Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

which I succeeded in impressing other people with what I have done. And those would be things like the two areas of work in which I received the Nobel Prize, and things like that.

I have always looked upon the task of a scientist as bearing the responsibility for persuading his contemporaries of the cogency and validity of his thinking.

On the other hand, it has been said that only four or five people in the world initially understood Einstein’s theory of relativity, but their opinion had enough weight to make his name a household word.

That while yearning to overthrow old beliefs, we also thirst for new certainties, and Einstein was said to have come

up with an important new truth?

Fields can affect the rate of creativity in at least three ways.

The first way is by being either reactive or proactive.

A reactive field does not solicit or stimulate novelty, while a proactive field does. One of the major reasons the Renaissance was so bountiful in Florence is that the p...

The second way for the field to influence the rate of novelty is by choosing either a narrow or a broad filter in the selection of novelty.

Some fields are conservative and allow only a few new items to enter the domain at any given time. They reject most novelty and select only what they consider best. Others are more liberal in allowing new ideas into their domains, and as a result these change more rapidly. At the extremes, both strategies can be dangerous: It is possible to wreck a domain either by starving it of novelty or by admitting too much unassimilated novelty into it.

Finally, fields can encourage novelty if they are well connected to the rest of the social system and are able to channel support into their own domain. For instance, after World War II it was easy for nuclear physicists to get all sorts of money to build new laboratories, research centers, experimental reactors, and to train new physicists, because politicians and voter...

No matter how much a group of scientists would like their pet theory accepted, it won’t be if it runs against the previously accumulated consensus.

The artistic establishment decides, without firm guidelines anchored in the past, which new works of art are worthy of inclusion in the domain.

The church interfered in Galileo’s astronomical findings; the Communist party for a while directed not only Soviet genetics but art and music as well; and fundamentalists in the United States are trying to have a voice in teaching evolutionary history. In more subtle ways, economic and political for...

Opera and ballet would virtually disappear without massive outside support.

The Romanian government was actively involved in the destruction of the art forms of its ethnic minorities in order to maintain the purity of Dacian culture; the Nazis tried to destroy what they considered “degenerate” Jewish art.

A leading philosopher in our study maintains that if a young person wants to learn philosophy these days, he or she would be better advised to become immersed in the domain directly and avoid the field altogether: “I’d tell him to read the great books of philosophy. And I would tell him not to do graduate study at any university.

These may range from grade school teachers to university professors and include anyone who has a right to decide whether a new idea or product is “good” or “bad.” It is impossible to understand creativity without understanding how fields operate, how they decide whether something new should or should not be added to the domain.

Finally we get to the individual responsible for generating novelty.

But this is not necessarily the case. For though it is true that behind every new idea or product there is a person, it does not follow that such persons have a single characteristic responsible for the novelty.

Perhaps being creative is more like being involved in an automobile accident. There are some traits that make one more likely to be in an accident—being young and male, for instance—but usually we cannot explain car accidents on the basis of the driver’s characteristics alone.

Nor can we say that it is the person who starts the creative process. In the case of the Florentine Renaissance one could just as well say that it was started by the rediscovery of Roman art, or by the stimulation provided by the city’s bankers.

When we asked creative persons what explains their success, one of the most frequent answers—perhaps the most frequent one—was that they were lucky. Being in the right place at the right time is an almost universal explanation.

Many women scientists who entered graduate school in the 1940s mention that they wouldn’t have been accepted by the schools, and certainly they wouldn’t have been given fellowships and special attention from supervisors, except for the fact that there were so few male students left to compete against, most of them having gone to war.

A very successful artist, whose work sells well and hangs in the best museums and who can afford a large estate with horses and a swimming pool, once admitted ruefully that there could be at least a thousand artists as good as he is—yet they are unknown and their work is unappreciated. The one difference between him and the rest, he said, was that years back he met at a party a man with whom he had a few drinks.

It is important to point out the tenuousness of the individual contribution to creativity, because it is usually so often overrated. Yet one can also fall in the opposite error and deny the individual any credit.

For while the individual is not as important as it is commonly supposed, neither is it true that novelty could come about without the contribution of individuals, and that all individuals have the same likelihood of producing novelty.

But many people never realize that they are standing in a propitious space/time convergence, and even fewer know what to do when the realization hits them.

A person who wants to make a creative contribution not only must work within a creative system but must also reproduce that system within his or her mind. In other words, the person must learn the rules and the content of the domain, as well as the criteria of selection, the preferences of the field.

“The important thing is that you must have a good, a very solid grounding in the physical sciences, before you can make any progress in understanding.” The same conclusions are voiced in every other discipline.

Writers say that you have to read, read, and read some more, and know what the critics’ criteria for good writing are, before you can write creatively yourself.

At first, he talks about the importance of what I have called the domain:

So you need three things to be an original thinker. First, you have to have a tremendous amount of information—a big database if you like to be fancy.

So you’re brought up in an atmosphere where you store a lot of information.

So you have to have the kind of memory that you need for the kind of things you want to do. And you do those things which are easy and you don’t do those things which are hard, so you get better and better by doing the things you do well, and eventually you become either a great tennis player or a good inventor or whatever, because you tend to do those things which you do well and the more you do, the easier it gets, and the easier it gets, the better you do it, and eventually you become very one-sided but you’re very good at it and you’re lousy at everything else because you don’t do it well.

So the small differences at the beginning of life become enormous differences by the time you’ve done it for forty,...

Next Rabinow brings up what the person must contribute, which is mainly a question of motivation, or the enjoyment one feels when playing (or working?) with the contents of the domain:

Then you have to be willing to pull the ideas, because you’re interested.

But there are people like myself who like to do it. It’s fun to come up with an idea, and if nobody wants it, I don’t give a damn. It’s just fun to come up with something strange and different.

And then you must have the ability to get rid of the trash which you think

You must think of a lot of music, a lot of ideas, a lot of poetry, a lot of whatever. And if you’re good, you must be able to throw out the junk immediately without even saying it.

And when you see the good one, you say, “Oops, this sounds interesting. Let me pursue that a little further.” And you start developing it.

They say, “What? You think of junk?” I say, “Yup. You must.” You cannot a priori think only of good ideas.

He was asked what constitutes “junk.” Is it something that doesn’t work, or—

It doesn’t work, or it’s old, or you know that it will not gel.

good. It’s too complicated. It’s not what mathematicians call “elegant.” You know, it’s not good poetry. And this is a matter of training. If you’re well trained in technology, you ...

First of all, ...

complicated. Secondly, it’s been tried before. Thirdly, he could have done it in thr...

And the guy says, “But to me it’s new.” I say, “Yup. To you it’s new. It may be new to the world. But it’s still not good.”

But if a group of engineers who work on new stuff look at it and say, “That’s pretty nice,” that’s because they know. They know because they’ve been trained in it.