“Those who cannot cope with a meaningless life may retire gracefully into relative oblivion.

Like waiters in a restaurant starting to place breakfast settings on the surrounding tables while one is still having dinner, these intimations of mortality plainly communicate the message: Your time is up, it’s time to move on.” But inevitably the bathroom mirror shows the first white hairs, and confirms the fact that those extra pounds are not about to leave inevitably eyesight begins to fail and mysterious pains begin to shoot through the body. During the years of early adulthood the future still looks promising, the hope remains that one’s goals will be realized. “People moving through life eventually ask a question ‘Is this all there is?’ Childhood can be painful, adolescence confusing, but for most people, behind it all there is the expectation that after one grows up, things will get better. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued it must ensue…as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.” The more you aim at success and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. “A happy life it is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe. To Live Well, Resist the Chaos of Reality by Controlling Consciousness Originally published on on June 13, 2015. Plaintext is Csikszentmihalyi, italics are me. Here’s excerpts of the 13 main points I noticed, with some extra comments from me.

Needless to say, I gained much and think it’s well worth a read. Without some intellectual effort, a commitment to reflect and think hard about your own experience, you will not gain much from what follows.” Like all adventures worth having it will not be an easy one. “Rather than presenting a list of dos and don’ts, this book intends to be a voyage through the realms of the mind, charted with the tools of science. It’s a personal manifesto backed by science, rather than science warped to serve a manifesto, as sometimes happens when self-development and science intersect. (This was my experience with Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.)īut Flow does not read like a science book, it reads like a self-help book. The author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a psychologist, and usually science books run the risk of being full of data and experiments without much soul or narrative to hold them together. Every book that multiple people have recommended me again and again has turned out to be excellent, and this was no exception. Flow was one of those books that kept getting recommended to me again and again.

Flow by mihaly csikszentmihalyi