Creativity (11 page)
Authors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
8. Generally, creative people are thought to be rebellious and independent. Yet it is impossible to be creative without having first internalized a domain of culture. And a person must believe in the importance of such a domain in order to learn its rules; hence, he or she must be to a certain extent a traditionalist. So it is difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both
traditional and conservative
and at the same time
rebellious and iconoclastic
. Being only traditional leaves the domain unchanged; constantly taking chances without regard to what has been valued in the
past rarely leads to novelty that is accepted as an improvement. The artist Eva Zeisel, who says that the folk tradition in which she works is “her home,” nevertheless produces ceramics that were recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as masterpieces of contemporary design. This is what she says about innovation for its own sake:
This idea to create something different is not my aim, and shouldn’t be anybody’s aim. Because, first of all, if you are a designer or a playful person in any of these crafts, you have to be able to function a long life, and you can’t always try to be different. I mean different from different from different. Secondly, wanting to be different can’t be the motive of your work. Besides—if I talk too much let me know—to be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different me
ans not like this and not like that. And the “not like”—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of “post” couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.
But the willingness to take risks, to break with the safety of tradition, is also necessary. The economist George Stigler is very emphatic in this regard:
I’d say one of the most common failures of able people is a lack of nerve. They’ll play safe games. They’ll take whatever the literature’s doing and add a little bit to it. In our field, for example, we study duopoly, which is a situation in which there are two sellers. Then why not try three and see what that does. So there’s a safe game to play. In innovation, you have to play a less safe game, if it’s going to be interesting. It’s not predictable that it’ll go well.
9. Most creative persons are very
passionate
about their work, yet they can be extremely
objective
about it as well. The energy generated by this conflict between attachment and detachment has been mentioned by many as being an important part of their work. Why this is the case is relatively clear. Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility. So the creative process tends to be what some respondents called a yin-yang alternation between these two extremes. Here is how the historian Natalie D
avis puts it:
I am sometimes like a mother trying to bring the past to life again. I love what I am doing and I love to write. I just have a
great deal of affect invested in bringing these people to life again, in some way. It doesn’t mean that I love my characters, necessarily, these people from the past. But I love to find out about them and re-create them or their situation. I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you write, so that you can’t be so identified with your work that you can’t accept criticism and response, and that is the danger of having as much affect as I do. But I am aware of that and of when I think it is particularly important to detach oneself from the work, and that is som
ething where age really does help.
10. Finally, the openness and sensitivity of creative individuals often exposes them to
suffering and pain yet also a great deal of enjoyment
. The suffering is easy to understand. The greater sensitivity can cause slights and anxieties that are not usually felt by the rest of us. Most would agree with Rabinow’s words: “Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them.” A badly designed machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when reading bad prose. Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also makes you exposed and vulnerable. Em
inence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested years in making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if nobody cares.
Ever since the Romantic movement gained ascendance a few centuries ago, artists have been expected to suffer in order to demonstrate the sensitivity of their souls. In fact, research shows that artists and writers do have unusually high rates of psychopathology and addictions. But what is the cause, what is the effect? The poet Mark Strand comments:
There have been a lot of unfortunate cases of writers, painters, who have been melancholic, depressed, taken their own lives. I don’t think it goes with the territory. I think those people would have been depressed, or alcoholic, suicidal, whatever, even if they weren’t writing. I just think it’s their characterological makeup. Whether that characterological makeup drove them to write or to paint, as well as to alcohol or to suicide, I don’t know. I know there are an awful lot of healthy
writers and painters who have no thoughts of suicide. I think it’s a myth, by and large. It creates a special aura, a frailty, around the artist to say that he lives so close to the edge. He’s so responsive to the world around him, so sensitive, so driven to respond to it, it’s almost unbearable. That he must escape either through drugs or alcohol, finally suicide, the burden of consciousness is so great. But the burden of consciousness is great for people who don’t—you know—want to kill themselves.
It is also true that deep interest and involvement in obscure subjects often goes unrewarded, or even brings on ridicule. Divergent thinking is often perceived as deviant by the majority, and so the creative person may feel isolated and misunderstood. These occupational hazards do come with the territory, so to speak, and it is difficult to see how a person could be creative and at the same time insensitive to them.
Perhaps the most difficult thing for a creative individual to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness experienced when, for some reason or another, he or she cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels one’s creativity drying out; then the whole self-concept is jeopardized, as Mark Strand suggests:
Yeah, there’s a momentary sereneness, a sense of satisfaction, when you come up with an idea that you think is worth pursuing. Another form of that is when you have completed, where you’ve done as much as you can with an idea that you thought was worth working on. Then you sort of bask in the glow of completion for a day, maybe. You know, have a glass or two more of wine at night because you don’t feel you have to go upstairs and look at anything again.
And then you’re beginning again. You hope. Sometimes the hiatus will last not overnight but for weeks, months, and years. And the longer the hiatus is between books that you’re committed to finishing, the more painful and frustrating life becomes. When I say “painful,” that’s probably too grandiose a term for the petty frustration one feels. But if it goes on, and on, and you develop what people call a writer’s block, it’s painful, because your identity’s at stake. If you’re not writing, and you’re a writer and known as a writer, what are you?
Yet when the person is working in the area of his or her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss. Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at the university, physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where
the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable. In fact, enjoyment is such an important part of creativity that we devote chapter 5 to the connection. Here I report a single illustration, just as a place marker, to make sure that we don’t lose sight of this essential component:
Margaret Butler is a computer scientist and mathematician, the first woman elected a fellow of the American Nuclear Society. In describing her work, like most of our respondents, she keeps stressing this element of fun, of enjoyment. In answer to the question “Of your accomplishments at work, what are you most proud of?” she answers:
Well, in my work I think that the most interesting and exciting things that I have done were in the early days at Argonne when we were building computers. We worked on a team to design one of the first computers. We developed image analysis software with the people in the biology division for scanning chromosomes and trying to do automatic karyotyping, and I think that was the most fun that I had in all of my forty-plus years at the lab.
It is interesting that this response, stressing fun and excitement, came in answer to a question about what she is most proud of in her work. Later on, she says:
I worked and worked. You work hard. You try to do your best. When we were working on the chromosome project, Jim [her husband] and I spent sometimes the whole night over there working. We would come out in the morning and the sun would be coming up. Science is very much fun. And I think women should have the opportunity to have fun.
I may work as hard as Butler did out of ambition or a desire to make money. But unless I also enjoy the task, my mind is not fully concentrated. My attention keeps shifting to the clock, to daydreams of better things to do, to resenting the job and wishing it was over. This kind of split attention, of halfhearted involvement, is incompatible with creativity. And creative people usually enjoy not only their work but also the many other activities in their lives. Margaret Butler, in describing what she does after her formal retirement, uses the word
enjoy
in reference to everything she does: helping her husband to continue his mathematical research, writing a careers-for-women guide for the American Nuclear Society, working with teachers to get women students interested in science, organizing support groups for women scientists, reading, and being involved in local politics.
These ten pairs of contrasting personality traits might be the most telling characteristic of creative people. Of course, this list is to a certain extent arbitrary. It could be argued that many other important traits have been left out. But what is im
portant to keep in mind is that these conflicting traits—or any conflicting traits—are usually difficult to find in the same person. Yet without the second pole, new ideas will not be recognized. And without the first, they will not be developed to the point of acceptance. Therefore, the novelty that survives to change a domain is usually the work of someone who can operate at both ends of these polarities—and that is the kind of person we call “creative.”
I
s there a single series of mental steps that leads to novelties that result in changing a domain? Or, to put it differently, is every creative product the result of a single “creative process”? Many individuals and business training programs claim that they know what “creative thinking” consists of and that they can teach it. Creative individuals usually have their own theories—often quite different from one another. Robert Galvin says that creativity consists of anticipation and commitment. Anticipation involves having a vision of something that will become important in the future before anyb
ody else has it; commitment is the belief that keeps one working to realize the vision despite doubt and discouragement.
On the other hand, in his letter of refusal, the management guru Peter Drucker lists four reasons that account for his accomplishments (in addition to the fifth, never participate in studies such as this):
(a) I have been able to produce because I have always been a loner and have not had to spend time on keeping subordinates, assistants, secretaries, and other time-wasters; because (b) I never set foot in my university office—I do my teaching; and if students
want to see me I give them lunch; because (c) I have been a workaholic since I was 20; and (d) because I thrive on stress and begin to pine if there is no deadline. Otherwise—if I may be presumptuous: I was born like the sentry in Goethe’s
Faust II
:
Zum Sehen geboren
Zum Schauen bestellt
(“Born to see, my task is to watch”)
Given how different domains are from one another, however, and given the variety of tasks and the different strengths and weaknesses of individuals, we should not expect a great deal of similarity in how people arrive at a novel idea or product. Yet some common threads do seem to run across boundaries of domains and individual idiosyncrasies, and these might well constitute the core characteristics of what it takes to approach a problem in a way likely to lead to an outcome the field will perceive as creative. Let’s illustrate this process with a description of how the Italian
author Grazia Livi wrote one of her short stories.
T
HE
W
RITING OF A
S
TORY
One day Livi went to her bank to talk to a financial adviser who managed her portfolio of investments. The adviser was a woman Livi had met before; she seemed to her the epitome of a contemporary career woman bent on success and not much else, immaculately groomed, cold, hard, impatient. A person without a private life, with no dreams except money and advancement. This particular day the appointment started in the usual key: the adviser looking distant and frigid, asking questions in a dry, uninterested voice. Then a ringing phone interrupted the conversation. To Livi’s surpr
ise, as the woman turned away to take the call, her face changed—the chiseled features softened, even the hard helmet of hair became velvety—her posture relaxed, her voice became low and caressing. Livi had an immediate visual image of the person at the other end of the phone: a handsome, tanned, laid-back architect who drove a Maserati. After returning from the bank, she made a few notes to herself in a log she keeps for this purpose and then apparently forgot the incident.
Some months later, rereading the log, she saw a connection
between the entry she had made of the episode at the bank and entries she had written about a dressed-for-success woman sitting for hours in a beauty shop and other similar types she had met in the course of the past years. She was seized with a strong feeling of emotional discovery: Here was an insight about the current predicament of women—torn between contrasting demands—that could yield a true story. True not in the sense of representing what she had seen—the woman at the bank may have been talking to her mother or her child—but true to a widespread condition of our times, w
here many women feel that they have to be aggressive and cold to compete in the business world yet at the same time cannot give up what they think of as their femininity. So she sat down to write about a career woman grooming herself all day for a date that never comes off—and it was a terrific story. Not because of the plot, which is as old as the hills, but because the emotional currents of her character reflected so achingly and accurately the experience of our time.
Livi’s story may not change the domain of literature, and hence it is not an example of the highest order of creativity. But it may well be included in future collections of short stories, because it is an excellent example of a contemporary genre. And to the extent that it expands the domain, it qualifies as a creative achievement. Is there a way to analyze what Livi did, to see more clearly what her mental processes were as she wrote the story?
The creative process has traditionally been described as taking five steps. The first is a period of preparation, becoming immersed, consciously or not, in a set of problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity. In the case of Grazia Livi, the emotional quandary of modern women was something she experienced personally, as a writer trying to compete for prizes, reviews, and publications, and also as a woman trying to balance the responsibilities of motherhood with her writing.
The second phase of the creative process is a period of incubation, during which ideas churn around below the threshold of consciousness. It is during this time that unusual connections are likely to be made. When we intend to solve a problem consciously, we process information in a linear, logical fashion. But when ideas call to each other on their own, without our leading them down a straight and narrow path, unexpected combinations may come into being.
The third component of the creative process is insight, sometimes
called the “Aha!” moment, the instant when Archimedes cried out “Eureka!” as he stepped into the bath, when the pieces of the puzzle fall together. In real life, there may be several insights interspersed with periods of incubation, evaluation, and elaboration. For instance, in the case of Livi’s short story, there are at least two moments of significant insight: when she saw the investment adviser transformed by the phone call, and when she saw the connection between the similar entries in the log.
The fourth component is evaluation, when the person must decide whether the insight is valuable and worth pursuing. This is often the most emotionally trying part of the process, when one feels most uncertain and insecure. This is also when the internalized criteria of the domain, and the internalized opinion of the field, usually become prominent. Is this idea really novel, or is it obvious? What will my colleagues think of it? It is the period of self-criticism, of soul-searching. For Grazia Livi, much of this sifting took place as she read through her log and decided which ideas to develop.
The fifth and last component of the process is elaboration. It is probably the one that takes up the most time and involves the hardest work. This is what Edison was referring to when he said that creativity consists of 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. In Livi’s case, elaboration consisted in selecting the characters of the story, deciding on a plot, and then translating the emotions she had intuited into strings of words.
But this classical analytic framework leading from preparation to elaboration gives a severely distorted picture of the creative process if it is taken too literally. A person who makes a creative contribution never just slogs through the long last stage of elaboration. This part of the process is constantly interrupted by periods of incubation and is punctuated by small epiphanies. Many fresh insights emerge as one is presumably just putting finishing touches on the initial insight. As Grazia Livi was struggling to find words to describe her character, the words themselves suggest
ed new emotions that were sometimes more “right” to the personality she was trying to create than the ones she had initially envisioned. These new feelings in turn suggested actions, turns of the plot she had not thought of before. The character became more complex, more nuanced, as the writing progressed; the plot became more subtle and intriguing.
Thus the creative process is less linear than recursive. How many
iterations it goes through, how many loops are involved, how many insights are needed, depends on the depth and breadth of the issues dealt with. Sometimes incubation lasts for years; sometimes it takes a few hours. Sometimes the creative idea includes one deep insight and innumerable small ones. In some cases, as with Darwin’s formulation of the theory of evolution, the basic insight may appear slowly, in separate disconnected flashes that take years to coalesce into a coherent idea. By the time Darwin clearly understood what his theory implied, it was hardly an insight any
longer, because its components had all emerged in his thought at different times in the past and had slowly connected with one another along the way. It was a thunderous “Aha!” built up over a lifetime, made up of a chorus of little “Eurekas.”
A more linear account is Freeman Dyson’s description of the creative process that brought him scientific fame. Dyson had been a student of Richard Feynman, who in the late 1940s was trying to make electrodynamics understandable in terms of the principles of quantum mechanics. Success in this task would mean translating the laws of electricity so that they conformed to the more basic laws of subatomic behavior. It would be a great simplification, a welcome ordering of the domain of physics. Unfortunately, while most colleagues felt that Feynman was onto something deep and importa
nt, not many could follow the few scribbles and sketches he used to prove his points, especially since he usually went from
A
directly to
Z
with no stops in between. At the same time, another physicist, Julian Schwinger, also was working on the unification of quantum and electrodynamic principles. Schwinger was in many ways Feynman’s opposite: He worked slowly and methodically and was such a perfectionist that he never felt ready to claim a solution to the problem he was working on. Freeman Dyson, working in Feynman’s orbit at Cornell University, was exposed to a series of lectures by Schwinger. It gave
him the idea of bringing together Feynman’s leaps of intuition with Schwinger’s painstaking calculations and to resolve once and for all the puzzle of how the behavior of quanta related to electrical phenomena. After Dyson finished his work, Feynman’s and Schwinger’s theories became understandable, and the two received the Nobel Prize in physics. Several colleagues felt that if anyone deserved the prize, it was Dyson. Here is how he describes the process that led to his accomplishment:
It was the summer of 1948, so I was then twenty-four. There was a big problem which essentially the whole community of physicists was concentrated on. Physics is usually like that—there is some particularly fascinating problem that everybody is working on and it tends to be sort of one thing at a time. And at that time the big problem was called quantum electrodynamics, which was a theory of radiation and atoms, and the theory was in a mess and nobody knew how to calculate with it. It was sort of a logjam for all kinds of further developments. So somebody had to learn how to
calculate with this theory. It wasn’t a question of the theory being wrong, but it was somehow not decently organized, so that people tried to calculate and always got silly answers, like zero or infinity, or something. Anyhow, at that moment there appeared two great ideas which were associated with two people, Schwinger and Feynman, both of them about five years older than I was. Each of them produced a new theory of radiation, which looked as though it was going to work, although there were difficulties with both of them. I was in this happy position of being familiar with both of them and I go
t to know both of them and I got to work.
I spent six months working very hard to understand both of them clearly, and that meant simply hard, hard work of calculating. I would sit down for days and days with large stacks of papers doing calculations so that I could understand precisely what Feynman was saying. And at the end of six months, I went off on a vacation. I took a Greyhound bus to California and spent a couple of weeks just bumming around. This was soon after I had arrived from England, so I had never been to the West before. After two weeks in California, where I wasn’t doing any work, I was just sight-seeing,
I got on the bus to come back to Princeton, and suddenly in the middle of the night when we were going through Kansas, the whole sort of suddenly became crystal clear, and so that was sort of the big revelation for me, it was the Eureka experience or whatever you call it. Suddenly the whole picture became clear, and Schwinger fit into it beautifully and Feynman fit into it beautifully and the result was a theory that actually was useful. That was the big creative moment of my life. Then I had to spend another six months working out the details and writing it all up and so forth. It finally ended up wi
th two long papers in the
Physical Review
, and that was my passport to the world of science.
It would be difficult to imagine a clearer example of the classical version of the creative process. It starts with Dyson, immersed in the field of physics, sensing from his teachers and colleagues where the next opportunity for adding something important to the domain lies. He has a privileged access to both the domain and the field—he is personally acquainted with the two central individuals involved. Having found his problem—to reconcile the two leading theories in the domain—he goes through a six-month period of consciously directed, hard preparation. Then he spends two weeks relaxing,
a period during which the ideas marshaled up during the past half year have a chance to incubate, to sort out and shake together. This is followed by the sudden insight that occurs unbidden during a night bus ride. And finally another half year of hard work evaluating and elaborating the insight. The idea having been accepted by the field—in this case, the editors of
Physical Review
—it is then added to the domain. As is often the case, most of the credit for the accomplishment does not go directly to the author, but to those whose work he has built upon.
