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"To be successful you have to enjoy doing your best while at the same time contributing to something beyond yourself."

--Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Legend's biography highlights and video transcript below

 

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(29 September 1934 - 20 October 2021)

--Legendary Best-selling Author and Psychologist of Flow and Positivity

Why should you consider this Legend's quote advice (in four minutes or less)?

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was born in Fiume, Italy, formerly the Kingdom of Italy (now Rijeka, Croatia) on 29 September 1934. During World War II, Mihaly spent time at an Italian prison camp and discovered the game of chess. Chess allowed him to tune-out what was happening around him. Both of Mihaly's two older half-brothers were killed when he was young. One half-brother was killed in the 50-day-long Siege of Budapest and the other brother was sent to a Siberian labor camp never to return. The intense focus around chess in the middle of the chaos of war, in his opinion, helped him fare better than so many others...

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would eventually become a legendary flow and positive psychologist. At age 16, he travelled to Switzerland to attend a lecture from Legendary psychiatrist Carl Jung about the mass delusion that had seized the European mind and resulted in the destruction of the war.

Jung affected Mihaly deeply. Mihaly once told a friend, "That struck me, because as a child in the war I'd seen something drastically wrong with how adults -the grown-ups I trusted -organized their thinking... I was trying to find a better system to order my life. Jung seemed to be trying to cope with some of the more positive aspects of human experience."

Csikszentmihalyi began reading books by Jung and Freud and was inspired to study psychology at the university level. However, he discovered few European universities offered the still new study of psychology, at the time.

When he was 22, he emigrated to the United States, working nights to support himself while studying at the University of Chicago. He received a B.A. in 1959 and his Ph.D. in 1965 from the University of Chicago. In 1969, he became a professor at his alma mater.

Csikszentmihalyi's work on happiness, creativity and flow are still influential and widely cited. He committed years of research and writing on happiness, creativity and flow. Until he was best known as the architect of the concept of flow and positive psychology. His work showed that people are happiest when they are in a state of flow -a state of concentration or complete absorption with their activity in question. It's a state in which people are so involved in their activity that nothing else seems to matter.

In 2009, Mihaly was awarded the Clifton Strengths Prize. In 2011, he won the Szechenyi Prize in Budapest. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Education and the Academy of Leisure Sciences. In 2014, he was awarded the Grand Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Hungary. Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi is considered amongst the most influential positive psychologists of all-time.

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Learn more about this Legend (below).

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Paperback) by Mihaly CsikszentmihalyiFlow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Paperback) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

 

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