Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

heart in the same way. I really knew whole symphonies by heart. I knew where every instrument came in and went out and all their figures. I listened with great care, and without being able to read music I did feel I knew these pieces very well indeed. And as I say, the great thing about music is that it is nonreferential so it is completely uncontaminated by anything. Even as a child I scoffed at people whose association with music was always with some sort of sentimental event. You know, “They’re playing our tune.” That meant nothing to me. A Beethoven sonata was not connected with any emotional event precisely because I didn’t want it to be. I wanted it to be pure music...

and math were the two things that I liked most as a child. It is fascinating how the pursuit of artistic domains such as music or poetry, and also of scientific domains like geometry and science, is motivated not so much by the desire to achieve some external goal—a poem or a proof—but by the feeling of freedom from the threats and stresses of everyday life one experiences when completely immersed in the domain. Paradoxically, it is ...

A fulfilling relationship and a creative profession—what more can one ask? Especially when work consists of adding to the culture’s heritage of

order and beauty.

nothing can be studied objectively, because to look at something is to change it and to be changed by it.

L’Engle believes that telling stories is an important way to keep people from falling away from one another and to keep the fabric of civilized

life from unraveling. Helping the relationship among people remain harmonious is one of her central tasks. She believes her calling is to reflect on what she has learned from experience and share it with other people, especially children.

In America we no longer value the wisdom of older people. Whereas in so-called primitive tribes, the older people are revered because they have the “story” of the tribe. I think as a country, we’re in danger of losing our stories. Planned obsolescence cuts across everything; it doesn’t only hit refrigerators and automobiles, it hits people, too. I have wonderful friends of many generations, and I think that’s important. I...

Like many other creative individuals, L’Engle attributes her success in large part to the ability to take risks. She has been adventurous in her personal life, trying to follow an inner sense of what was right even when it went against the norms and expectations of her social milieu. She flouted popular wisdom by writing in a style that editors and critics thought was too difficult for young people to read, too childish for adults—even though the scientific concepts and philosophical ideas actually were not that easy even for grown-ups to grasp. So it took ten years for her unusual stories to be published. The manuscript of A Wrinkle in Time collected rejection slips for two and a half years before a publisher took a chance on it. “You cannot name a major publisher who didn’t reject it. They all did.” But she was never tempted to compromise her vision in order to play it safe.

One episode she remembers in this context

concerns a time early in her career when she was invited to give a talk to a women’s group on the West Coast. She prepared a humorous talk but one that adroitly avoided controversial issues. When she showed the draft of the lecture to her husband, he said: “‘Well, dear, it’s very funny. But they’re not paying you to go all that way just to make them laugh. They think you may have something to say. Stick your neck out and say ...

Human beings are the only creatures who are allowed to fail. If an ant fails, it’s dead. But we’re allowed to learn from our mistakes and from our failures. And that’s how I learn, by falling flat on my face and picking myself up

and starting all over again. If I’m not free to fail, I will never start another book, I’ll never start a new thing.

It is not surprising that Stern too uses his writing to exorcise some evil. In his case, the evil seems to be something more private, less dramatic, more related to the normal wear and tear of life. Perhaps one could say that his intent is to explore the damage that psychic entropy causes to our lives—the stunted emotions, the acts of selfishness, the betrayals, the inevitable disappointments that are the conditions of existence. These are the grains of sand that cause the writer to coat them with words to diminish the pain:

The great thing about this kind of work is that every feeling that you have, every negative feeling, is in a way precious. It is your building material, it’s your stone, it’s something

you use to build your work. I would say the conversion of the negative is very important. So I taught to myself what I try to teach my students who are becoming writers: Don’t duck pain. It’s preci...

To overcome the pain of existence, one must be honest with oneself, acknowledging one’s faults and weaknesses. Like a surgeon, one must be willing to cut deeply into the festering sores of the psyche. Otherwise too much energy is absorbed

in denial, or in ruminating over disappointments.

I think it’s that rubbishy part of myself, that part which is described by such words as vanity, pride, the sense of not being treated as I should be, comparison with others, and so on. I’ve tried rather hard to discipline that. And I’ve been lucky that there has been enough that’s positive to enable me to counter a kind of biliousness and resentment—ressentiment—which I’ve seen paralyze colleagues of mine, peers who are more gifted than I. I’ve felt it in myself. And I’ve had to learn to counter that. I would say that the chief obstacle is—oneself.

Stern endorses Pascal’s maxim “To understand is to forgive.” In fact, one of the most exciting opportunities in being a writer, he feels, is to take a villain or criminal character and make him human by showing what caused him to be so. It is more difficult to forgive oneself, but writing helps to do that, too. After all, the writer is also a part of the human race, and when he explains the failings of a character, to a certain extent he excuses himself as well. And then there is joy in being able to craft a story that will add meaning to the reader’s life.

The greatest reward of the writer is when the readers have enjoyed, had pleasure in the rise and fall, in the symmetry, in the characters, in

the situations, so that they feel their understanding deepened. They’ve felt pleasure, and it’s related to something that I’ve made. I have told my grandchildren stories, and my little nieces and nephew. To see two or four or five faces hanging on things you say is one of the most beautiful things in the world. That kind of attention. You know, I know some actors and actresses well, and I see through them the connection between their work and mine. It’s making human beings ...

As these five cases suggest, the domain of the word is indeed quite powerful. It allows us to recognize our feelings and label them in terms of enduring, shared qualities. In this way both the author and the reader can achi...

begin to understand, to contextualize, to explain what otherwise would remain a visceral reaction. Poets and novelists stand...

Their struggle leaves a record of the human attempt to bring meaning to life. For the most part, it is this struggle that serves as the inspiration for their work.

Another similarity among the writers was the oft-stressed emphasis on the dialectic between

the irrational and the rational aspects of the craft, between passion and discipline. Whether we want to call it the Freudian unconscious where childhood repressions linger or the Jungian collective unconscious where the archetypes of the race dwell, or whether we think of it as a space below the threshold of awareness where previous impressions randomly combine until a striking new connection happens by chance, it is quite clear that all the writers place great stock in the sudden voice that arises in the middle of the night to enjoin: “You have to write this.”

Being able to braid together ideas and emotions from disparate domains is one way writers express their creativity.

There were many similarities also in the methods these writers follow as they ply their craft. All of them keep notebooks handy for when the voice of the Muse calls, which tends to be early in the morning while the writer is still in bed, half asleep. Most of them have been keeping diaries for many years. They usually start a working day with

a word, a phrase, or an image, rather than a concept or planned composition. The work evolves on its own rather than the author’s intentions, but is always monitored by the critical eye of the writer. What is so difficult about this process is that one must keep the mind focused on two contradictory goals: not to miss the message whispered by the unconscious and at the same time force it into a suitable form. The first requires openness, the second critical judgment. If these two processes are not kept in a constantly shifting balance, the flow of writing dries up. After a few hours the tremendous concentration required for this balancing act becomes so exhausting that the writer has to change gears and focus on something else, something mundane. But while it lasts, creative writing is the next best thing to having a world of one’s own in which what’s wrong with the “real” world can be set right.

polarities—facility vs. persistence, love of subject matter vs. desire to control, selflessness vs. ambition, solitude vs. social acceptance, enjoyment vs. pain—

Even now his greatest fear is that people who depend on him won’t be happy, that he will let others down. His greatest source of pride is the ability to control his own emotions so as to preserve harmony

in personal and professional relationships.

An atheist with a positive outlook, he feels happy even though he is sure that life has no meaning at all. His goal is not to save humanity from disease, or to build a scientific empire, or to be successful. He has identified flow as the moving force of his life. The important thing is not to be bored and not to disappoint those close to him. “Whenever I am concentrating, I am happy,” he says. “I am horrified by the very concept of ‘taking it easy,’ of taking a vacation. I get panic-stricken when at a formal dinner I have to sit next to boring people.” But when working on

a scientific problem, or involved in anything challenging, Klein feels “the happiness of a deer running through a meadow.”

When it comes to applying technology, science predictably sells out to the highest bidder. The military ends up controlling the awesome power of radiation; pharmaceutical companies profit from the fruits of chemistry; agribusiness uses biology for its own aims.

None of these entrenched interests has any

responsibility to preserve the fabric of life on the planet, although each one owns the means for destroying it. So we must step in and regain control in the name of th...

When I was five—you know, like where you just open your eyes and you look around and say, “Wow, what an incredible trip this is! What the hell is going on? What am I supposed to be doing here?” I’ve had that question in me all my life. And I love it! It makes every day very fresh. If you can keep that question fresh and remember what that was like when you were a child and you looked

around and you looked at, say, trees, and you forgot that you knew the word tree—you’ve never seen anything like that before. And you haven’t named anything. And you haven’t routinized your perceptions at all. And then every morning you wake up and it’s like the dawn of creation.

American philosopher C. S. Peirce’s distinction between what he called “perception” and “recognition”;

After high school Henderson made two resolutions: to travel around the world to see how everyone else lived and not to do anything she did not enjoy.

stepping out of the money economy and of organizing small-scale, mutually beneficial exchange systems.

People are the wealth of nations, you see. The real wealth of nations are ecosystem resources and intelligent, problem-solving, creative people. That’s the wealth of nations. Not money, it doesn’t have anything to do

with money. Money is worthless; everybody knows money is worthless. I do seminars on money. And I start off by burning a dollar bill, saying, “This is good to light a fire but you know it’s not wealth. It’s a tracking system, to help us track transactions.”

Every culture is really a high-quality program of software, derived from a value system and a set of goals. And every corporate culture and every institution is like that. And so what I like to do is to write the DNA codes for new organizations.

At a certain point, twenty years ago, she went through a burnout phase. She had been too involved, too busy, too anxious. The constant traveling and stress were giving her neck pains. She was coming close to a breaking point. So she realized she’d better “make her own mode of sustainable operation.” This is when she decided to move to Florida and change her lifestyle. But above all else, she reevaluated her priorities and decided that it

wasn’t important to get credit for what she had been doing, it wasn’t important for her to get anywhere. What mattered was to do the best she could and enjoy it while it lasted, without getting all ego-involved with success. This decision has given her so much peace of mind that now she is busier than before without feeling any stress or pain.

There’s a very harmonious continuum of what Zen Buddhists call attachment-detachment. And you should always be in the state

where you’re both. There’s a yin/yang continuum, which we can’t understand in Western logic because we have this either/or. But it’s “both/and” logic, and it says that there’s a constant dance and continuum between attachment and detachment, between the long view, the infinite view, and the incarnated view where we have to learn about limitedness, and finitude, and action.