Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

One thing about creative work is that it’s never done.

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.

At first, it seems strange that dancers, rock climbers, and composers all agree that their most enjoyable experiences resemble a process of discovery. But when we think about it some more, it seems perfectly reasonable that at least some people should enjoy discovering and creating above all else.

By random mutations, some individuals must have developed a nervous system in which the discovery of novelty stimulates the pleasure centers in the brain.

It was clear from talking to them that what kept them motivated was the quality of experince they felt when they were involved with the activity. This feeling didn’t come when they were relaxing, when they were taking drugs or alcohol, or when they were consuming the expensive privileges of wealth. 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. The flow experience was described in almost identical terms regardless of the activity that produced it. Athletes, artists, religious mystics, scientists, and ordinary working people described their most rewarding experiences with very similar words.

We might even feel that we have stepped out of the boundaries of the ego and have become part, at least temporarily, of a larger entity. The musician feels at one with the harmony of the cosmos, the athlete moves at one with the team, the reader of a novel lives for a few hours in a different reality. Paradoxically, the self expands through acts of self-forgetfulness.

Oh, I love to solve problems. If it is why our dishwasher does not work, or why the automobile does not work, or how the nerve works, or anything. Now I am working on how the hair cells work, and ah…it is so very interesting. I don’t care what kind of problem it is. If I can solve it, it is fun.

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.

the link between flow and happiness depends on whether the flow-producing activity is complex, whether it leads to new challenges and hence to personal as well as cultural growth.

Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato wrote that the most important task for a society was to teach the young to find pleasure in the right objects.

Neither parents nor schools are very effective at teaching the young to find pleasure in the right things.

Schools generally fail to teach how exciting, how mesmerizingly beautiful science or mathematics can be; they teach the routine of literature or history rather than the adventure.

It is in this sense that creative individuals live exemplary lives.

They show how joyful and interesting complex symb...

They have become pioneers of culture, models for what men and women of the future will be—if there is to be a future at all.

It is by following their example that human consciousness will grow beyond the limitations of the past, the programs that genes and cultures have wired into our brains.

According to some, universities are too committed to their primary function, which is the preservation of knowledge, to be very good at stimulating creativity.

Often sudden availability of money at a certain place attracts artists or scientists to an otherwise barren environment, and that place becomes, at least for a while, one of the centers of the field.

The intellectual atmosphere in which you are determines a lot how you work.

The belief that the physical environment deeply affects our thoughts and feelings is held in many cultures. The Chinese sages chose to write their poetry on dainty island pavilions or craggy gazebos. The Hindu Brahmins retreated to the forest to discover the reality hidden behind illusory appearances. Christian monks were so good at selecting the most beautiful natural spots that in many European countries it is a foregone conclusion that a hill or plain particularly worth seeing must have a convent or monastery built upon it. A similar pattern exists in the United States. The Institute for Advanced Studies in the physical sciences at Princeton and its twin for the behavioral sciences in Palo Alto are situated in especially beautiful settings. Deer tiptoe through the immaculate grounds of the Educational Testing Services headquarters, and the research and development center of any corporation worth its salt will be situated among rolling meadows or within hearing range of thundering surf. The Aspen conferences unfold in the heady, thin air of the Rockies, and the Salk Institute sparkles over the cliffs of La Jolla like a Minoan temple; the idea is that such a setting will stimulate thought and refresh the mind, and thus bring forth novel and creative ideas. Unfortunately, there is no evidence—and probably there never will be—to prove that a delightful setting induces creativity.

highest levels of creativity when walking, driving, or swimming; in other words, when involved in a semiautomatic activity that takes up a certain amount of attention, while leaving some of it free to make connections among ideas below the threshold of conscious intentionality.

Devoting full attention to a problem is not the best recipe for having creative thoughts.

At that moment the novel idea seems like a voice from heaven, the key to our problems. Later on, as we try to fit it into “reality,” that original thought may turn out to have been trivial and naive.

seduced to follow the novel and attractive patterns.

Occasionally a single experience of awe provides the fuel for a lifetime of creative work.

The person who creates a more unique home environment is likely to be more original to begin with. Yet having a home that reinforces one’s individuality cannot but help increase the chances that one will act out one’s uniqueness.

Of course, such idiosyncrasies are not endearing to those they have to deal with, and it is not surprising that creative people are generally considered strange and difficult to get along with.

Again, what matters is not whether one keeps to a strict or to a flexible schedule; what counts is to be master of one’s own time.

Creating a harmonious, meaningful environment in space and time helps you to become personally creative.

Children can show tremendous talent, but they cannot be creative because creativity involves changing a way of doing things, or a way of thinking, and that in turn requires having mastered the old ways of doing or thinking.

But when we look at what is known about the childhoods of eminent creative persons, it is difficult to find any consistent pattern.

The thing that has driven me my whole life, and I have always maintained this, is curiosity. I am incredibly curious about things, little things I see around me. My mother used to think that I was just very inquisitive about other people’s business. But it was not just people, it is things around me. I am a noticer.

they had a tremendous interest, a burning curiosity, concerning at least one aspect of their environment. Whether

Perhaps the best general answer we can give at this point is that each child becomes interested in pursuing whatever activity gives him or her an edge in the competition for resources—the attention and admiration of significant adults being the most important resource involved.

Dissatisfied with superficial knowledge, he decided to understand better the underlying brain mechanisms that might explain deviant behavior, and this led him to the study of neurochemistry.

But Prigogine continued to be inspired by his initial curiosity; he gradually realized that the statistical unpredictability in the behavior of simple molecules might shed light on some of the basic problems of philosophy, such as the question of choice, of responsibility, of freedom. Whereas the physical laws of Newton and Einstein were deterministic and expressed certitudes that applied equally to the past and to the future, Prigogine found in the unstable chemical systems he studied processes that could not be predicted with certainty, and that could not be reversed once they happened. If you can say that the universe is deterministic, a kind of automaton, then how can we hold to the idea of responsibility? All of Western philosophy was dominated by this problem. It seemed to me that we had to choose between a scientific view which was negating humanistic tradition, or a humanistic tradition which was trying to destroy what we learned from science…I was very sensitive to this conflict because I came to science, to hard science, from the human sciences…. But what I learned from thermodynamics confirmed my philosophical point of view. And gave me the energy to continue to look on a deeper interpretation of time and of the laws of nature. So, I would say, it is a kind of feedback between the humanistic and the scientific point of view. The synergy between the humanistic and the scientific quest has served Prigogine well. In addition to illuminating basic thermodynamic proc...

In most cases it is the parents who are responsible for stimulating and directing the child’s interest. Sometimes the only contribution of the parents to their child’s intellectual development is treating him or her like a fellow adult.

Perhaps the most important contribution was in shaping character.

Probably the most important of these was honesty. An astonishing number said that one of the main reasons they had became successful was because they were truthful or honest, and these were virtues they had acquired from a mother’s or a father’s example.

I don’t know whether the word honesty is the best word. It’s the search for truth in your work. You must criticize yourself, you must consider everything that may contradict what you think, and you must never hide an error.

The social scientists stressed that unless their colleagues respected their truthfulness, the credibility of their ideas would be compromised. What the artists and writers meant by honesty was truthfulness to their own feelings and intuitions. And businesspersons, politicians, and social reformers saw the importance of honesty in their relationship with other people, with the institutions they led or belonged to. In none of these fields could you be ultimately successful if you were not truthful, if you distorted the evidence, either consciously or unconsciously, for your own advantage. Most of the respondents felt fortunate to have acquired this quality from the example of parents.

The mere fact of not having a father is not what affects the later life of such children; what counts is the meaning they extract from the event.

Unfortunately, one cannot be exceptional and normal at the same time. Parents often fret and plot to make their talented children more popular without realizing the inherent contradiction. Popularity, or even the strong ties to friends so common in adolescence, tends to make a young person conform to the peer culture.

Instead of being shaped by events, they shaped events to suit their purposes.

According to this view, a creative life is still determined, but what determines it is a will moving across time—the fierce determination to succeed, to make sense of the world, to use whatever means to unravel some of the mysteries of the universe.

These accounts of the relationships of creative individuals are so diverse that they cannot prove any one point. But they can disprove a generally held notion that people who achieve creative eminence are unusually promiscuous and fickle in their human ties. In fact, the opposite seems closer to the truth: These individuals are aware that a lasting, exclusive relationship is the best safeguard of that peace of mind they need in order to focus on their creative pursuit. And if they are lucky, they find a partner who fills that need.

Most creative achievements are part of a long-term commitment to a domain of interest that starts somewhere in childhood, proceeds through schools, and continues in a university, a research laboratory, an artist’s studio, a writer’s garret, or a business corporation.

In contrast, creative individuals usually are forced to invent the jobs they will be doing all through their lives.

if a person wants to have a career in a field that does not exist, he or she must invent it. And that is what people who create new domains do.

All through this time he still felt confused and unsure of himself. The first time he realized that he was becoming a real artist was in the mid-1960s: