Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Thinking Quotations

Act as if the future of the universe depends on what you do, while laughing at yourself for thinking that your actions make any difference.

I think that evolution has had a hand in selecting people who had a sense of doing something beyond themselves.

To live means to experience-through doing, feeling, thinking. Experience takes place in time, so time is the ultimate scarce resource we have. Over the years, the content of experience will determine the quality of life. Therefore one of the most essential decisions any of us can make is about how one's time is allocated or invested.

What does this contradictory pattern mean?one conclusion seems inevitable: when it comes to work, people do not heed the evidence of their senses. They disregard the quality of immediate experience, and base their motivation instead on the strongly rooted cultural stereotype of what work is supposed to be like. They think of it as an imposition, a constraint, an infringement of their freedom, and therefore something to be avoided as much as possible.

It is not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel but the ones we think we have.