Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi Explains Why the Source of Happiness Lies in Creativity and Flow, Not Money

Speak­ing at the TED Con­fer­ence, famed psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Czik­szent­mi­ha­lyi asks what’s the source of hap­pi­ness? And his answer comes down to this: Beyond a cer­tain point (and it’s not very far), mon­ey does­n’t affect hap­pi­ness too much. Rather, as his research shows, we tend to be most hap­py when we get immersed, almost lost in, being cre­ative and per­form­ing at our best. It’s an ecsta­t­ic state that he calls “flow.” The video runs about 19 min­utes, and is well worth your time. Some book titles worth check­ing out include: Flow: The Psy­chol­o­gy of Opti­mal Expe­ri­ence or Find­ing Flow: The Psy­chol­o­gy of Engage­ment with Every­day Life.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Cleese, Mon­ty Python Icon, on How to Be Cre­ative

Mal­colm McLaren: The Quest for Authen­tic Cre­ativ­i­ty

Amy Tan: The Sources of Cre­ativ­i­ty

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Ali G and Noam “Norman” Chomsky Talk Linguistics

Here it goes, and it’s added to our YouTube playlist.

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From Washington to Lincoln — The Geography of US Presidential Elections

We have now post­ed Lec­ture 2 of our ongo­ing course, The Geog­ra­phy of US Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tions, pre­sent­ed by Stan­ford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram. You can down­load it via Tune­sU here (in high res) or you can watch it embed­ded below. This week, Pro­fes­sor Mar­tin Lewis takes you through Amer­i­ca’s ear­ly for­ma­tive elec­tions, start­ing with Wash­ing­ton and Jef­fer­son­’s elec­toral vic­to­ries and mov­ing through the trans­for­ma­tive Civ­il War. To watch the first lec­ture, click here. And to ask Pro­fes­sor Lewis ques­tions about the sec­ond lec­ture, just click here. And keep in mind, this is all free. For more free cours­es, check out our big col­lec­tion here.

 

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Ninth Circuit Judge on The Dating Game Way Back When

The name Alex Kozin­s­ki prob­a­bly won’t mean much to many of you. But if you’re a lawyer, or a Supreme Court watch­er, you’ll know that he’s the Chief Judge of the Unit­ed States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Cir­cuit (a real­ly pres­ti­gious posi­tion). Rather recent­ly, he’s been asso­ci­at­ed with a high­ly vis­i­ble pornog­ra­phy scan­dal relat­ed to one of his cas­es, and now this. A video doc­u­ment­ing his appear­ance long ago on The Dat­ing Game, a won­der­ful piece of Amer­i­cana. And the best part is that he beat Squig­gy from the oth­er slice of Amer­i­cana, Lav­erne & Shirley. Oh, the end­less wealth of YouTube:

Harold Pinter’s “The Dumb Waiter” Animated

and con­densed…

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Paul Krugman On The Financial Crisis And the Coming Recession

How does the new win­ner of the Nobel Prize in Eco­nom­ics think the US gov­ern­ment should man­age the big loom­ing reces­sion? And does the New Deal offer a mod­el for con­fronting this new jam? Have a lis­ten: iTunes — Rss Feed — MP3.

Free Tech How-To Books

Thanks to Boing­Bo­ing, you can get free access (for 30 days) to three pop­u­lar tech man­u­als:

• JavaScript: The Defin­i­tive Guide
• Learn­ing Perl
• Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML

Get details here

Electing a US President in Plain English

We’re less than two weeks away (final­ly, at long last) from the next US pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, and that means that it’s a good time to deci­pher Amer­i­ca’s con­vo­lut­ed elec­toral sys­tem. So here’s a piece from The Com­mon Craft Show, which does it in a fair­ly cre­ative way:

 

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.