Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

Around my late thirties I came to recognize a very powerful dilemma for the American people. They have an ethos of equality and some words that describe that ethos, and yet people vary tremendously in ability and capacity to reach certain standards. And so the subtitle of the book [Excellence] was “Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too?” It seemed to me that we had to have a conception of excellence that left room for the person who was excellent as a plumber. Excellence at various levels. If you start off and say only these people at the very top are excellent, then you invite a carelessness for all the rest of the society. You’re saying it doesn’t matter, because they can’t be excellent anyway, they’re just slobs. That’s a terrible way to run the society. Everybody ought to feel that whatever his or her calling, they can be excellent. They can be an excellent mechanic, they can be an excellent kindergarten teacher, as well as being an excellent neurosurgeon or whatever.