Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

an idea or product that deserves the label “creative” arises from the synergy of many sources and not only from the mind of a single person. It is easier to enhance creativity by changing conditions in the environment than by trying to make people think more creatively.

And a genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of a sudden insight, a lightbulb flashing on in the dark, but comes after years of hard work.

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives fo...

First, most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the...

Without creativity, it would be difficult indeed to distinguish humans from apes.

The second reason creativity is so fascinating is that when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes close to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely

But she could use this luck only because she had been, for years, deeply involved with the small details of the movements of stars.

It takes a lot of courage to be a research scientist. It really does. I mean, you invest an enormous amount of yourself, your life, your time, and nothing may come of it.

I just looked upon my role as that of gathering valuable data for the astronomical community,

But discoveries are always nice.

all kinds of interesting things—I have sort of gotten hung up on these little interesting things.

Well, I finally decided that in this galaxy some of the stars were going one way and some of the stars were going the other way; some were going clockwise and some were going counterclockwise.

suddenly I understood it all. I have no other way of describing it. It was exquisitely clear. I don’t know why I hadn’t done this two years earlier.

And it’s fun, great fun, to come upon something

When all goes well, the drudgery is redeemed by success.

The many years of tedious calculations are vindicated by the burst of new knowledge. But even without success, creative persons find joy in a job well done. Learning for its own sake is rewarding even if it fails to result in a public discovery. How and why this happens is one of the central questions this book explores.

For most of human history, creativity was held to be a prerogative of supreme beings.

puny, helpless things subject to the wrath of the gods. It was only very recently in the history of the human race that the tables were reversed: It was now men and women who were the creators and gods the figments of their imagination.

Then, slowly at first, and with increasing speed in the last thousand years or so, we began to understand how things work—from microbes to planets, from the circulation of the blood to ocean tides—and humans no longer seemed so helpless after all. Great machines were built, energies harnessed, the entire face of the earth transformed by human craft and appetite. It is not surprising that as we ride the crest of evolution we have taken over the title of creator.

Because for better or for worse, our future is now closely tied to human creativity. The result will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.

is an effort to make more understandable the mysterious process by which men and women come up with new ideas and new things.

And without the assessment of competent outsiders, there is no reliable way to decide whether the claims of a self-styled creative person are valid.

According to this view, creativity results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation.

For instance, in Vera Rubin’s account of her astronomical discovery, it is impossible to imagine it without access to the huge amount of information about celestial motions that has been collecting for centuries, without access to the institutions that control modern large telescopes, without the critical skepticism and eventual support of other astronomers. In my view these are not incidental contributors to individual o...

in this book I devote almost as much attention to the domain and t...

individual creative...

In cultural evolution there are no mechanisms equivalent to genes and chromosomes. Therefore, a new idea or invention is not automatically passed on to the next generation.

The analogy to genes in the evolution of culture are memes, or units of information that we must learn if culture is to continue.

It is these memes that a creative person changes, and if enough of the right people see the change as an improvement, it will become part of the culture.

Therefore, to understand creativity it is not enough to study the individuals who seem most responsible for a novel idea or a new thing. Their contribution, while necessary and important, is only a link in a chain, a phase in a process.

To say that the theory of relativity was created by Einstein is like saying that it is the spark that is responsible for the fire. The spark is necessary, but without air and tinder there would be no flame.

Creativity, at least as I deal with it in this book, is a process by which a symbolic domain in the culture is changed.

New songs, new ideas, new machines are what creativity is about.

It takes effort to change traditions.

For example, memes must be learned before they can be changed: A musician must learn the musical tradition, the notation system, the way instruments are played before she can think of writing a new song; before an inventor can improve on airplane design he has to learn physics, aerodynamics, and why birds don’t fall out of the sky.

If we want to learn anything, we must pay attention to the informati...

attention is a limited resource: There is just so much information we can pro...

Nor can we learn well while we do the other things that need to be done and require attention,

The point is, a great deal of our limited supply of attention is committed to the tasks of surviving from one day to the next.

To achieve creativity in an existing domain, there must be surplus attention available.

In other words, creativity is more likely in places where new ideas require less effort to be perceived.

As cultures evolve, it becomes increasingly difficult to master more than one domain of knowledge.

Therefore, it follows that as culture evolves, specialized knowledge will be favored over generalized knowledge.

With time, specialists are bound to take over leadership and control of the various institutions of culture.

Another consequence of limited attention is that creative individuals are often considered odd—or even arrogant, selfish, and ruthless.

If that person is so taken with his domain that he fails to take our wishes into account we call him “insensitive” or “selfish” even though such attitudes are far from his mind.

Yet it is practically impossible to learn a domain deeply enough to make a change in it without dedicating all of one’s attention to it and thereby appearing to be arrogant, selfish, and ruthless to those who believe they have a right to the creative person’s attention.

Second, to have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong from it. We also need a positive goal, otherwise why keep

going?

Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of