NOTES ■ 277
are commitment to one’s goals, a sense of being in control, and enjoy
ment of challenges (Kobasa, Maddi, &. Kahn 1982). A similar term is
Vaillant’s (1977) concept of “mature defense,” Lazarus’s concept of
“coping” (Lazarus & Folkman 1984), and the concept of “personality
strength” measured in German surveys by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann
(1983, 1985). All of these coping styles—hardiness, mature defenses,
and transformational coping—share many characteristics with the auto-
telic personality trait described in this volume.
200 Courage. That people consider courage the foremost reason for admir
ing others emerged from the data of my three-generation family study
when Bert Lyons analyzed it for his Ph.D. dissertation (1988).
201 Dissipative structures. For the meaning of this term in the natural
sciences see Prigogine (1980).
202 Transformational skills in adolescence. One longitudinal study con
ducted with the ESM (Freeman, Larson, <Sl Csikszentmihalyi 1986)
suggests that older teenagers have just as many negative experiences with
family, with friends, and alone as younger teenagers do, but that they
interpret them more leniently—that is, the conflicts that at 13 years of
age seemed tragic at 17 are seen to be perfectly manageable.
203 Unself conscious self-assurance. For the development of this concept
see Logan (1985, 1988).
205 “Each individual crystal.. .” This quote from Chouinard was re
ported in Robinson (1969, p. 6 ).
“My cockpit is small.. .” is from Lindbergh (1953, pp. 227-28).
208 Discovering new goals. That a complex self emerges out of various
experiences in the world, just as a creative painting emerges out of the
interaction between the artist and his materials, has been argued in
Csikszentmihalyi (1985a) and Csikszentmihalyi & Beattie (1979).
Artists’ discovery. The process of problem finding, or discovery, in art
is described in a variety of papers starting with Csikszentmihalyi (1965)
and ending with Csikszentmihalyi &. Getzels (1989). See also Getzels &
Csikszentmihalyi (1976). Very briefly, our findings show that art stu
dents who in 1964 painted in the manner described here (i.e., who
approached the canvas without a clearly worked out image of the fin
ished painting) were 18 years later significantly more successful—by the
standards of the artistic community—than their peers who worked out
the finished product in their minds beforehand. Other characteristics,
such as technical competence, did not differentiate the two groups.
209 Setting realistic goals. It has been reported that adults who commit
themselves to very long-term goals, with few short-term rewards, are less
satisfied with their lives than people who have easier, short-term goals
