Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

But when we are left alone, with no demands on attention, the basic disorder of the mind reveals itself. With nothing to do, it begins to follow random patterns, usually stopping to consider something painful or disturbing. Unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at

more a job inherently resembles a game—with variety, appropriate and flexible challenges, clear goals, and immediate feedback—the more enjoyable it will be regardless of the worker’s level of development.

It seems we can manage at most seven bits of information—such as differentiated sounds, or visual stimuli, or recognizable nuances of emotion or thought—at any one time, and that the shortest time it takes to discriminate between one set of bits and another is about 1/18 of a second. By using these figures one concludes that it is possible to proce

Unconditional acceptance, the complete trust family members ought to have for one another, is meaningful only when it is accompanied by an unstinting investment of attention. Otherwise it is just an empty gesture, a hypocritical pretense indistinguishable from disinterest.

As Democritus said so simply many centuries ago: “Water can be both good and bad, useful and dangerous. To the danger, however, a remedy has been found: learning to swim.”

This in turn suggests that people who can enjoy themselves in a variety of situations have the ability to screen out stimulation and to focus only on what they decide is relevant for the moment.

Every time one speaks to him, the image of a deep well full of energy comes to mind. As he talks, his eyes take in everything; every sentence he hears is analyzed three or four different ways even before the speaker has finished saying it. Things that most people take for granted puzzle him; and until he figures them out in an original yet perfectl

A symbolic system is like a game in that it provides a separate reality, a world of its own where one can perform actions that are permitted to occur in that world, but that would not make much sense anywhere else. In symbolic systems, the “action” is usually restricted to the mental manipulation of concepts.

“Men are not afraid of things, but of how they view them,” said Epictetus a long time ago. And the great emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: “If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgment of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgment now.”