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those addicted to pleasure, lacking skills and discipline and therefore unable to fend for themselves, find themselves lost and helpless.
Unless a person learns to enjoy it, much of life will be spent desperately trying to avoid its ill effects.
Cicero once wrote that to be completely free one must become a slave to a set of
Unless the partners invest psychic energy in the relationship, conflicts are inevitable, simply because each individual has goals that are to a certain extent divergent from those of all other members of the family.
More than anything else they involve paying attention to the partner’s own complexity,
acceptance, control, and self-confidence to the adolescent.
Health, money, and other material advantages may or may not improve life. Unless a person has learned to control psychic energy, chances are such advantages will be useless.
a person who knows how to find flow from life is able to enjoy even situations that seem to allow only despair.
Learning to live again was in itself a matter of enjoyment and pride,
and they were able to turn the accident from a source of entropy into an occasion of inner order.
What does it benefit to man if he gains the entire world, but loses himself?
distilled everyday life into a goal of hallucinatory clarity: to control his consciousness in order to establish a connection between his self
The peak in the development of coping skills is reached when a young man or woman has achieved a strong enough sense of self, based on personally selected goals, that no external disappointment can entirely undermine who he or she is.
For some people the strength derives from a goal that involves identification with the family, with the country, or with a religion or an ideology.
For others, it depends on mastery of a harmonious system of symbols, such as ...
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those who know how to transform a hopeless situation into a new flow activity that can be controlled
Unselfconscious self-assurance.
their energy is typically not bent on dominating their environment as much as on finding a way to function within it harmoniously.
his goals, his intentions take precedence over everything else.
Their ego involvement prevents them from coping effectively with frustration and from realizing their goal.
Focusing attention on the world.
if your attention is completely absorbed by the goal of making it to the office in time,
The discovery of new solutions.
or else he will waste his energies in inner turmoil.
“a self that has self-contained goals,”
For most people, goals are shaped directly by biological needs and social conventions, and therefore their origin is outside the self.
experience evaluated in consciousness,
1. Setting goals.
it is she who has chosen whatever goal she is pursuing.
having a feeling of ownership of her decisions,
actions are reliable
internally con...
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knowing them to be her own, she can more easily ...
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an autotelic person’s behavior is both more consistent and more flexible. 2. Becoming...
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Some people begin with unrealistic expectations,
When their hopes are dashed, most become despondent, and their selves wither from the loss of psychic energy expended in fruitless attempts.
At the other extreme, many people stagnate because they do not trust their own potential. They choose the safety of trivial goals, and arrest the growth o...
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To achieve involvement with an action system, one must find a relatively close mesh between the demands of the envir...
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People who suffer from attentional disorders, who cannot keep their minds from wandering, always feel left out of the flow of life.
3. Paying attention to what is happening.
it is the other way around: it is the very lack of self-consciousness that makes deep involvement possible.
4. Learning to enjoy immediate experience.
Being in control of the mind
determination and discipline.
transform random events into flow, one must develop skills that stretch capacities,
make one become more than what one is.
Creating meaning involves bringing order to the contents of the mind by integrating one’s actions into a unified flow experience.
To experience flow one must set goals for one’s actions:
The goal in itself is usually not important;
what matters is that it focuses a person’s attention and involves it in an achiev...
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