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Kindle Notes & Highlights
1. There are clear goals every step of the way.
2. There is immediate feedback to one’s actions.
3. There is a balance between challenges and skills.
4. Action and awareness are merged.
5. Distractions are excluded from consciousness
6. There is no worry of failure.
7. Self-consciousness disappears.
8. The sense of time becomes distorted.
9. The activity becomes autotelic.
At this point the activity becomes autotelic, which is Greek for something that is an end in itself.
Most things in life are exotelic. We do them not because we enjoy them but in order to get at some later goal. And some activities are both: The violinist gets paid for playing, and the surgeon gets status and good money for operating, as well as getting enjoyment from doing what they do.
If work and family life become autotelic, then there is nothing wasted in life, and everything we do is worth doing for its own sake.
Many creative scientists say that the difference between them and their less creative peers is the ability to separate bad ideas from good ones, so that they don’t waste much time exploring blind alleys. Everyone has both bad and good ideas all the time, they say. But some people can’t tell them apart until it’s too late, until they have already invested a great deal of time in the unprofitable hunches.
At Linus Pauling’s sixtieth birthday celebration, a student asked him, “Dr. Pauling, how does one go about having good ideas?” He replied, “You have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.”
Schools generally fail to teach how exciting, how mesmerizingly beautiful science or mathematics can be; they teach the routine of literature or history rather than the adventure.
