult: having limited amounts of psychic energy yet having many goals. Now comes into play efficient systems, using the Pareto principle and identifying the highest yield activities with lowest psychic energy cost. Part of this involves deft leveraging of money to preserve psychic energy as well as skillful delegation. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 212 The elements of the autotelic personality are related to one another by links of mutual causation. It does not matter where one starts—whether one chooses goals first, develops skills, cultivates the ability to concentrate, or gets rid of self-consciousness. One can start anywhere, because once the flow experience is in motion the other elements will be much easier to attain. Highlight (yellow) - The Autotelic Self: A Summary > Page 212 4. Learning to enjoy immediate experience. Chapter 10 Highlight (yellow) - What Meaning Means > Page 217 the answer to the old riddle “What is the meaning of life?” turns out to be astonishingly simple. The meaning of life is meaning: whatever it is, wherever it comes from, a unified purpose is what gives meaning to life. Highlight (yellow) - What Meaning Means > Page 217 What counts is not so much whether a person actually achieves what she has set out to do; rather, it matters whether effort has been expended to reach the goal, instead of being diffused or wasted. Highlight (yellow) - What Meaning Means > Page 217 “He who desires but acts not,” wrote Blake with his accustomed vigor, “breeds pestilence.” Highlight (yellow) - What Meaning Means > Page 217 Someone who knows his desires and works with purpose to achieve them is a person whose feelings, thoughts, and actions are congruent with one another, and is therefore a person who has achieved inner harmony. Highlight (yellow) - Cultivating Purpose > Page 218 In the lives of many people it is possible to find a unifying purpose that justifies the things they do day in, day out—a goal that like a magnetic field attracts their psychic energy, a goal upon which all lesser goals depend. This goal will define the challenges that a person needs to face in order to transform his or her life into a flow activity. Without such a purpose, even the best-ordered consciousness lacks meaning. Highlight (yellow) - Cultivating Purpose > Page 218 Ultimate goals, in Arendt’s opinion, must accommodate the issue of mortality: they must give men and women a purpose that extends beyond the grave. Highlight (yellow) - Cultivating Purpose > Page 221 There is a consensus among psychologists who study such subjects that people develop their concept of who they are, and of what they want to achieve in life, according to a sequence of steps. Each man or woman starts with a need to preserve the self, to keep the body and its basic goals from disintegrating. At this point the meaning of life is simple; it is tantamount to survival, comfort, and pleasure. When the safety of the physical self is no longer in doubt, the person may expand the horizon of his or her meaning system to embrace the values of a community—the family, the neighborhood, a religious or ethnic group. This step leads to a greater complexity of the self, even though it usually implies conformity to conventional norms and standards. The next step in development involves reflective individualism. The person again turns inward, finding new grounds for authority and value within the self. He or she is no longer blindly conforming, but develops an autonomous conscience. At this point the main goal in life becomes the desire for growth, improvement, the actualization of potential. The fourth step, which builds on all the previous ones, is a final turning away from the self, back toward an integration with other people and with universal values. In this final stage the extremely individualized person—like Siddhartha letting the river take control of his boat—willingly merges his interests with those of a larger whole. Highlight (yellow) - Cultivating Purpose > Page 222 The number of steps is irrelevant; what counts is that most theories recognize the importance of this dialectic tension, this alternation between differentiation on the one hand and integration on the other. From this point of view, individual life appears to consist of a series of different “games,” with different goals and challenges, that change with time as a person matures. Complexity requires that we invest energy in developing whatever skills we were born with, in becoming autonomous, self-reliant, conscious of our uniqueness and of its limitations. At the same time we must invest energy in recognizing, understanding, and finding ways to adapt to the forces beyond the boundaries of our own individuality. Of course we don’t have to undertake any of these plans. But if we don’t, chances are, sooner or later, we will regret it. Highlight (yellow) - Forging Resolve > Page 223 The price one pays for changing goals whenever opposition threatens is that while one may achieve a more pleasant and comfortable life, it is likely that it will end up empty and void of meaning. Highlight (yellow) - Forging Resolve > Page 224 Mobility has freed us from ties to our birthplaces: there is no longer any reason to become involved in one’s native community, to identify with one’s place of birth. If the grass looks greener across the fence, we simply move to the other field—How about opening that little restaurant in Australia? Life-styles and religions are choices that are easily switched. In the past a hunter was a hunter until he died, a blacksmith spent his life perfecting his craft. We can now shed our occupational identities at will: no one needs to remain an accountant forever. Highlight (yellow) - Forging Resolve > Page 224 the inevitable consequence of equally attractive choices is uncertainty of purpose; uncertainty, in turn, saps resolution, and lack of resolve ends up devaluing choice. Therefore freedom does not necessarily help develop meaning in life—on the contrary. If the rules of a game become too flexible, concentration flags, and it is more difficult to attain a flow experience. Commitment to a goal and to the rules it entails is much easier when the choices are few and clear. Highlight (yellow) - Forging Resolve > Page 225 how do we know where to invest psychic energy? There is no one out there to tell us, “Here is a goal worth spending your life on.” Because there is no absolute certainty to which to turn, each person must discover ultimate purpose on his or her own. Through trial and error, through intense cultivation, we can straighten out the tangled skein of conflicting goals, and choose the one that will give purpose to action. Note - Forging Resolve > Page 225 Man's Search for Meaning Highlight (yellow) - Forging Resolve > Page 225 Self-knowledge—an ancient remedy so old that its value is easily forgotten—is the process through which one may organize conflicting options. “Know thyself” was carved over the entrance to the Delphic oracle, and ever since untold pious epigrams have extolled its virtue. Highlight (yellow) - Forging Resolve > Page 225 Inner conflict is the result of competing claims on attention. Too many desires, too many incompatible goals struggle to marshal psychic energy toward their own ends. It follows that the only way to reduce conflict is by sorting out the essential claims from those that are not, and by arbitrating priorities among those that remain. Highlight (yellow) - Forging Resolve > Page 226 Jesuits’ test of conscience, which involves reviewing one’s actions one or more times each day to check whether what one has been doing in the past few hours has been consistent with long-term goals, self-knowledge can be pursued in innumerable ways, each leading potentially to greater inner harmony. Highlight (yellow) - Forging Resolve > Page 226 Activity and reflection should ideally complement and support each other. Action by itself is blind, reflection impotent. Before investing great amounts of energy in a goal, it pays to raise the fundamental questions: Is this something I really want to do? Is it something I enjoy doing? Am I likely to enjoy it in the foreseeable future? Is the price that I—and others—will have to pay worth it? Will I be able to live with myself if I accomplish it? Highlight (yellow) - Recovering Harmony > Page 228 The more complex any system, the more room it leaves open for alternatives, and the more things can go wrong with it. This is certainly applicable to the evolution of the mind: as it has increased its power to handle information, the potential for inner conflict has increased as well. When there are too many demands, options, challenges, we become anxious; when too few, we get bored. Highlight (yellow) - Recovering Harmony > Page 229 When we can imagine only few opportunities and few possibilities, it is relatively easy to achieve harmony. Desires are simple, choices clear. There is little room for conflict and no need to compromise. This is the order of simple systems—order by default, as it were. It is a fragile harmony; step by step with the increase of complexity, the chances of entropy generated internally by the system increase as well. Note - Recovering Harmony > Page 229 So for more flow, less goals but clear ones. Simplify, simplify, simplify your life! Highlight (yellow) - Recovering Harmony > Page 230 A child’s options are usually few and coherent; with each year, they become less so. The earlier clarity that made spontaneous flow possible is obscured by a cacophony of disparate values, beliefs, choices, and behaviors. Highlight (yellow) - Recovering Harmony > Page 230 Once the fruit is plucked from the tree of knowledge, the way back to Eden is barred forever. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 230 Instead of accepting the unity of purpose provided by genetic instructions or by the rules of society, the challenge for us is to create harmony based on reason and choice. Philosophers like Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty have recognized this task of modern man by calling it the project, which is their term for the goal-directed actions that provide shape and meaning to an individual’s life. Psychologists have used terms like propriate strivings or life themes. In each case, these concepts identify a set of goals linked to an ultimate goal that gives significance to whatever a person does. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 233 the theme is in many cases a reaction to a great personal hurt suffered in early life—to being orphaned, abandoned, or treated unjustly. But what matters is not the trauma per se; the external event never determines what the theme will be. What matters is the interpretation that one places on the suffering. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 233 To find purpose in suffering one must interpret it as a possible challenge. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 233 a complex, negentropic life theme is rarely formulated as the response to just a personal problem. Instead, the challenge becomes generalized to other people, or to mankind as a whole. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 235 To discard the hard-won information on how to live accumulated by our ancestors, or to expect to discover a viable set of goals all by oneself, is misguided hubris. The chances of success are about as good as in trying to build an electron microscope without the tools and knowledge of physics. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 238 Dante recognized that every system of spiritual order, when it becomes incorporated into a worldly structure like an organized church, begins to suffer the effects of entropy. So to extract meaning from a system of beliefs a person must first compare the information contained in it with his or her concrete experience, retain what makes sense, and then reject the rest. Notes Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 241 Norman Bradburn’s The Structure of Psychological Well-Being (Bradburn 1969), which pointed out that happiness and unhappiness were independent of each other; in other words, just because a person is happy it does not mean he can’t also be unhappy at the same time. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 243 Escalating expectations. According to many authors, chronic dissatisfaction with the status quo is a feature of modernity. The quintessential modern man, Goethe’s Faust, was given power by the Devil on condition that he never be satisfied with what he has. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 243 happiness and satisfaction with life depend on how small a gap one perceives between what one wishes for and what one possesses, and that expectations tend to rise, have been often observed. For instance, in a poll conducted in 1987 and reported in the Chicago Tribune (Sept. 24, sect. 1, p. 3), Americans making more than $100,000 a year (who constitute 2 percent of the population) believe that to live in comfort they would need $88,000 a year; those who earn less think $30,000 would be sufficient. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 245 Genes and personal advantage. The argument that genes were programmed for their own benefit, and not to make life better for their carriers, was first formulated in a coherent way by Dawkins (1976), although the saying “The chicken is only an egg’s way for making another egg,” which encapsulates Dawkins’s idea very well, is much older. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 249 Order. What order—or psychic negentropy—implies will be discussed in the pages below; see also Csikszentmihalyi (1982a) and Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1984). Basically, it refers to the lack of conflict among the bits of information present in an individual’s consciousness. When the information is in harmony with a person’s goals, the consciousness of that person is “ordered.” The same concept applies also to lack of conflict between individuals, when their goals are in harmony with each other. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 252 Painting. The distinction between more and less original artists is that the former start painting with a general and often vague idea of what they want to accomplish, while the latter tend to start with a clearly visualized picture in mind. Thus original artists must discover as they go along what it is that they will do, using feedback from the developing work to suggest new approaches. The less original artists end up painting the picture in their heads, which has no chance to grow and develop. But to be successful in his open-ended process of creation, the original artist must have well-internalized criteria for what is good art, so that he can choose or discard the right elements in the developing painting (Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi 1976). Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 260 The goals we pursue are not determined in advance or built into our makeup. They are discovered in the process of enjoying the extension of our skills in novel settings, in new environments. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 267 Maurice Schlick (1934) pointed out how important enjoyment was in sustaining scientific creativity. In an interesting recent study, B. Eugene Griessman interviewed a potpourri of high achievers ranging from Francis H. C. Crick, the codiscoverer of the double helix, to Hank Aaron, Julie Andrews, and Ted Turner. Fifteen of these celebrities completed a questionnaire in which they rated the importance of thirty-three personal characteristics, such as creativity, competence, and breadth of knowledge, in terms of helping them achieve success. The item most strongly endorsed (for an average of 9.86 on a 10-point scale) was enjoyment of work (Griessman 1987, pp. 294–95). Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 268 The 54-volume series of the Great Books of the Western World, now edited by Mortimer Adler and published by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is a good introduction to the most influential thinkers of our culture— Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 270 Martin Heidegger (1962) has analyzed our continuous dependence on the they, or the intrapsychic representation of other people we carry in our minds. Related concepts are Charles Cooley’s (1902) “generalized other” and Freud’s “superego.” Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 276 even interest in other people seems to alleviate stress: “Those who have a concern for other people and concerns beyond the self have fewer stressful experiences, and stress has less effect on anxiety, depression, and hostility; they make more active attempts to cope with their problems” (Crandall 1984, p. 172). Note - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 276 Lol mom is right Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 276 Hardiness is a term coined by Salvatore Maddi and Suzanne Kobasa to describe the tendency of certain people to respond to threats by transforming them into manageable challenges. The three main components of hardiness are commitment to one’s goals, a sense of being in control, and enjoyment of challenges (Kobasa, Maddi, & Kahn 1982). A similar term is Vaillant’s (1977) concept of “mature defense,” Lazarus’s concept of “coping” (Lazarus & Folkman 1984), and the concept of “personality strength” measured in German surveys by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1983, 1985). All of these coping styles—hardiness, mature defenses, and transformational coping—share many characteristics with the autotelic personality trait described in this volume. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 277 findings show that art students who in 1964 painted in the manner described here (i.e., who approached the canvas without a clearly worked out image of the finished painting) were 18 years later significantly more successful—by the standards of the artistic community—than their peers who worked out the finished product in their minds beforehand. Other characteristics, such as technical competence, did not differentiate the two groups. Note - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 277 Case for being a rational flaneur. Not being stuck in a narrative and more agile to pursue optima as information comes in. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 277 Setting realistic goals. It has been reported that adults who commit themselves to very long-term goals, with few short-term rewards, are less satisfied with their lives than people who have easier, short-term goals (Bee 1987, p. 373). On the other hand, the flow model suggests that having too-easy goals would be equally dissatisfying. Neither extreme allows a person to enjoy life fully. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 279 The autobiography of Malcolm X (1977) is a classic description of the development of a life theme. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 279 The counterintuitive notion that transference of attention from personal problems to the problems of others helps personal growth underlies the work of the developmental psychologists mentioned in the note to page 221; see also Crandall (1984), and note to p. 198. Note - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 280 Man for others. Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 280 Books as socializing agents. For studies on the effect of books and stories told in childhood on the subsequent life themes of individuals see Csikszentmihalyi & Beattie (1979) and Beattie & Csikszentmihalyi (1981). Highlight (yellow) - The Unification of Meaning in Life Themes > Page 280 Religion and entropy. See, for instance, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s early essay, written in 1798 but not published until 110 years later: Der Geist der Christentums und sein Schiksal (The spirit of Christianity and its fate), in which he reflects on the materialization that Christ’s teachings underwent after they were embedded into a Church.

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