Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

As far as the domain is concerned, the Renaissance was made possible in part by the rediscovery of ancient Roman methods of building and sculpting that had been lost for centuries during the so-called Dark Ages. In Rome and elsewhere, by the end of the thirteen hundreds, eager scholars were excavating classical ruins, copying down and analyzing the styles and techniques of the ancients. This slow preparatory work bore fruit at the turn of the fifteenth century, opening up long-forgotten knowledge to the artisans and craftsmen of the time.

the Florentine Renaissance cannot be explained only in terms of the sudden availability of information. Otherwise, the same flowering of new

artistic forms would have taken place in all the other cities exposed to the ancient models. And though this actually did happen to a certain extent, no other place matched Florence in the intensity and depth of artistic achievement.

The explanation is that the field of art became particularly favorable to the creation of new works at just about the same time as the red...

But while the coffers of the bankers were getting fuller, the city itself was troubled. Men without property were ruthlessly exploited, and political tensions fueled by economic inequality threatened at any moment to explode into open conflict.

To make matters worse, Florence was surrounded by Siena, Pisa, and Arezzo, cities jealous of its wealth and ambitions and always ready to snatch away whatever they could of Florentine trade and territory.

It was in this atmosphere of wealth and uncertainty that the urban leaders decided to invest in making Florence the most beautiful city in Christendom—in their words, “a new Athens.”

And in a way, they were not wrong: When more than five hundred years later Hitler ordered the retreating German troops to blow up the bridges on the Arno and level the city around them, the field commander refused to obey on the grounds that too much beauty would be erased from the world—and the city was saved.

The important thing to realize is that when the Florentine bankers, churchmen, and heads of great guilds decided to make their city intimidatingly beautiful, they did not just throw money at artists and wait to see what happened. They became intensely involved in the process of encouraging, evaluating, and selecting the works they wanted to see completed. It was because the leading citizens, as well as the common people, were so seriously concerned with the outcome of their work that the artists were pushed to perform beyond their previous limits.

Then they wrote to some of the most eminent philosophers, writers, and churchmen in Europe to request their opinion of which scenes from the Bible should be included in the panels, and how they should be represented.

Lorenzo Ghiberti was twenty-one years old at the time. He spent the next twenty years finishing the north door and then another twenty-seven finishing the famed east door.

However, one could claim without too much risk of exaggeration that what made the Gates of Paradise so beautiful was the care, concern, and support of the entire community, represented by the field of judges who supervised their construction. If Ghiberti and his fellows were driven to surpass themselves, it was by the intense competition and focused attention their work attracted.

“In the art of the early Renaissance…the starting point of production is to be found mostly not in the creative urge, the subjective self-expression and spontaneous inspiration of the artist, but in the task set by the customer.”

And that with the favorable conjunction of field and domain, if these two artists had not been born, some others would have stepped in their place and built the dome and the doors. It is because of this inseparable connection that creativity must, in the last analysis, be seen not as something happening within a person but in the relationships within a system.

It seems that every species of living organism, except for us humans, understands the world in terms of more or less built-in responses to certain types of sensations. Plants turn toward the sun.

Each species experiences and understands its environment in terms of the information its sensory equipment is programmed to process.

But in addition to the narrow windows on the world our genes have provided, we have managed to open up new perspectives on reality based on information mediated by symbols.

Different as they are from each other, lyric poetry and magnetic resonance spectroscopy are both ways to make accessible information that otherwise we would never have an inkling about.

Knowledge mediated by symbols is extrasomatic; it is not transmitted through the chemical codes inscribed in our chromosomes but must be intentionally passed on and learned. It is this extrasomatic information that makes up what we call a culture.

In many ways, each domain describes an isolated little world in which a person can think and act with clarity and concentration.

The existence of domains is perhaps the best evidence of human creativity. The fact that calculus and Gregorian chants exist means that we can experience patterns of order that were not programmed into our genes by biological evolution. By learning the rules of a domain, we immediately step beyond the boundaries of biology and enter the realm of cultural evolution.

Each person is surrounded by an almost infinite number of domains that are potentially able to open up new worlds and give new powers to those who learn their rules. Therefore, it is astounding how few of us bother to invest enough mental energy to learn the rules of even one of these domains, and live instead exclusively within the constraints of biological existence.

For most people, domains are primarily ways to make a living. We choose nursing or plumbing, medicine or business administration because of our ability and the chances of getting a well-paying job.

For them the match is so perfect that acting within the rules of the domain is rewarding in itself; they would keep doing what they do even if they were not paid for it, just for the sake of doing the activity.

To bring order to experience, to make something that will endure after one’s death, to do something that allows humankind to go beyond its present powers are very common themes.

There are several ways that domains can help or hinder creativity. Three major dimensions are particularly relevant: the clarity of structure, the centrality within the culture, and accessibility.

following: Which company has the more detailed data about pharmaceuticals? Where are the data better organized? Which company puts more emphasis in its culture on research, relative to other areas such as production and marketing? Where does pharmaceutical knowledge earn more respect? Which company disseminates knowledge better among its staff? Where is it easier to test a hypothesis? The company where knowledge is better structured, more central, and more accessible is likely to be the one where—other things still being equal—creative innovations are going to happen.

It has been often remarked that superior ability in some domains—such as mathematics or music—shows itself earlier in life than in other domains—such as painting or philosophy. Similarly, it has been suggested that the most creative performances in some domains are the work of young people, while in other domains older persons have the edge.

Mathematical genius peaks in the twenties, physics in the thirties, but great philosophical works are usually achieved later in life.

The symbolic system of mathematics is organized relatively tightly;

Therefore, it is easy for a young person to assimilate the rules quickly and jump to the cutting edge of the domain in a few years.

By contrast, it takes decades for social scientists or philosophers to master their domains, and if they produce a new idea, it takes the

field many years to assess whether it is an improvement worth adding to the knowledge base.

This story could never have been told about my branch of psychology. If a student stood up in a psychology seminar at any school in the world and uttered the most profound ideas, he or she would not create a ripple beyond the walls of the classroom. Not because psychology students are less intelligent or original than the ones in physics. Nor because my colleagues and I are less alert to our students’ new ideas. But because with the exception of a few highly structured subdomains, psychology is so diffuse a system of thought that it takes years of intense writing for any person to say something that others recognize as new and important.

Does this mean that a domain that is better structured—where creativity is easier to determine—is in some sense “better” than one that is more diffuse? That it is more important, more advanced, more serious? Not at all. If that were true, then chess, microeconomics, or computer programming, which are very clearly structured domains,

would have to be considered more advanced than morality or wisdom.

But it is certainly true that nowadays a quantifiable domain with sharp boundaries and well-defined rules is taken more seriously. In a typical university it is much...

It is much less likely that ten scholars would agree on who is a world authority on personality development. From this it is easy to make the regrettable mistake of inferring that personality development is a scientifically less respectable domain than the one that studies the mating practices of the kangaroo rat.

In the current historical climate, a domain where quantifiable measurement is possible takes precedence over one where it does not. We believe that things that can be measured are real, and we ignore those that we don’t know how to measure.

As long as the costs of pollution, depredation of natural resources, decline in the quality of life, and various other human costs are left out of the reckoning of the GNP, she claims, entirely distorted pictures of reality result.

If a symbolic domain is necessary for a person to innovate in, a field is necessary to determine whether the innovation is worth making a fuss about.

For instance, about one hundred thousand new books are published every year in the United States. How many of these will be remembered ten years from now?

George Stigler, the Nobel laureate in economics, made the same point about new ideas produced in his domain, and what he says can be applied to any other field of science:

The profession is too busy to read much. I keep telling my colleagues at the Journal of Political Economy that anytime we get an article that fifteen of our profession, of the seven thousand subscribers, read carefully, that must be truly a major article of the year.

In order to survive, cultures must eliminate most of the new ideas their members produce. Cultures are conservative, and for good reason.

In other words, no person can afford to pay attention to more than a very small fraction of new things produced. Yet a culture could not survive long unless all of its members paid attention to at least a few of the same things.

Because of the scarcity of attention, we must be selective: We remember and recognize only a few of the works of art produced, we read only a few of the new books written,

A field is made up of experts in a given domain whose job involves passing judgment on performance in that domain.

This competition also means that a creative person must convince the field that he or she has made a valuable innovation. This is never an easy task.

I think you have to accept the judgment of others. Because if one were allowed to judge his own case, every one of us should have been president of the United States and received all the medals and so forth. And so I guess I am most proud of the things in