Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes

I think about willpower almost never. I realize for myself, trying to be more disciplined is pretty nebulous and it's often a slippery target. For me, I've just thought about incentives.

The experiments show quite clearly that, as you resist more and more temptation, you're actually more and more likely to fail.

We want to design interventions to teach people how to harness their considerable willpower.

Discipline is what you use when you don't want to do something, when you have to force yourself.

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

You make New Year's resolutions. And you make them into the teeth of old resolutions which were different. Then you don't keep your new resolutions and you tell yourself you are weak-willed. You aren't weak-willed, you are simply obeying yourself as of yesterday.

If you find you require willpower, you aren't ready to lose weight.

Refrain to-night; And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence, the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature, And either master the devil or throw him out With wondrous potency.

Many people have trouble sticking to their resolutions, and there is a simple scientific explanation for this. In 1987, a team of psychologists conducted a study in which they monitored the New Year's resolutions of 275 people. After one week the psychologists found that 92 percent of the people were keeping their resolutions; after two weeks we have no idea what happened because the psychologists had quit monitoring.

Bad habits are our enemies because they hinder us from being the person we want to be.

The problem with resolutions is they're only as solid as the person making them.

Self-discipline is a rigorous process at best; too many of us want it to be effortless and painless.

It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

The best way to break a bad habit is to drop it.

You can't suddenly say, 'I want a brand new habit tomorrow,' and expect it to be easy and effortless.

Your desired behavior must become just as much a habit as your undesired behavior was before.

It's easy to diet or get off a diet when you've got a juicy role to play.

Now I also discipline myself to do things I love to do when I don't want to do them.

We may think there is willpower involved, but more likely... change is due to want power. Wanting the new addiction more than the old one. Wanting the new me in preference to the person I am now.

It's easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken.

Just being aware of what you are about to do greatly diminishes the tendency to do what you don't want to. You will pull your hand back from that pizza slice, tell the waitress that you are passing on dessert, put on your gym shoes instead of going under the comforter, and take several deep breaths instead of screaming at your daughter.

We can use decision-making to choose the habits we want to form, use willpower to get the habit started, then - and this is the best part - we can allow the extraordinary power of habit to take over. At that point, we're free from the need to decide and the need to use willpower.

One of the widest gaps in human experience is the gap between what we say we want to be and our willingness to discipline ourselves to get there.

Everyone deals with temptation. It's just there.