“What matters most in a child’s development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.” (xv)
“It wasn’t poverty itself that was compromising the executive function abilities of the poor kids. It was the stress that went along with it.” (20)
“It was the licking-and-grooming habits of the rearing rat mother that mattered. When a pup received the comforting experience of lickign and grooming as an infant, it grew up to be braver and bolder and better adjusted than a pup who hadn’t, whether or not its biological mother was the one who had done the licking and grooming.” (30)
“It showed that, in rats at least, subtle parental behaviors had predictable and long-lasting DNA-related effects that could actually be traced and observed.” (31)
“Babies whose parents responded readily and fully to their cries in the first months of life were, at one year, more independent and intrepid than babies whose parents had ignored their cries.” (33)
“Pure IQ is stubbornly resistant to improvement after about age eight. But executive functions and the ability to handle stress and manage strong emotions can be improved, sometimes dramatically, well into adolescence and even adulthood.” (43)
“There was always this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful. Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that.” (56)
“People who have an easy time of things, who get eigh hundreds on their SATs, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that.” (57)
“Duckworth finds it useful to divide the mechanics of achievement into two separate dimensions: motivation and volition.” (64)
“A psychologist found that the test that most reliably predicted a high-school student’s future didn’t measure IQ; it measured how a student’s peers rated him on a trait Smith called “strength of character,” which included being “conscientious, responsible, insistently orderly, not prone to daydreaming, determined, persevering.” This measure was three times more successful in predicting college performance than any combination of cognitive ratings, including SAT scores and class rank.” (72)
“Regardless of the facts on the malleability of intelligence, students do much better academically if they believe intelligence is malleable.” (97)
“Most people won’t tell teenage girls (especially the together, articulate ones) that they are lazy and the quality of their work is unacceptable. And sometimes kids need to hear that, or they have no reason to step up.” (120)
“A lot of people with attention issues crave intense experiences and serious stimulations, they want to be absorbed in some sort of all-encompassing pursuit.” (130)
“When it comes to ambitions, it is crucial to distinguish between ‘wanting’ something and ‘choosing’ it. Decide that you want to become world champion, Rowson explained, and you will inevitably fail to put in the necessary hard work. You will not only not become world champion but also have the unpleasant experience of falling short of a desired goal, with all the attendant disappointment and regret. If, however, you choose to become world champion, then you will “reveal your choice through your behavior and your determination. Every action says, ‘This is who I am.’” (131)
“Standardized-test scores were predicted by scores on pure IQ tests and that GPA was predicted by scores on tests of self-control.” (153)
“Whether or not a student is able to graduate from a decent American college doesn’t necessarily have all that much to do with how smart he or she is. It has to do, instead, with that same list of character strengths that produce high GPAs in middle school and high school.” (153)
“I think it is easier to take someone in the fishing industry and teach him about currency trading,” Stefan Alfsson says, “than to take someone from the banking industry and teach them how to fish.”” (34)
“A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will.” (97)
“There is an ancient rule of financial life – if you owe the bank 5 million bucks, the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank 5 billion bucks, you own the bank.” (125)
“The scary thing about state treasurers,” Meredith Whitney said “is that they don’t know the financial situation in their own municipalities.” “How do you know that?” “Because I asked them!” (177)
“Those who have money and can move do so,” Whitney wrote in her report to her Wall Street clients, “those without money and who cannot move do not, and ultimately rely more on state and local assistance. It becomes effectively a ‘tragedy of the commons.’”” (177)
Arnold Schwarzenegger: “There were times of disappointment. But if you want to live rather than just exist, you want the drama.” (189)
“The people who had power in the society, and were charged with saving it from itself, had instead bled the society to death.” (202)
“The problem with police officers and firefighters isn’t a public-sector problem; it isn’t a problem with government; it’s a problem with the entire society. It’s what happened on Wall Street in the run-up to the subprime crisis. It’s a problem of people taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences. It’s not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. THey’d been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences.” (202)
“Everywhere you turn you see Americans sacrifice their long-term interests for a short-term reward.” (205)
“Nobody cared in 2007 how much I made. If I made six figures they said, ‘Shit, man, you deserve it. You run into a burning building.’ Because everyone had a job. All they knew about our job is that it was dangerous. The minute the economy started to collapse, people started looking at each other.” (210)
As always, if you liked the quotes, please buy the book.
“People are more apt to be dishonest in the presence of nonmonetary objects – such as pencils and tokens – than actual money.” (34)
“The more cashless our society becomes, the more our moral compass slips.” (34)
“Generally speaking, if you wear down your willpower, you will have considerably more trouble regulating your desires, and that difficulty can wear down your honesty as well.” (106)
“We should face situation that require self-control-a particularly tedious assignment at work, for example-early in the day, before we are too depleted.” (115)
“The bottom line is that we should not view a single act of dishonesty as just one petty act. We tend to forgive people for their first offense with the idea that it is just the first time and everyone makes mistakes. And although this may be true, we should also realize that the first act of dishonesty might be particularly important in shaping the way a person looks at himself and his actions from that point on – and because of that, the first dishonest act is the most important one to prevent.” (137)
“We have a gut feeling about what we want, and we go through a process of mental gymnastics, applying all kinds of justifications to manipulate the criteria. That way, we can get what we really want, but at the same time keep up the appearance – to ourselves and to others – that we are acting in accordance with our rational and well-reasoned preferences.” (167)
“The individuals who were more creative also had higher levels of dishonesty. Intelligence, however, wasn’t correlated to any degree with dishonesty.” (176)
“I think that these results suggest that once something or someone irritates us, it becomes easier for us to justify our immoral behavior.” (178)
“(In our vending machine) we almost tripled sales by probabilistically giving people back their money.” [70% chance of paying full price of $1.00, 30% chance of getting all their money back/free] (194)
“It’s important to realize that the effects of individual transgressions can go beyond a singular dishonest act. Passed from person to person, dishonesty has a slow, creeping, socially erosive effect.” (214)
“Whereas altruism can increase cheating and direct supervision can decrease it, altruistic cheating overpowers the supervisory effect when people are put together in a setting where they have a chance to socialize and be observed.” (228)
“This study suggests that as dentists become more comfortable with their patients, they also more frequently recommend procedures that are in their own financial interest. And long-term patients, for their part, are more likely to accept the dentist’s advice based on the trust that their relationship has engendered.” (230)
“Very few people steal to a maximal degree. But many good people cheat just a little here and there by rounding up their billable hours, claiming higher losses on their insurance claims, recommending unnecessary treatments, and so on.” (239)
“The amount of cheating seems to be equal in every country – at least in those we’ve tested so far.” (242)
“Negative emotions (like sadness) by themselves do not create a desire for self-inflicted pain. However, those in the guilty condition were far more disposed to self-administering higher levels of shocks.” (251)
“There is a fundamental logic to murder – ruthless but rational – and it resides not only in the minds of people who actually become murders, but in the minds of all of us.” (5)
“According to our findings, 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women have had at least one vivid fantasy about killing someone.” (8)
“Seven years of near obsessive subsequent research into murder has led me to the conclusion that, yes, the human mind has developed adaptations for killing – deeply ingrained patterns of thought, often accompanied by internal dialogue, anchored in powerful emotions – that motivate us to murder.” (8)
“Murder is a product of the evolutionary pressures our species confronted and adapted to.” (9)
“It may seem bizarre to talk about killing as adaptive, or murder as advantageous, but in fact the benefits of killing, in an evolutionary sense, are so substantial that the real mystery is not why killing has been so prevalent over our evolutionary history, but why killing has not been more prevalent.” (11)
“The evolution of the psychology of murder has been like an arms race: in response to the threat of murder, we’ve developed a well-honed set of defenses against it, and they have acted as powerful deterrents.” (11)
“A core argument that I will make in this book is that passions are rational. They function as well-designed components of human psychological machinery, facilitating effective solutions to specific adaptive problems. They succeed at precisely those critical junctures in life when dispassionate cold calculation would fail. Emotions, far from opposing reason, are extraordinarily effective means for implementing goals.” (15)
“The saying, “Don’t get mad, get even,” misses this basic point: getting mad exists, in part, precisely for the purpose of “getting even.”” (15)
“In our study of 375 Michigan murders, we found that 96 percent were judged to be legally sane, competent, and nonpsychotic. They full understood that their actions were wrong and illegal.” (15)
“Most killers, in a nutshell, are not crazy. They kill for specific reasons, such as lust, greed, envy, fear, revenge, status, and reputation, or to get rid of someone who they perceive is inflicting costs on them. They are like you. They are like me.” (15)
“Key contexts in which women’s lives are at risk are “lovers’ triangles” in which the woman is substantially younger than her husband.” (17)
“Men indicate an increased willingness to kill as their mating prospects become dire; women do not.” (17)
“”For every “successful” murder, there are more than there attempted murders that fail because of successful medical intervention.” (20)
“Serial killers attract a wildly disproportionate share of media attention, but they actually account for only 1 to 2 percent of all murders in America.” (21)
“In one study of murderers who were paroled, for example, only 6 percent were subsequently rearrested for committing another murder. Although there clearly are some career criminals who have committed repeated murders, most murderers kill only once.” (22)
“Year after year, the percentage of murders in the U.S. that are committed by men hovers right around 87.” (22)
“Of murder victims in any given year, on average, 75 percent are men – a percentage that has remained quite stable over the years.” (22)
“On average, 65 percent of all murders involve males killing males. By comparison, 22 percent of murders involve males killing females. As for murders by women, 10 percent of all murders, on average, involve females killing males, and a mere 3 percent of murders involve females killing other females.” (22)
“A host of personality variables on which men score higher than women correlate with criminality and delinquency in general. These include impulsivity (acting without deliberation), sensation seeking (taking risks to achieve novel experience), childhood aggressiveness, lack of empathy, and deficient moral reasoning. None of these personality variables, however, have been shown to predict homicide specifically.” (23)
“The highest rate of murdering occurs between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine, though murder rates start rising by the time males reach fifteen and continue to remain high into the thirties and forties. Most murder victims also fall in their twenties, with a similarly wide age distribution.” (23)
“Murder increases dramatically as males enter the years of reproductive competition.” (23)
“Of all crimes, murder has the highest “clearance” or solve rate.” (23)
“The clearance rate for burglary is only 14 percent, arson 15 percent, larceny-theft 20 percent, the clearance rate for murder typically hovers around 69 percent.” (24)
“Though poverty per se is not a powerful predictor of crime, economic inequality is. In regions where there is great income disparity, where some people are wealthy and others dirt-poor, the rates of both property offenses and violent crime tend to increase.” (26)
“The patterns that I discovered in the triggers of homicidal fantasies support a radical new theory of murder – that all of us house in our large brains specialized psychological circuits that lead us to contemplate murder as a solution to specific adaptive problems.” (30)
“People have hundreds of homicidal thoughts for ever one that is acted upon. Though homicidal thoughts usually precede murder – as we found in the case files in the Michigan study of murderers – they do not invariably, or even very often lead to murder. In fact, most fantasies help to put the brakes on murderous impulses, inhibiting the intent to kill, because we usually appraise the costs as too high and choose more effective, less risky solutions.” (31)
“A crucial point about this evolutionary theory of murder is that I am not arguing for “genetic determinism.” I am not saying that we are lumbering robots with blind killer-impulses that inevitably get expressed. I am also not saying that we have no choice in the matter of whether or not we go to the extreme of actually killing someone. The mere existence of psychology adaptations that lead us to murder in certain circumstances does not mean that we are inevitably driven to kill. Murder is one strategy on a menu of solutions to a predictable set of adaptive problems that were frequent in the lives of our ancestors and, fortunately, most of the time people use non-lethal means of solving these problems.” (34)
“The more I analyzed the psychology of killing in cases of actual murder and in homicidal fantasies, the more striking was the realization that so many murders follow from the intense pressures of mating.” (44)
“The qualities men find attractive – clear, smooth, unblemished skin; lustrous hair; good muscle tone; symmetrical features; and a narrow waist and full hips that make a waist-to-hip ratio of .70-are clear markers of both health and youth, and hence of fertility. These standards of female beauty are remarkably consistent across cultures, with a few notable exceptions, such as a preference for slimness or plumpness.” (55)
“Research shows that social comments can indeed influence our perceptions of attractiveness.” (57)
“The fundamental difference in reproductive biology cascades throughout the entire mating system. For one thing, it accounts for why males throughout history have devoted far more energy to what evolutionary biologists call “mating effort,” which includes chasing, attracting, and courting mates, as well as engaging other men in competition. Women rapidly reach diminishing returns, in the currency of reproductive fitness, from a fanatical expenditure of effort toward mating. Once a woman has found a man she’s happy with, she wants to settle down more readily. This is because her fitness depends more on the quality of a single male and his investment in her children. For most women, adding additional sex partners does not increase, and may actually decrease, their reproductive success (although there are important exceptions, such as if her mate is infertile, if she’s looking to leave the relationship, or if she can garner superior genes through an affair).” (59)
“Henry Kissinger captured this insight by noting, “Power is an aphrodisiac.” He also noted, “Now when I bore people at parties, they think it’s their fault.” (59)
“One especially interesting finding is that, although men do not compete as strenuously as women to be physically attractive, men’s attractiveness is far more influenced than is women’s by the prestige of his clothing and other external accoutrements.” (59)
“Men seemed virtually impervious to clothing context, judging the same women to be nearly sexually attractive regardless of the prestige of the clothes they wore.” (60)
“Men mature sexually two years late, on average, than women – to beef up for the intensity of intrasexual competition rather than enter the fray before they are ready.” (61)
“Love has turned to hate, and yet, as many of the cases we studied revealed, the murderers are generally still in love with the people they kill.” (70)
“Robert Frank contends that the emotion we call love is the evolved solution to the problem of commitment. If a partner chooses you for purely rational reasons, he or she might leave you for the same rational reasons: finding someone slightly more desirable on all of the “rational” criteria. If your partner is blinded by an uncontrollable love, however, a love for only you and no other, then commitment should be strong even when you are sick rather than healthy, when you are poorer rather than richer. It’s the emotion that signals to your mate that you are willing to commit emotional, economic, and genetic resources over the long haul.” (77)
“People in love literally experience a flood of dopamine, adrenaline, and serotonin – brain chemicals that simultaneously produce euphoria, psychological intoxication, and ideational obsession. These psychological rewards keep us performing activities – having sex, investing in romance, giving to children – that lead to successful reproduction.” (77)
“Evolution is utterly indifferent to the reprehensibility of the tactics it favors. It ruthlessly favors whatever strategies work in the retention of reproductively valuable resources, even if that means inflicting costs on others by those strategies. And when it comes to mating, evolution has equipped us not with a single strategy, but, rather, with a menu of strategies. Even as it has provided the motivations and mechanisms for falling into committed love, it has also given us strong incentives to cheat, and to fall out of love.” (77)
“A man who was chosen in part for his potential wealth and ambitious goals may get dumped when he loses his job. A woman chosen in part for her youth and beauty may lose out when a younger model beckons the woman’s partner. An initially considerate partner may turn cruel. And a couple’s infertility after repeated episodes of sex may prompt either to seek a more fruitful union elsewhere.” (78)
“We may admire a woman who stands by her loser husband. But few of those who did are our ancestors. Modern humans descended from those who traded up when the increment was sufficient to outweigh the manifold costs people experience as a consequence of breaking up.” (78)
“The average woman is able to attract a far more desirable mate for a short-term sexual encounter than for long-term love, because highly desirable men are willing to consent to sex with a woman of lower mate value as long as the liaison does not come burdened with entangling commitments.” (79)
“When ovulating and therefore capable of conception, women in committed romantic relationships report flirting more with other men, feeling more sexual desire for other men, and experiencing more sexual fantasies about men other than their regular partners. These effects, however, occur only if the woman is mated to a relatively asymmetrical partner.” (81)
“Women having affairs appear to time sex with their affair partners to coincide with the time they are ovulating, acting on their lust for other men, whereas they time sex with their regular partners to coincide with when they are least fertile.” (81)
“My study of married couples confirmed that sexual infidelity and intense mate guarding increased with the age discrepancy between man and wife. Older men married to younger women get both more vigilant and more violent.” (94)
“The Stratten murder contained all the ingredients for women’s highest risk of being murdered by the men they reject – when they are young and attractive, when they are mated to men substantially older, during the first few months of the breakup, when a rival has gained sexual access to her, and when the man’s prospects for replacing her with a woman of equivalent mate value approach nil.” (95)
“In one study, 64 percent of men who killed their mates were unemployed at the time of the killing.” (97)
“Women are more likely than men to forgive a partner’s sexual indiscretion, especially if it was a single episode and not linked with emotional or psychological involvement with the short-term lover. “(101)
“The main motives for murders committed by women, in short, are self-defense and a desperate desire to escape a dangerous marriage.” (114)
“We tend to pick friends because they share interests and values, and often share many of the same desirable qualities that we possess. So people have an above-average probability of being attracted to the friends of their mate.” (141)
“Just as women’s youth and physical attractiveness figure heavily in men’s initial mate preferences, they also determine the intensity of effort men devote to holding on to her.” (147)
“Women’s mate guarding, in contrast, was not at all influenced by their husbands’ physical appearance or age. It was affected by the husband’s income and how determined he was to climb the status hierarchy.” (147)
“Men tend to focus on the poacher’s sexual advances, which are an indicator of the threat of genetic cuckoldry. Women’s anger tends to focus on a potential rival’s attractiveness and the threat that it poses to the partner’s commitment and devotion. To a woman, a rival’s emotional involvement with her partner is the more galling factor.” (151)
“Whereas men focus almost exclusively on the partner’s sexual involvement with a rival, women are more profoundly upset by signs of psychological intimacy, which signal the long-term loss of a mate.” (152)
“Our psychological mechanisms governing mating were not designed to deal with the modern context.” (152)
“In Texas, until 1974, it was perfectly legal to kill a man found in bed with one’s wife, with absolutely no penalty.” (157)
“Because the costs of being killed are so severe, our evolved emotions cause us to overestimate the likelihood of death whenever the odds of being killed actually are nonzero.” (160)
“Evolution will favor parents who withhold their investment from children who are losing propositions. In the extreme case, evolution has favored adaptations that motivate us to kill children who severely interfere with our prospects for reproductive success.” (165)
“Infanticide by a genetic parent is one of the few types of murder that women commit more than men.” (165)
“Parents, mostly mothers, kill their infants for observable deformities more than for any other single cause of infant killing.” (166)
“Far more genetic children are killed by their mothers than by their fathers, especially at very young ages, because it is the mothers who face the problem of burdensome children to the greatest extent.” (169)
“Despite utopian visions and wishful thinking about egalitarian values, all human societies are subject to strict, and sometimes frustrating, rules regarding status. All societies, throughout the eons of evolution, have had status hierarchies.” (198)
“In the modern world, killing is clearly not a successful strategy for getting ahead. But for most of our evolutionary history, there were no police forces, judicial systems, or jails. Our psychology was forged in the evolutionary furnace of small-group living, and in that context, murder under some circumstances would have been a successful way of gaining and maintaining position in status hierarchies.” (201)
“Ecclesiasticus says: “The stroke of the whip maketh marks in the flesh: but the stroke of the tongue breaketh bones.” (205)
“Cultural values appear likely to set different thresholds for activating the homicidal circuits we all possess. The underlying motives for murders are identical in Southern and Northern men. Residing in cultures of honor, such as those of the American South, seems to lower the threshold for acting on these universal male motives, but the motives remain the same.” (213)
“In human evolutionary competition, the greater the variability among men in access to resources and to women, the riskier the men’s competitive strategies will become.” (213)
“Killing is more common in cultures lacking television, movies, and violent video games.” (230)
“Our moral abhorrence of homicide should not cause us to reject the compelling evidence that a deep psychology of killing has been and is an essential component of human nature.” (231)
“Murder has evolved as only one among a menu of contingent strategies for solving very specific adaptive problems of survival and reproductive competition.” (237)
“The overwhelming majority of actual murders occur within racial and ethnic groups. In the United States, 88 percent of white murder victims are killed by other whites, and 94 percent of African American murder victims are killed by other African Americans.” (238)
“The expressions of xenophobia are anachronisms whereby a fear of strangers who appear different, so supremely adaptive in the evolutionary past, gets played out mistakenly in the modern world through the ugliness of racial fear and unwarranted hatred.” (239)
As always, if you enjoy the quotes, please buy the book.
“Happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.” (2)
“Ask yourself whether you are happy,” said J.S. Mill, “and you cease to be so.”” (2)
“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” (3)
“Getting control of life is never easy, and sometimes it can be definitely painful. But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of mastery – or perhaps better, a sense of participation in determining the content of life – that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.” (4)
“I developed a theory of optimal experience based on the concept of flow – the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” (4)
“Everything we experience – joy or pain, interest or boredom – is represented in the mind as information. If we are able to control this information, we can decide what our lives will be like.” (6)
“The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in consciousness. This happens when psychic energy – or attention – is invested in realist goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else. These periods of struggling to overcome challenges are what people find to be the most enjoyable times of their lives.” (6)
“I shall argue that the primary reason it is so difficult to achieve happiness centers on the fact that, contrary to the myths mankind has developed to reassure itself, the universe was not created to answer our needs. Frustration is deeply woven into the fabric of life. And whenever some of our needs are temporarily met, we immediately start wishing for more.” (7)
“With affluence and power come escalating expectations, and as our level of wealth and comforts keep increasing, the sense of well-being we hoped to achieve keeps receding into the distance.” (10)
“The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment.” (10)
“Religions are only temporarily successful attempts to cope with the lack of meaning in life; they are not permanent answers.” (14)
“To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances. This challenge is both easier and more difficult than it sounds: easier because the ability to do so is entirely within each person’s hands; difficult because it requires discipline and perseverance that are relatively rare in any era, and perhaps especially in the present. And before all else, achieving control over experience requires a drastic change in attitude about what is important and what is not.” (16)
“It is important to realize that seeking pleasure is a reflex response built into our genes for the preservation of the species, not for the purpose of our own personal advantage. The pleasure we take in eating is an efficient way to ensure that the body will get the nourishment it needs. The pleasure of sexual intercourse is an equally practical method for the genes to program the body to reproduce and thereby to ensure the continuity of the genes.” (17)
“At certain times in history cultures have taken it for granted that a person wasn’t fully human unless he or she learned to master thoughts and feelings… people were held responsible for keeping a tight rein on their emotions. Anyone who indulged in self-pity, who let instinct rather than reflection dictate actions, forfeited the right to be accepted as a member of the community. In other historical periods, such as the one in which we are now living, the ability to control oneself is not held in high esteem. People who attempt it are thought to be faintly ridiculous, uptight, or not quite “with it.”” (23)
“Consciousness has developed the ability to override its genetic instructions and to set its own independent course of action.” (24)
“The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as ti takes to achieve a goal, and not longer.” (31)
“The outside event appears in consciousness purely as information, without necessarily having a positive or negative value attached to it. It is the self that interprets that raw information in the context of its own interests, and determines whether it is harmful or not.” (38)
“There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.” (43)
“A researcher found that very wealthy persons report being happy on the average 77 percent of the time, while persons of average wealth say they are happy only 62 percent of the time.” (45)
“The authors report that a person’s financial situation is one of the least important factors affecting overall satisfaction with life.” (45)
“The phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components. When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following. First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements cause a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.” (49)
“The challenges of competition can be stimulating and enjoyable. But when beating the opponent takes precedence in the mind over performing as well as possible, enjoyment tends to disappear. Competition is enjoyable only when it is a means to perfect one’s skills; when it becomes an end in itself, it ceases to be fun.” (50)
“One of the most universal and distinctive features of optimal experience takes place: people become so involved in what they are doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic; they stop being aware of themselves as separate from the actions they are performing.” (53)
“A rock climber explains how it feels when he is scaling a mountain: “You are so involved in what you are doing that you aren’t thinking of yourself as separate from the immediate activity.. You don’t’ see yourself as separate from what you are doing.” (53)
“Enjoyable activities require a complete focusing of attention on the task at hand – thus leaving no room in the mind for irrelevant information.” (58)
“All I can remember is the last thirty seconds, and all I can think ahead is the next five minutes.” (58)
“What people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations. It is not possible to experience a feeling of control unless one is willing to give up the safety of protective routines.” (61)
“When a person becomes so dependent on the ability to control an enjoyable activity that he cannot pay attention to anything else, then he loses the ultimate control: the freedom to determine the content of consciousness. Thus enjoyable activities that produce flow have a potentially negative aspect: while they are capable of improving the quality of existence by creating order in the mind, they can become addictive, at which point the self becomes captive of a certain kind of order, and is then unwilling to cope with the ambiguities of life.” (62)
“Loss of self-consciousness does not involve a loss of self, and certainly not a loss of consciousness, but rather, only a loss of consciousness of the self. What slips below the threshold of awareness is the concept of self, the information we use to represent to ourselves who we are. And being able to forget temporarily who we are seems to be very enjoyable. When not preoccupied with our selves, we actually have a chance to expand the concept of who we are. Loss of self-consciousness can lead to self-transcendence, to a feeling that the boundaries of our being have been pushed forward.” (64)
“Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person’s skills, it usually beings to be intrinsically rewarding.” (68)
“The elders [of an Indian tribe in British Columbia] said, at times the world became too predictable and the challenge began to go out of life. Without challenge, life had no meaning. So the elders, in their wisdom, would decide that the entire village should move, those moves occurring every 25 to 30 years. The entire population would move to a different part of the Shushwap land and there, they found challenge. There were new streams to figure out, new game trails to learn, new areas where the balsamroot would be plentiful. Now life would regain its meaning and be worth living. Everyone would feel rejuvenated and healthy. Incidentally, it also allowed exploited resources in one area to recover after years of harvesting.” (80)
“Cultures are defensive constructions against chaos, designed to reduce the impact of randomness on experience.” (81)
“One of the most ironic paradoxes of our time is this great availability of leisure that somehow fails to be translated into enjoyment. Compared to people living only a few generations ago, we have enormously greater opportunities to have a good time, yet there is no indication that we actually enjoy life more than our ancestors did.” (83)
“When the now extinct natives of the Caribbean islands were put to work in the plantations of the conquering Spaniards, their lives became so painful and meaningless that they lost interest in survival, and eventually ceased reproducing. It is probably that many cultures disappeared in a similar fashion, because they were no longer able to provide the experience of enjoyment.” (85)
“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.” (87)
“The family context promoting optimal experience could be described as having five characteristics. The first one is clarity: the teenagers feel that they know what their parents expect from them – goals and feedback in the family interaction are unambiguous. The second is centering, or the children’s perception that their parents are interested in what they are doing in the present, in their concrete feelings and experiences, rather than being preoccupied with whether they will be getting into ago do college or obtaining a well-paying job. Next is the issue of choice: children feel that they have a variety of possibilities from which to choose, including that of breaking parental rules – as long as they are prepared to face the consequences. The fourth differentiating characteristic is commitment, or the trust that allows the child to feel comfortable enough to set aside the shield of his defenses, and become unselfconsciously involved in whatever he is interested in. And finally there is challenge, or the parents’ dedication to provide increasingly complex opportunities for action to their children.” (88)
“When adversity threatens to paralyze us, we need to reassert control by finding a new direction in which to invest psychic energy, a direction that lies outside the reach of external forces. When every aspiration is frustrated, a person still must seek a meaningful goal around which to organize the self. Then, even though that person is objectively a slave, subjectively he is free.” (92)
“What we found was that when people were pursuing leisure activities that were expensive in terms of the outside resources required – activities that demanded expensive equipment, or electricity, or other forms of energy measured in BTUs, such as power boating, driving, or watching television – they were significantly less happy than when involved in inexpensive leisure. People were happiest when they were just talking to one another, when they gardened, knitted, or were involved in a hobby; all of these activities require few material resources, but they demand a relatively high investment of psychic energy.” (99)
“Peasant women in Eastern Europe were not judged to be ready for marriage unless they had learned to cook a different soup for each day of the year.” (114)
“Unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment: it will focus on some real or imaginary pain, on recent grudges or long-term frustrations. Entropy is the normal state of consciousness – a condition that is neither useful nor enjoyable.” (119)
“It is a common fate of many human institutions to begin as a response to some universal problem until, after many generations, the problems peculiar to the institutions themselves will take precedence over the original goal.” (138)
“If a person feels coerced to read a certain book, to follow a given course because that is supposed to be the way to do it, learning will go against the grain. But if the decision is to take that same route because of an inner feeling of rightness, the learning will be relatively effortless and enjoyable.” (139)
“Early hunter-gatherers in Africa and Australia spent only three to five hours each day on what we would call working – providing for food, shelter, clothing, and tools. They spent the rest of the day in conversation, resting, or dancing.” (143)
“The mystical heights of the Yu are not attained by some superhuman quantum jump, but simply by the gradual focusing of attention on the opportunities for action in one’s environment, which results in a perfection of skills that with time becomes so thoroughly automatic as to seem spontaneous and otherworldly.” (151)
“The performances of a great violinist or a great mathematician seem equally uncanny, even though they can be explained by the incremental honing of challenges and skills.” (151)
“The 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.” (152)
“The apathy of many of the people around us is not due to their being physically or mentally exhausted. The problem seems to lie more in the modern worker’s relation to his job, with the way he perceives his goals in relation to it.” (160)
“Instead of helping us reach our own goals, it is called upon to make someone else’s come true. The time channeled into such at ask is perceived as time subtracted from the total available for our life. Many people consider their jobs as something they have to do, a burden imposed from the outside, an effort that takes life away from the ledger of their existence. So even though the momentary on-the-job experience may be positive, they tend to discount it, because it does not contribute to their own long-range goals.” (160)
“Whether a job has variety or not ultimately depends more on a person’s approach to it than on actual working conditions.” (161)
“The quality of life depends on two factors: how we experience work, and our relations with other people.” (164)
“We also value privacy and often wish to be left alone. Yet it frequently turns out that as soon as we are, we begin to grow depressed.” (164)
“The worst moods are reported when one is alone and there is nothing that needs to be done.” (168)
“Worries about one’s love life, health, investments, family, and job are always hovering at the periphery of attention, waiting until there is nothing pressing that demands concentration. As soon as the mind is ready to relax, zap! The potential problems that were waiting in the wings take over.” (169)
“The frequency of murder is much higher among family members than among unrelated people.” (177)
“If a person is unwilling to adjust personal goals when starting a relationship, then a lot of what subsequently happens in that relationship will produce disorder in the person’s consciousness, because novel patterns of interaction will conflict with old patterns of expectation.” (177) “Unconditional acceptance is especially important to children. If parents threaten to withdraw their love from a child when he fails to measure up, the child’s natural playfulness will be gradually replaced by chronic anxiety.” (184)
“Early emotional security may well be one of the conditions that helps develop an autotelic personality in children.” (184)
“Many men wake up to the fact that the family, like any other joint enterprise, needs constant investments of psychic energy to assure its existence.” (185)
“Individuals who survived severe physical ordeals-polar explorers wandering alone in the Arctic, concentration camp inmates-one common attitude shared by such people was the implicit belief that their destiny was in their hands.” (203)
“They are not self centered; their energy is typically not bent on dominating their environment as much as on finding a way to function within it harmoniously.” (203)
“People who know how to transform stress into enjoyable challenge spend very little time thinking about themselves. They are not expending all their energy trying to satisfy what they believe to be their needs, or worrying about socially conditioned desires. Instead their attention is alert, constantly processing information from their surroundings.” (204)
“Achieving this unity with one’s surroundings is not only an important component of enjoyable flow experiences but is also a central mechanism by which adversity is conquered.” (205)
“Transformations require that a person be prepared to perceive unexpected opportunities.” (207)
“If the artist holds on to a preconceived notion of what the painting should look like, without responding to the possibilities suggested by the forms developing before her, the painting is likely to be trite.” (208)
“The “autotelic self” is one that easily translates potential threats into enjoyable challenges, and therefore maintains its inner harmony.” (209)
“Without constant attention to feedback I would soon become detached from the system of action, cease to develop skills, and become less effective.” (210)
“Even the most highly respected physicist, artist, or politician becomes a hollow bore and cease to enjoy life if all he can interested himself in is his limited role in the universe.” (212)
“Being in control of the mind means that literally anything that happens can be a source of joy.” (213)
“If we enjoyed work and friendships, and faced every challenge as an opportunity to develop new skills, we would be getting rewards out of living that are outside the realm of ordinary life. Yet even this would not be enough to assure us of optimal experience. As long as enjoyment follows piecemeal from activities not linked to one another in a meaningful way, one is still vulnerable to the vagaries of chaos.” (214)
“Purpose, resolution, and harmony unify life and give it meaning by transforming it into a seamless flow experience.” (218)
“Authentic projects describe the theme of a person who realizes that choices are free, and makes a personal decision based on a rational evaluation of his experience. It does not matter what the choice is, as long as it is an expression of what the person genuinely feels and believes. Inauthentic projects are those a person chooses because everybody else is doing, and therefore there is no alternative. Authentic projects tend to be intrinsically motivated, chosen for what they are worth in themselves; inauthentic ones are motivated by external forces.” (231)
“To find purpose in suffering one must interpret it as a possible challenge.” (233)
“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.” (234)
