We are always getting to live, as Ralph Waldo Emerson used to say, but never living. Or as poor Frances learned in the children’s story, it is always bread and jam tomorrow, never brad and jam today.
Since the purpose of business is to satisfy existing desires, or stimulate new ones, if everyone were genuinely happy, there would be no need for business any longer.
There are managers so preoccupied with their e-mail messages that they never look up from their screens to see what’s happening in the nondigital world.
It is not the hearing that improves life, but the listening.
It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.
Entropy is the normal state of consciousness – a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.
A person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free.
To be creative, a person has to internalize the entire system that makes creativity possible. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals.
To be successful you have to enjoy doing your best while at the same time contributing to something beyond yourself.
And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can’t be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical knowledge immersion in a particular field.
If we know what that set point is, we can predict fairly accurately when you will be in flow, and it will be when your challenges are higher than average and skills are higher than average.
As long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.
The happiest people spend much time in a state of flow – the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.
A business is successful to the extent that it provides a product or service that contributes to happiness in all of its forms.
We cannot deny the facts of nature, but we should certainly try to improve on them.
But shortcuts are dangerous; we cannot delude ourselves that our knowledge is further along than it actually is.
Socializing is more positive than being alone, that’s why meetings are so popular. People don’t like being alone. That would be, however, an important skill to learn...
Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there.
Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person’s skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding.
It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.
The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.