Book Titles

We’d be much better off avoiding easy fun and seeking out hard fun, or hard work that we enjoy…

As long as we feel capable of meeting the challenge, we report being highly motivated, extremely interested, and positively engaged by stressful situations.

Fiero is the Italian word for ‘pride… You know it when you feel it and when you see it. That’s because we almost all express fiero in exactly the same way: we throw our arms over our head and yell.

Games teach us how to create opportunities for freely chosen, challenging work that keeps us at the limits of our abilities, and those lessons can be transferred to real life.

Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy.

A major flow experience can improve our mood for hours, or even days… But because it’s such a state of extreme engagement, it eventually uses up our physical and mental resources.

Too much flow can lead to happiness burnout. Meanwhile, too much fiero can lead to addiction.

We need games that make us happier even when we’re not playing. Only then will we find the right balance between playing our favorite games an making the most of our real lives.

…there are many ways to be happy, but we cannot find happiness. No object, no event, no outcome or life circumstance can deliver real happiness to us. We have to make our own happiness – by working hard at activities that provide their own reward.

The more we consume, acquire, and elevate our status, the harder it is to stay happy.