Flow: The Classic Work On How To Achieve Happiness: The Psychology of Happiness

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

A person who has achieved control over psychic energy and has invested it in consciously chosen goals cannot help but grow into a more complex being. By stretching skills, by reaching toward higher challenges, such a person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual.

Many people have impressive record libraries, full of the most exquisite music ever produced, yet they fail to enjoy it. They listen a few times to their recording equipment, marveling at the clarity of the sound it produces, and then forget to listen again until it is time to purchase a more advanced system.

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude,” goes the old saying that Francis Bacon repeated, “is either a wild beast or a god.”

Antonio was so sickly as a child that for years his mother is said to have dressed him in his best clothes every evening and laid him out to sleep in a coffin, expecting him to be dead by morning. Altogether, it was not a very promising start.