Find out what you like and what you hate about life. Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate.
The task is to learn how to enjoy everyday life without diminishing other people’s chances to enjoy theirs.
Some individuals have developed such strong internal standards that they no longer need the opinion of others to judge whether they have performed a task well or not. The ability to give objective feedback to oneself is in fact the mark of the expert.
Flow is hard to achieve without effort. Flow is not ’wasting time.
Contrary to what most of us believe, happiness does not simply happen to us. It’s something that we make happen, and it results from doing our best. Feeling fulfilled when we live up to our potentialities is what motivates differentiation and leads to evolution.
There are two main strategies we can try 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.
Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.
It is better to look suffering straight in the eye, acknowledge and respect it’s presence, and then get busy as soon as possible focusing on things we choose to focus on.
But it is impossible to enjoy a tennis game, a book, or a conversation unless attention is fully concentrated on the activity.
People generally report higher levels of stress, depression, and tension after watching TV. It seems that TV’s main virtue is that it occupies the mind undemandingly.
The rules themselves are clear enough, and within everyone’s reach. But many forces, both within ourselves and in the environment, stand in the way. It is a little like trying to lose weight: everyone knows what it takes, everyone wants to do it, yet it is next to impossible for so many.
It is not the skills we actually have that determine how we feel but the ones we think we have.
However, a good life consists of more than simply the totality of enjoyable experiences. It must also have a meaningful pattern, a trajectory of growth that results in the development of increasing emotional, cognitive, and social complexity.
And, in fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources do not increase happiness.
If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable. To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity.
One cannot lead a life that is truly excellent without feeling that one belongs to something greater and more permanent than oneself.
For better or worse, our future will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.
If a leader demonstrates that his purpose is noble, that the work will enable people to connect with something large – more permanent than their material existence – people will give the best of themselves to the enterprise.
Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.
A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening ‘outside,’ just by changing the contents of consciousness.