Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

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. So people take intelligence very seriously, because the mental ability we call by that name can be measured by tests; whereas few bother about how sensitive, altruistic, or helpful someone is, because as yet there is no good way to measure such qualities.

This does not mean that creative persons are hyperactive, always “on,” constantly churning away. In fact, they often take rests and sleep a lot. The important thing is that the energy is under their own control—it is not controlled by the calendar, the clock, an external schedule. When necessary they can focus it like a laser beam; when it is not, they immediately start recharging their batteries. They consider the rhythm of activity followed by idleness or reflection very important for the success of their work. And this is not a biorhythm they inherited with their genes; it was learned by trial and error, as a strategy for achieving their goals.

Some people with high IQs get complacent, and, secure in their mental superiority, they lose the curiosity essential to achieving anything new. Learning facts, playing by the existing rules of domains, may come so easily to a high-IQ person that he or she never has any incentive to question, doubt, and improve on existing knowledge. This is probably why Goethe, among others, said that naïveté is the most important attribute of genius.

a certain immaturity, both

emotional and mental, can go hand in hand with deepest insights.

When tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.

Finally, the openness and sensitivity of creative individuals often exposes them to suffering and pain yet also a great deal of enjoyment. The suffering is easy to understand. The greater sensitivity can cause slights and anxieties that are not usually felt by the rest of us.

research shows that artists and writers do have unusually high rates of psychopathology and addictions.

There have been a lot of unfortunate cases of writers, painters, who have been melancholic, depressed, taken their own lives. I don’t think it goes with the territory. I think those people would have been depressed, or alcoholic, suicidal, whatever,

even if they weren’t writing. I just think it’s their characterological makeup. Whether that characterological makeup drove them to write or to paint, as well as to alcohol or to suicide, I don’t know. I know there are an awful lot of healthy writers and painters who have no thoughts of suicide. I think it’s a myth, by and large. It creates a special aura, a frailty, around the artist to say that he lives so close to the edge. He’s so responsive to the world around him, so sensitive, so driven to respond to it, it’s almost unbearable. That he must escape either through drugs or alcohol, finally suicide, the burden of consciousness is so great. But the burden of consciousness is great for people who don’t—you know—want to kill themselves. It is also true that deep interest and involvement

in obscure subjects often goes unrewarded, or even brings on ridicule. Divergent thinking is often perceived as deviant by the majority, and so the creative person may feel isolated and misunderstood. These occupational hazards do come with the territory, so to speak, and it is difficult to see how a person could be creative and at the same time insensitive to them. Perhaps the most difficult thing for a creative individual to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness experienced when, for some reason or another, he or s...

If you’re not writing, and you’re a writer and known as a writer, what are you?

Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at the university, physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.

The creative process has traditionally been described as taking five steps. The first is a period of preparation, becoming immersed, consciously or

not, in a set of problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity.

The second phase of the creative process is a period of incubation, during which ideas churn around below the threshold of consciousness.

The third component of the creative process is insight, sometimes called the “Aha!” moment,

The fourth component is evaluation, when the person must decide whether the insight is valuable and worth pursuing.

The fifth and last component of the process is elaboration. It is probably the one that takes up the most time and involves the hardest work. This is what Edison was referring to when he said that creativity consists of 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

The influence of historical events on the arts is less direct but probably not less important. It could be argued, for instance, that the breakaway from classical literary, musical, and artistic styles that is so characteristic of the twentieth century was an indirect reaction to the disillusion people felt at the inability of Western civilization to avoid the bloodshed of World War I. It is no coincidence that Einstein’s theory of relativity, Freud’s theory of the unconscious, Eliot’s free-form poetry, Stravinsky’s twelve-tone music, Martha Graham’s abstract choreography, Picasso’s deformed figures, James Joyce’s stream of consciousness prose

were all created—and were accepted by the public—in the same period in which empires collapsed and belief systems rejected old certainties.

The creative process starts with a sense that there is a puzzle somewhere, or a task to be accomplished. Perhaps something is not right, somewhere there is a conflict, a tension, a need to be satisfied. The problematic issue can be triggered by a personal experience, by a lack of fit in the symbolic system, by the stimulation of colleagues, or by public needs. In any case, without such a felt tension that attracts the psychic energy

of the person, there is no need for a new response. Therefore, without a stimulus of this sort, the creative process is unlikely to start.

I am fooling around not doing anything, which probably means that this is a creative period, although of course you don’t know until afterward. I think that it is very important to be idle. I mean, they always say that Shakespeare was idle between plays. I am not comparing myself to Shakespeare, but people who keep themselves busy all of the time are generally not creative. So I am not ashamed of being idle.

Cognitive theorists believe that ideas, when deprived of conscious direction, follow simple laws of association. They combine more or less randomly, although seemingly irrelevant associations between ideas may occur as a result of a prior connection:

For example, the German chemist August Kekulé had the insight that the benzene molecule might be shaped like a ring after he fell asleep while watching sparks in the fireplace make circles in the air. If he had stayed awake, Kekulé would have presumably rejected as ridiculous the thought that there

might be a connection between the sparks and the shape of the molecule. But in the subconscious, rationality could not censor the connection, and so when he woke up he was no longer able to ignore its possibility. According to this perspective, truly irrelevant connections dissolve and disappear from memory, while t...

The distinction between serial and parallel processing of information may also explain what happens during incubation. In a serial system like that of an old-fashioned calculator, a complex numerical problem must be solved in a sequence, one step at a time. In a parallel system such as in advanced computer software, a problem is broken up into its component steps, the partial computations are carried out simultaneously, and then these are reconstituted in...

are said to be incubating. When we think consciously about an issue, our previous training and the effort to arrive at a solution push our ideas in a linear direction, usually along predictable or familiar lines. But intentionality does not work in the subconscious. Free from rational direction, ideas can combine and pursue each other every which way. Because of this freedom, original ...

The insight presumably occurs when a subconscious connection between ideas fits so well that it is forced to pop out into awareness, like a cork held underwater breaking out into the air after it is released.

One thing about creative work is that it’s never done. In different words, every person we interviewed said that it was equally true that they had worked every minute of their careers, and that they had never worked a day in all their lives. They experienced even the most focused immersion in extremely difficult tasks as a lark, an exhilarating and playful adventure. It is easy to resent this attitude and see the inner freedom of the creative person as an elite privilege. While the rest of us are struggling at boring jobs, they have the luxury of doing what they love to do, not knowing whether it is work or play. There might be an element of truth in this. But far more important, in my opinion, is the message that the creative person is sending us: You,

too, can spend your life doing what you love to do. After all, most of the people we interviewed were not born with a silver spoon in their mouth; many came from humble origins and struggled to create a career that allowed them to keep exploring their interests. Even if we don’t have the good fortune to discover a new chemical element or write a great story, the love of the creative process for its own sake is available to all. It is difficult to imagine a richer life.

most enjoyable experiences resemble a process of discovery.

it seems perfectly reasonable that at least some people should enjoy discovering and creating above all else.

Rather, it often involved painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.

This optimal experience is what I have called flow, because many of the respondents described the feeling when things were going well as an almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness.

Paradoxically, the self expands through acts of self-forgetfulness.

This is indeed a difficult problem. Many artists give up because it is just too excruciating to wait until critics or galleries take notice and pass judgment on their canvases. Research scientists drift away from pure science because they cannot tolerate the long cycles of insecurity before reviewers and editors evaluate their results. So how can they experience flow without external information about their performance? The solution seems to be that those individuals who keep doing creative work are those who succeed in internalizing the field’s criteria of judgment to the extent that they can give feedback to themselves, without having to wait to hear from experts.

The poet who keeps enjoying writing verse is the one who knows how good each line is, how appropriate is each word chosen.

Many creative scientists say that the difference between them and their less creative peers is the ability to separate bad ideas from good ones, so that they don’t waste much time exploring blind alleys.

“Dr. Pauling, how does one go about having good ideas?” He replied, “You have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.”

To do that, of course, one has to have a very well internalized picture of what the domain is like and what constitutes

“good” and “bad” ideas according ...

It is never easy to break new ground, to venture into the unknown.

Well, I think that you have to describe it as sort of a struggle. I have to always force myself to write, and also to work harder at a science problem. You have to put blood, sweat, and tears into it first. And it is awfully hard to get started. I think most writers have this problem. I mean, it’s part of the business. You may work very hard for a week producing

the first page. That’s really blood, tears, and sweat, and there is nothing else to describe it. You have to force yourself to push and push and push with the hope that something good will come out. And you have to go through that process before it really starts to flow easily, and without that preliminary forcing and pushing probably nothing would ever happen. So, I think that is what distinguishes it from just having a good time—you have a good time once you are really in the flowing phase, but you have to overcome some sort of barrier to get there. That is why I say it is unconscious, because you don’t know actually whether you are really getting anywhere or not. In that phase it just seems to be unadulterated torture.

I always find that when I am writing, it is really the fingers that are doing it and not the brain. Somehow the writing takes charge. And the same thing happens of course with equations. You don’t really think of what you are going to write. You just scribble, the equations lead the way, and what you are doing is sort of architectural. You have to

have a design in view, in which you design a chapter, or a proof of a theorem, as the case may be. Then you have to put it together out of words or out of symbols as the case may be, but if you don’t have a clear architecture in mind then the thing won’t end up being any good. The trick is to start from both ends and to meet in the middle, which is essentially like building a bridge. That seems to me the way that I think, anyhow. So the original design is somehow accidental and you don’t know how it comes into your head. It just sort of happens, maybe when you are shaving or taking a walk, then you sit down and actually work through and that is when the hard work is done. And that is very largely a matter of putting pieces together, finding out what works and what doesn’t.

At your best you’re not thinking, How am I making my way ahead in the world by doing this? No. You’re concentrated on your characters, on the situation, on the form of the book, on the words which are coming out. And their shape. You’ve lost…you’re not an ego at that point. It’s not competitive. It’s…I would use the word pure. You know that this is right. I don’t mean that it works in the world, or that it adds up, but that it’s right in this place. In this story. It belongs to it. It’s right for that person, that character.

Avoiding Distractions Many of the peculiarities attributed to creative persons are really just ways to protect the focus of concentration so that they may lose themselves in the creative process. Distractions interrupt flow, and it may take hours to recover the peace of mind