SPACESFlow
Have you found yourself staying up late, joylessly bingeing TV shows and doomscrolling through the news, or simply navigating your day uninspired and aimless? Chances are you're languishing, says orga…
Finding Flow Book Notes
It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life. When we are in flow, we are not happy, because to experience happiness we must focus on our inner states, …
When the job presents clear goals, unambiguous feedback, a sense of control, challenges that match the worker's skills, and few distractions, the feelings it provides are not that different from what …
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 …
Lack of true friends is often the main complaint of people confronting an emotional crisis in the second half of life.
Flow tends to occur when a person's skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable.
To achieve excellence, we must first understand the reality of the everyday, with all its demands and potential frustrations.
Flow Book Notes
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 lo…
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’…
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 t…
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…
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.
Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person’s capacity to act.
Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-by-moment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment.
Creativity Book Notes
It is easier to enhance creativity by changing conditions in the environment than by trying to make people think more creatively. And a genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of …
The second reason creativity is so fascinating is that when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.
So the first step toward a more creative life is the cultivation of curiosity and interest, that is, the allocation of attention to things for their own sake.
To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity.
Good Business Book Notes
When we begin to respond to an opportunity that has clear goals and provides immediate feedback, we are likely to become involved in it, even if the activity itself is not very “important”—such as a g…
Whatever the composition of a firm, if it is to do good business it should be a place where everyone is encouraged to progress toward complexity—or at the very least a place that does not make it more…
The first is the process of differentiation, which involves realizing that we are unique individuals, responsible for our own survival and well-being, who are willing to develop this uniqueness wherev…
The ability to give objective feedback to oneself is in fact the mark of the expert.
The challenge for someone who wants to create an environment that attracts and retains enthusiastic and enterprising workers is to understand why people want to work in the first place, and then provi…
Many of the descriptions of flow quoted up to now have mentioned the fact that while immersed in the experience one tends to forget not only one’s problems and surroundings, but one’s very self.
To be successful you have to enjoy doing your best while at the same time contributing to something beyond yourself.
A good flow activity is one that offers challenges at several levels of complexity.
