Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

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.

First, most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity. We share 98 percent of our genetic makeup with chimpanzees. What makes us different—our language, values, artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology—is the result of individual ingenuity that was recognized, rewarded, and transmitted through learning. 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.

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.

When the first myths of creation arose, humans were indeed helpless, at the mercy of cold, hunger, wild beasts, and one another. They had no idea how to explain the great forces they saw around them—the rising and setting of the sun, the wheeling stars, the alternating seasons.

Whether this transformation will help the human race or cause its downfall is not yet clear.

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.

The analogy to genes in the evolution of culture are memes, or units of information that we must learn if culture is to continue. Languages, numbers, theories, songs, recipes, laws, and values are all memes that we pass on to our children so that they will be remembered. 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.

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

If we want to learn anything, we must pay attention to the information to be learned. And attention is a limited resource: There is just so much information we can process at any given time.

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. Over an entire lifetime, the amount of attention left over for learning a symbolic domain—such as music or physics—is a fraction of this already small amount.

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

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

Nobody knows who the last Renaissance man really was, but sometime after Leonardo da Vinci it became impossible to learn enough about all of the arts and the sciences to be an expert in more than a small fraction of them.

In fact, creative people are neither single-minded, specialized, nor selfish. Indeed, they seem to be the opposite: They love to make connections with adjacent areas of knowledge. They tend to be—in principle—caring and sensitive. Yet the demands of their role inevitably push them toward specialization and selfishness. Of the many paradoxes of creativity, this is perhaps the most difficult to avoid.

First of all, workable new solutions to poverty or overpopulation will not appear magically by themselves. Problems are solved only when we devote a great deal of attention to them and in a creative way.

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? Creativity is one answer to that question: It provides one of the most exciting models for living.

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.

If I could find just one white raven, that would be enough to disprove the statement: “All ravens are black.” 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. The same lack of symmetry between what is called falsification and proof holds even for the most sacred laws of physics.

Contrary to the popular image of creative persons, the interviews present a picture of creativity and creative individuals that is upbeat and positive. Instead of suspecting these stories of being self-serving fabrications, I accept them at face value—provided they are not contradicted by other facts known about the person or by internal evidence.

As a result, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, our discipline runs the risk of degenerating into a “de-bunking enterprise,” based more on ideology than evidence.

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.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

WHERE IS CREATIVITY?

creativity does not happen inside people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a sociocultural context. It is a systemic rather than an individual phenomenon.

Who is right: the individual who believes in his or her own creativity, or the social milieu that denies it?

If we take sides with the individual, then creativity becomes a subjective phenomenon. All it takes to be creative, then, is an inner assurance that what I think or do is new and valuable.

On the other hand, if we decide that social confirmation is necessary for something to be called creative, the definition must encompass more than the individual.

Unless they also contribute something of permanent significance, I refer to people of this sort as brilliant rather than creative—and by and large I don’t say much about them in this book.

These are individuals whose perceptions are fresh, whose judgments are insightful, who may make important discoveries that only they know about. I refer to such people as personally creative,

The final use of the term designates individuals who, like Leonardo, Edison, Picasso, or Einstein, have changed our culture in some important respect. They are the creative ones without qualifications.

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—except, perhaps, in the memories of those who have known them.

The biographers of outstanding creators struggle valiantly to make their subjects interesting and brilliant, yet more often than not their efforts are in vain.

The first is talent. Talent differs from creativity in that it focuses on an innate ability to do something very well.

The other term that is often used as a synonym for “creative” is genius. Again, there is an overlap. Perhaps we should think of a genius as a person who is both brilliant and creative at the same time.

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 theory can be seen as domains.

The second component of creativity is the field, which includes all the individuals who act as gatekeepers to the domain.

Finally, the third component of the creative system is the individual person. Creativity occurs when a person, using the symbols of a given domain such as music, engineering, business, or mathematics, 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.

This may be the result of chance, perseverance, or being at the right place at the right time.

Perhaps the most important implication of the systems model is that the level of creativity in a given place at a given time does not depend only on the amount of individual creativity.

CREATIVITY IN THE RENAISSANCE

A good example is the sudden spurt in artistic creativity that took place in Florence between 1400 and 1425. These were the golden years of the Renaissance, and it is generally agreed that some of the most influential new works of art in Europe were created during that quarter century.

Any list of the masterpieces would include the dome of the cathedral built by Brunelleschi, the “Gates of Paradise” crafted for the baptistery by Ghiberti, Donatello’s sculptures for the chapel of Orsanmichele, the fresco cycle by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel, and Gentile da Fab...

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.

The cathedral of Florence, Santa Maria Novella, had been left open to the skies for eighty years because no one could find a way to build a dome over its huge apse. There was no known method for preventing the walls from collapsing inward once the curvature of the dome had advanced beyond a certain height.

But eventually humanist scholars became interested in the Pantheon of Rome, measured its enormous dome, and analyzed how it had been constructed. The Pantheon had been rebuilt by the emperor Hadrian in the second century. The diameter of its 71-foot-high dome was 142 feet. Nothing on that scale had been built for well over a thousand years, and the methods that allowed the Romans to build such a structure that would stand up and not collapse had been long forgotten in the dark centuries of barbarian invasions. But now that peace and commerce were reviving the Italian cities, the knowledge was slowly being pieced back together.

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 rediscovery of the ancient domains of art. Florence had become one of the richest cities in Europe first through trading, then through the manufacture of wool and other textiles, and finally through the financial expertise of its rich merchants. By the end of the fourteenth century there were a dozen major bankers in the city—the Medici being only one of the minor ones—who were getting substantial interest every year from the various foreign kings and potentates to whom they had lent money.