Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

The basis of ancient Greek philosophy was the injunction to know thyself. The first step toward self-knowledge involves having a clear idea of what you spend your life doing and how you feel while doing it.

Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate.

You may find that, contrary to what you had thought, the few times you were with your spouse during the week you had great conversations and

felt relaxed. That at work, despite stress and hassles, you felt better about yourself than when watching television. Or, conversely, that most of the time when you were at work you felt listless and bored. Why were you so irritated with your children? So impatient with the people you work with? So cheerful when walking down the street?

You may never find out the deep reasons that answer these questions. Perhaps there are no deep reasons. The point is that once you know what your daily life is like and how you experience it, it is easier to begin getting control over it. Perhaps the pattern of feelings shows that you should change your job—or learn to bring more flow to it. Or that you should be outdoors more often, or find ways to do some more interesting things with your children. The important thing is to make sure ...

The only way to stay creative is ...

wear and tear of existence with techniques that organize time, space, and activity to your advantage. It means developing schedules to protect your time and avoid distraction, arranging your surroundings to heighten concentration, cutting out meaningless chores that soak up psychic energy, and devoting the energy thus saved to what you really care about. It i...

INTERNAL TRAITS The next step, after learning to liberate the creative energy of wonder and awe, and then learning to protect it by managing time, space, and activity, is to internalize as many of these supporting structures into your personality as possible. We can think of personality as a habitual way of thinking, feel...

attention. Some traits are more likely than others to result in personal creativity. Is it possible to reshape personality to make it more creative? It is difficult for adults to change personalities. Some of the habits that form personality are based on temperament, or the particular genetic inheritance that makes one person very shy, or aggressive, or distractible. Temperament then interacts with social environment—parents, family, friends, teachers—and some habits are strengthened, others weakened or repressed. By the time we are out of our teens, many of these habits are strongly set, and it is difficult to invest attention—to think, feel, or act—in any other way than what our traits allow. It is difficult, but it is not impossible. Strangely, in our culture we spend billions of dollar...

up were turned to other uses, we could easily solve the material problems of the world. Yet most of that energy is wasted because how we look, or how much we weigh, is more difficult to change because it is more dependent on genetic instructions than are personality traits. And, of course, improving who we are is a great deal more important than improving how we look. To change personality means to learn new patterns of attention. To look at differen...

Develop what you lack.

The point here is that everyone can strengthen the missing end of the polarity. When an extrovert learns to experience the world like an introvert, or vice versa, it is as if he or she discovered a whole missing dimension to the world.

The same happens if a very feminine person learns to act in what we consider a masculine manner. Or

if an objective, analytic person decides to trust intuition for a change. In all of these cases, a new realm of experience opens up in front of us, which means that in effect we ...

Keep exploring what it takes to be the opposite of who you are.

Shift often from openness to closure.

Start with relaxing your mind; look out the window if you can, or let your eyes roam unfocused over the desk and the office. Now try to grasp what are the most important issues about the project. Grasp not only intellectually but also at a gut level, emotionally. What’s really important? What gives you a good feeling about it? What scares you? Or try to get images in your mind, like scenes in a film. Picture the people involved in the project. What are they doing? What are they saying to each other?

Then start jotting down some words on a pad, or on the computer. Any word that comes to mind concerning your feelings about the project or the movie in your mind. Words that describe facts, or events, or persons. When you have a few words down, see if you can string them together into a story—it should not be too difficult. The story you

glimpse at this stage represents your strongest feelings about what is happening on the project. It is at this point that the emphasis might shift from openness to discipline. Begin to choose words carefully, keeping in mind the goals of your department, division, or the corporation as a whole, as well as the interests, tastes, and prejudices of the bosses who will read the report. You want to be effective and convincing. So muster all your skills to write a report that conveys your beliefs as clearly and succinctly as possible. If you manage to be intuitively receptive at the beginning, and rationally critical later on, the report will be considerably more creative than if you relied exclusively on one of these strategies. Shifting from one of these poles to the other is important also in relationships—be...

It is essential to change perspectives when necessary, to compromise, to understand the world and to act differently, because this is what the other person’s reality requires. Yet it is just as important to remain in touch with our own beliefs and perspectives. In a relationship we should be able to shift moment by moment from our own viewpoint to that of the other. We can see depth only because looking with two eyes gives us slightly different perspectives. How much deeper can we see when instead of two eyes w...

Aim for complexity.

Complexity also is a feature of human personality. Some people are integrated but not very differentiated: They hold on to a few ideas, opinions, or feelings. They are predictable. They come across as boring, one-dimensional, rigid. There are others who express many opinions, who are changeable and constantly striving to accomplish something new and different, but who give the impression that they have no center, no continuity, no ruling passion. They have a differentiated consciousness that is not well integrated. Neither

of these ways of being is very satisfying. As we have seen, creative individuals seem to have relatively complex personalities. Neither the centrifugal nor the centripetal force prevails—they are able to keep in balance the contrary tendencies that make some people turn inward until each becomes a hard shell, and others fly outward at random. A creative person is highly individualized. She follows her own star and creates her own career. At the same time, she is deeply steeped in the traditions of the culture; she learns and respects the rules of the domain and is responsive to the opinions of the field—as long as those opinions do not conflict with personal experience. Complexity is the result of the fruitful interaction between these two opposing tendencies.

Creative people are constantly surprised. They don’t assume that they understand what is happening around them, and they don’t assume that anybody else does either.

Problem finding is important in the daily domain because it helps us focus on issues that will affect our experiences but otherwise may go unnoticed. To practice this skill you might try the following suggestions.

Find a way to express what moves you.

Later in life the main reasons for unease may involve your job, your spouse, or the state of the community or of the planet.

Lesser concerns may derive from a temporary threat: the scowl of a boss, the illness of a child, the change in the value of your stock portfolio. Each of these is likely to interfere with the quality of life. But you will not know what ails you unless you can attach a name to it. The first step in solving a problem is to find it, to formulate the vague unease into a concrete problem amenable to solution.

Look at problems from as many viewpoints as possible.

If someone has been promoted ahead of you, you might define the problem as “This happened because the boss dislikes me.” As soon as you do this, reverse the formulation: “It happened because I dislike the boss.” Does this way of looking at the problem make sense? Could it be at least partly true? And then immediately consider

a few more alternatives: “It happened because I haven’t kept up with the changing job as much as I should have” or “Lately I have been too distraught by what happens at home, and it affected my performance.” Which formulation comes closest to representing the problem? Perhaps each is true to a certain extent, and your colleague’s promotion was overdetermined by several unrelated causes.

It is possible that you eventually decide that the fact that you didn’t get promoted is no problem at all. Being passed over may give you more time to spend at home, to learn something new, to devote your psychic energy to some other task. You may come to realize that the problem was your competitiveness, your ambition, the fact that you invested all your energies in advancing on the job rather than doing a good job for its own sake, or living more fully. So th...

Figure out the implications of the problem.

Implement the solution.

original artist is more ready to learn from the emerging work; he or she is alert to the unexpected and is willing to go with a better solution if one presents itself.

Similarly, creative writers often start a story without knowing how it will end; the ending emerges as they follow the logic of the evolving story.

In fact, we could not afford to be creative all the time because we would soon stretch the limits of attention and collapse. Routine results in great savings.

Divergent Thinking Not all thinking involves the solution of problems.

Sometimes we are asked to respond to what other people say, or to produce ideas in response to events, without having a particular problem that needs to be formulated and solved. There are more or less creative ways to pursue these less focused mental tasks. In talking to a friend I can use trite phrases or I can try to say things in a fresh, topical way that more closely represents what I feel at the moment. I can use stock images or try for more vivid ones, based on common experiences.

They try to enhance three dimensions of divergent thinking that are generally held to be important to creativity: fluency, or the knack for coming up with a great number of responses; flexibility, or the tendency to produce ideas that are different from each other; and originality, which refers to the relative rarity of the ideas produced.

Produce as many ideas as possible.

Have as many different ideas as possible.

Whenever someone says something, he asks himself, What if the opposite were true?

Imagining alternatives to what others hold to be true is probably going to be useless 99 percent of the time. But that one other time the practice of flipping to a divergent perspective

might generate an insight that is not only original...

Try to produce unlikely ideas.

But even though personal life can be very complex, it is also limited in scope. Much of what makes life interesting and meaningful belongs to

special domains: Music, cooking, poetry, gardening, bridge, history, religion, baseball, and politics are symbolic systems with their own special rules, and they exist outside any individual’s life. They and thousands of other such systems make up culture, and we become human by seeing the world through the lenses they provide. A person who learns to operate by the rules of one of these domains has a chance to expand enormously the range of his or her creativity.

Too many people assume that most of the world is off-limits to them. Some consider art as being beyond the realm of possibility, others sports or music. Or dancing, science, philosophy—the list of things that are “not for me” can be endless. And it is true that some domains just don’t agree with some people. But generally the problem is that cultural resources are underutilized. Either because of ignorance, l...

be good at many of the things that make...