Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

instructions: a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk—the curiosity that leads to creativity belongs to this set.

If too few opportunities for curiosity are available, if too many obstacles are placed in the way of risk and exploration, the motivation to engage in creative behavior is easily extinguished.

But if we look at the reality, we see a different picture. Basic scientific research is minimized in favor of immediate practical applications.

I am told I am creative—I don’t know what that means…. I just keep on plodding….

productivity in my experience consists of NOT doing anything that helps the work of other people but to spend all one’s time on the work the Good Lord has fitted one to do, and to do well.

But here I don’t even attempt to come up with generalizations that are supposed to hold for all creative persons. What I try to do occasionally is to disprove certain widespread assumptions.

whereas a single case can disprove a generalization,

even all the cases in the world are not enough for a conclus...

But I can point at millions of black ravens without confirming the statement that all ravens are black. Somewhere there may be a white raven hiding.

I like the expression “It makes the spirit sing,” and I use it quite often.

but isn’t it common knowledge that to achieve anything new and important, especially in the arts, a person must be poor and suffering and tired of the world? So lives like these either represent only a small minority of the creative population, or they must not be accepted at face value, even if all the evidence suggests their truth.

Thus the individuals who ended up as part of the sample are skewed in the direction of positive health, physical and psychological.

Pessimism is a very easy way out when you’re considering what life really is, because pessimism is a short view of life.

If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of man or the future of the world.

did not, however, write this book to prove a point.

The findings I discuss emerged from the data.

Creativity is some sort of mental activity, an insight that occurs inside the heads of some special people.

There is no way to know whether a thought

is

new except with reference to some standards, and there is no way to tell whether it is valuable until...

it became increasingly clear that the experiments on which the claims were based had been flawed. So the researchers who at first were hailed as the greatest creative scientists of the century became somewhat of an embarrassment to the scholarly establishment. Yet, as far as we know, they firmly believed that they were right and that their reputations had been ruined by jealous colleagues.

what the term originally was supposed to mean—namely, to bring into existence something genuinely new that is valued enough to be added to the culture.

The problem is that the term “creativity” as commonly used covers too much ground.

The second way the term can be used is to refer to people who experience the world in novel and original ways. These are individuals whose perceptions are

fresh, whose judgments are insightful, who may make important discoveries that only they know about.

The final use of the term designates individuals who, like Leonardo, Edison, Picasso, or Einstein, have changed our culture in some important respect.

It happens very often, for example, that some persons brimming with brilliance, whom everyone thinks of as being exceptionally creative, never leave any accomplishment, any trace of their existence—

Neither Isaac Newton nor Thomas Edison would have been considered assets at a party either, and outside of their scientific concerns they appeared colorless and driven.

But talking with Bardeen on any issue besides his work was not easy; his mind followed abstract paths while he spoke slowly, haltingly, and without much depth or interest about “real life” topics.

We might say that Michael Jordan is a talented athlete, or that Mozart was a talented pianist, without implying that either was creative for that reason.

Although several of the people in our sample have been called a genius by the media, they—and the majority of creative individuals we interviewed—reject this designation.

To have any effect, the idea must be couched in terms that are understandable to others, it must pass muster with the experts in the field, and finally it must be included in the cultural domain to which it belongs. So the first question I ask of creativity is not what is it but where is it?

The answer that makes most sense is that creativity can be observed only in the interrelations of a system made up of three main parts. The first of these is the domain, which consists of a set of symbolic rules and procedures. Mathematics is a domain, or at a finer resolution algebra and number

Domains are in turn nested in what we usually call culture, or the symbolic knowledge shared by a particular soc...

The second component of creativity is the field, which includes all the individuals who act a...

It is this field that selects what new works of art deserve to be recognized, preserved, and remembered.

Finally, the third component of the creative system is the individual person.

has a new idea or sees a new pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the appropriate field for inclusion into the relevant domain.

Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one. And the definition of a creative person is: someone whose thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain. It is important to remember, however, that a domain cannot be changed without the explicit or implicit consent of a field responsible for it.

For instance, we don’t need to assume that the creative person is necessarily different from anyone else. In other words, a personal trait of “creativity” is not what determines whether a person will be creative. What counts is whether the novelty he or she produces is accepted for inclusion in the domain.

A person cannot be creative in a domain to which he or she is not exposed.

But even if the rules are learned, creativity cannot be manifested in the absence of a field that recognizes and legitimizes the novel contributions.

It also follows that creativity can be manifested only in existing domains and fields.

So we are in the paradoxical situation that novelty is more obvious in domains that are often relatively trivial but easy to measure; whereas in domains that are more essential novelty is very difficult to determine.

But the systems model recognizes the fact that creativity cannot be separated from its recognition.

Raphael is creative when the community is moved by his work, and discovers new possibilities in his paintings. But when his paintings seem mannered and routine to those who know art, Raphael can only be called a great draftsman, a subtle colorist—perhaps even a personally creative individual—but not creative with a capital C.

A more objective description of van Gogh’s contribution is that his creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art. Without such a response, van Gogh would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.

It depends just as much on how well suited the respective domains and fields are to the recognition and diffusion of novel ideas.

Motorola)? Because we are used to thinking that creativity begins and ends with the person, it is easy to miss the fact that the greatest spur to it may come from changes outside the individual.

How can this flowering of great art be explained? If creativity is something entirely within a person, we would have to argue that for some reason an unusually large number of creative artists were born in Florence in the last decades of the fourteenth century.