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.

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.

Learning for its own sake is rewarding even if it fails to result in a public discovery.

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

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.

My work in this area has convinced me that creativity cannot be understood by looking only at the people who appear to make it happen. Just as the sound of a tree crashing in the forest is unheard if nobody is there to hear it, so creative ideas vanish unless there is a receptive audience to record and implement them. 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.

Sharing is critical

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.

creative idea, product, o...

Each child has to learn them again from the start.

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.

Edison’s or Einstein’s discoveries would be inconceivable without the prior knowledge, without the intellectual and social network that stimulated their thinking, and without the social mechanisms that recognized and spread their innovations.

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

because these changes do not happen automatically as in biological evolution, it is necessary to consider the price we must pay for creativity to occur.

If we want to learn anything, we must pay attention to the information to be learned.

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

It also seems true that centers of creativity tend to be at the intersection of different cultures, where beliefs, lifestyles, and knowledge mingle and allow individuals to see new combinations of ideas with greater ease.

In cultures that are uniform and rigid, it takes a greater investment of attention to achieve new ways of thinking.

creativity is more likely in places where new ideas require less ef...

it is important to recognize that given how little attention we have to work with, and given the increasing amounts of information that are constantly being added to domains, specialization seems inevitable. This trend might be reversible, but only if we make a conscious effort to find an alternative; left to itself, it is bound to continue.

Another consequence of limited attention is that creative individuals are often considered odd—or even arrogant, selfish, and ruthless. It is important to keep in mind that these are not traits of creative people, but traits that the rest of us attribute to them on the basis of our perceptions.

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.

two main reasons why looking closely at the lives of creative individuals and the contexts of their accomplishments is useful.

first is the most obvious one: The results of creativity enrich the culture and so they indirectly improve the quality of all our lives.

But we may also learn from this knowledge how to make our own lives directly more in...

Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of 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.

Students generally find the basic academic subjects threatening or dull; their chance of using their minds in creative ways comes from working on the student paper, the drama club, or the orchestra.

I am afraid I have to disappoint you. I could not possibly answer your questions. I am told I am creative—I don’t know what that means…. I just keep on plodding….

I agree with these sentiments of the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies: 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 look at what is happening around us today and what has happened just since you were born, you can’t help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems and illnesses of one sort or another. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically from the day when the first amoeba crawled out of the slime and made its adventure on land. 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. You can take a short view and think that everything is a mess, that life is a cheat and a deceit, and of course you feel miserable. And I become very much amused by some of my colleagues, particularly in the study of literature, who say the pessimistic, the tragic view, is the only true key to life—which I think is just self-indulgent nonsense. It’s very much easier to be tragic than it is to be comic. I have known people to embrace the tragic view of life, and it is a cop-out. They simply feel rotten about everything, and that is terribly easy. And if you try to see things a little more evenly, it’s surprising what complexities of comedy and ambiguity and irony appear in it. And that, I think, is what is vital to a novelist. Just writing tragic novels is rather easy.

the most important message we can learn from creative people: how to find purpose and enjoyment in the chaos of existence.

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. Some

The problem is that the term “creativity” as commonly used covers too much ground. It refers to very different entities, thus causing a great deal of confusion.

The first usage, widespread in ordinary conversation, refers to persons who express unusual thoughts, who are interesting and stimulating—in short, to people who appear to be unusually bright.

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. They are the creative ones without qualifications.

So the first question I ask of creativity is not what is it but where is it?

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...

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

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

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.

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