Business Insight Zone

From Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

Learning to manage one’s goals is an important step in achieving excellence in everyday life. To do so, however, does not involve either the extreme of spontaneity on the one hand, or compulsive control on the other. The best solution might be to understand the roots of one’s motivation, and while recognizing the biases involved in one’s desires, in all humbleness to choose goals that will provide order in one’s consciousness without causing too much disorder in the social or material environment. To try for less than this in to forfeit the chance of developing your potential, and to try for much more is to set yourself up for defeat.

(This matches what Geoff Colvin says in Talent is Overrated about how the best performers practice: with enough challenge to keep themselves from getting stale, but not with so much challenge that they panic or shut down.)

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Related posts:

• How Flow is like a good cup of coffee.
• Time is the resource, but attention is the problem.
• The joy of creation.
• This is how you get better: deliberate practice.

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Category: Books, Productivity