Optimal Experience Quotes

And I try to give the best bang for the buck. I love performing more than anything else.

Flow is being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.

A typical day is full of anxiety and boredom. Flow experiences provide the flashes of intense living against this dull background.

Enjoyment appears at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act.

A perfect scenario would be to feel like you've just started on every event.

Optimal experience is that rare occasion when we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment that is long cherished and that becomes a landmark in memory for what life should be like.

I was reading an article in the 'New York Times;' it talked about being in the zone, and being in the zone you're so focused that time ceases to exist. It's when you think, 'Oh, I've been doing this for five hours and didn't even know it.' It's the difference between hard work and going, '12 o'clock, not moving.'

I'm in the search for the perfect game.

Flow is an optimal state in which you feel totally engaged in an activity...In a state of flow, you're neither bored nor anxious, and you don't question your own adequacy. Hours pass without your noticing.

I've come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks.

One of the strongest signs of being in the zone is a sense of freedom and of authenticity. When we are doing something that we love and are naturally good at, we are much more likely to feel centered in our true sense of self - to be who we feel we truly are. When we are in our Element, we feel we are doing what we are meant to be doing and being who we're meant to be.

There is one aspect of happiness that's been well studied, and it's the notion of flow. Ask yourselves, when for you does time stop? When are you truly at home, wanting to be no place else?

You're letting go of having the best possible experience you can have regardless of who you are and where you are. I think that can be applied to all things, but it's easier said than done.

But to change all existence into a flow experience, it is not sufficient to learn merely how to control moment-by-moment states of consciousness. It is also necessary to have an overall context of goals for the events of everyday life to make senseTo create harmony in whatever one does is the last task that the flow theory presents to whose who wish to attain optimal experience; it is a task that involves transforming the entirety of life into a single flow activity, with unified goals that provide constant purpose.

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 begins to be intrinsically rewarding.

When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.

The goal is not to simply eliminate the bad, which does nothing more than leave you with a vacuum, but to pursue and experience the best in the world.

You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.

Competition is an easy way to get into flow.

Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.

Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges that quite exactly meet them.

Other things equal, a life filled with complex flow activities is more worth living than one spent consuming passive entertainment.

I'll tell you, there were only a few games in my career where I was totally oblivious to everything around me, where I was in the zone.

Repeatedly we question the necessity of our actions and evaluate critically the reasons for carrying them out. But in flow there is no need to reflect, because the action carries us forward as if by magic.

I want people to flourish. I want them to walk away from the experience going, "That's what it should be like."