Is it in the nature of human beings to be drawn to excellence and, given the chance, to pursue it, or is excellence something that must be elicited from human beings who are naturally indifferent to it?Read more at location 8449
Nicomachean Ethics. A leading topic in those books is the meaning of pleasure in human life.Read more at location 8453
Other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.Read more at location 8457
The things we enjoy the most deeply are the things at which we are most expert.Read more at location 8469
EVIDENCE FOR THE PRINCIPLE’S REALITY Until the 1960s, any psychologist who claimed that the Aristotelian principle says something true about the behavior of human beings faced ridicule.Read more at location 8483
The human mind and personality are driven by positive and negative reinforcements, the behaviorists said. A concept such as “enjoyment” is illusory—human beings will enjoy whatever they are trained to enjoy.Read more at location 8486
Abraham Maslow published an article entitled “A Theory of Human Motivation”(1943)Read more at location 8489
Humans persistently exhibited tendencies to enjoy the stimulation of new things, complexity, surprises, even in the absence of any perceptible external reinforcement.Read more at location 8499
Csikszentmihalyi published a series of books elaborating the data and the theory that now goes under the label of flow
