Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

1. First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing.
2. 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.
3. The most important step in emancipating oneself from social controls is the ability to find rewards in the events of each moment.
4. It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.
5. We can experience pleasure without any investment of psychic energy, whereas enjoyment happens only as a result of unusual investments of attention.
6. How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony, not on the controls we are able to exert over the great forces of the universe.
7. Pleasure is a feeling of contentment that one achieves whenever information in consciousness says that expectations set by biological programs or by social conditioning have been met.
8. The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body.
9. Enjoyment is characterized by this forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment.
10. 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.

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