Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

Yeah, it’s almost embarrassing. In a way it depends on recognition. Certainly it does.

Those who persevere and succeed must be creative not only in their manipulation of symbols but perhaps even more in shaping a future for themselves, a career that will enable them to survive while continuing to explore the strange universe in which they live.

libri aut liberi

If anything, it seems that the curiosity and commitment that drive these people to break new ground in their respective fields also direct them to confront the social and political problems that the rest of us are all too content to leave alone.

Davies’s account highlights another task that creative individuals begin to turn to after they become successful: to preserve the record of their lives.

One of the problems about being a writer today is that you are expected to be a kind of public show and public figure and people want your opinions about politics and world affairs and so forth, about which you don’t know any more than anybody else, but you have to go along or you’ll get a reputation of being an impossible person, and spiteful things would be said about you.

Institutions are fragile things. And when they are built around a creative person, their survival is more threatened than usual.

But then why call what they are doing work? It may just as easily be called play.

The majority of people in every culture invest their lives in projects that are defined by their society.

there is nothing permanent in history.

idleness was a necessary precursor of a productive burst:

This kind of future orientation was typical. There was very little reminiscing and dwelling on past success in this group; everyone’s energies were focused on tasks still to be accomplished.

Freud’s deceptively simple answer to an inquiry about the secret for a happy life: “Love and work,” he said, and with those two words he may have run out of all the options.

In looking more closely at the answers, another interesting pattern appears. Some of the respondents—about 70 percent of the 70 percent who mentioned work first as source of pride—speak primarily about extrinsic reasons for feeling proud, such as the great contributions they have made, the recognition and prizes they received, their renown among colleagues. The remaining 30 percent emphasize intrinsic reasons—the cultural advance made possible by the accomplishment or the personal rewards of a difficult job well done.

I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.

Of all the writers we interviewed, Hilde Domin most clearly sees literature as an alternative reality, a refuge from the brutish aspects of life.

Honesty is always touching because so few people are honest, no? I don’t make words around it.”

When you write poetry honestly, and when you read it honestly, then you become an individual and build up a defense against becoming programmed.

This is why it becomes so tempting to invest more and more energy in one’s work and forget everyday life—in other words, become a workaholic.

Of course, the men in our sample feel a great deal of responsibility to their wives and children, and the depth of guilt they experience if they feel unable to meet their obligations can be overwhelming. But their sense of responsibility is generally limited to the role of husband and father, whereas the women’s usually embraces a larger web of kinship.

Everything in the Universe Is Interrelated

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

It is not enough to come up with new ideas, new facts, new laws. One also must convince young people that they will be able to make a living and a name for themselves by adopting the new perspective.

A central theme in Salk’s life was the effort to see, and to make others see, that which is hidden.

Since then, of course, all of the genetic engineering and the other things that are done to parts of the virus are continuations of this principle. And so I tend to look for patterns. I recognize patterns that become integrated and synthesized and I see meaning, and it’s the interpretation of meaning, of what I see in these patterns.

So, in a sense, the most momentous creative events are those in which entire new symbolic systems are created.

Commoner found himself increasingly frustrated by the abstraction and fragmentation of academic science.

Most people chalk up such events as the necessary price to pay for progress and do not worry too much. But Commoner, either because his interdisciplinary training made him think in terms of systemic patterns rather than linear processes, or because of a long personal history as an outsider who has been forced to take a critical perspective, felt that these events were not just side effects but part of the main history of our time.

when knowledge within separate domains is pursued without understanding how its applications affect the whole, it unleashes forces that can be enormously destructive.

Like all creative individuals we studied, Commoner tends not to waste energy on problems that cannot be solved; he has a knack for recognizing what is feasible and what is not.

most people in the university work for the admiration of their peers.

Not problems defined by a discipline. Problems defined by the real world.

That’s why I say we are adisciplinary, not interdisciplinary.

how patterns of consumption affect our uses of resources

conceptual moves, her formulation consists in focusing first on one limited aspect of the problem

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.”

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.

It is so much easier to blame the ills of the world on manageable targets such as the Soviet Union, South Africa, religious fundamentalists, or the liberal establishment, instead of considering the possibility that one’s own actions are part of the problem. It is always easier to try to get other people to behave instead of behaving ourselves. Yet when we see the world as a system, it is obvious that it is impossible to change one part of it while leaving the rest unchanged.

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.

Gardner has kept learning and growing. He started out reserved, aloof, and detached. This persona worked well as long as he was an academic researcher, but as the head of a large foundation it was intimidating, so he developed a more friendly demeanor. Similarly, the highly rational approach to problems that is appropriate in academic settings is not as effective when it comes to motivating large groups of people:

If you’re going to move them, you have to reach their motivations, you have to get below the surface of their thinking into what moves them, what affects their enthusiasms, their concerns.

The anthropic principle, which claims that our thoughts and actions actually make the existence of the universe possible, is another.

The world would be a very different place if it were not for creativity. We would still act according to the few clear instructions our genes contain, and anything learned in the course of our lives would be forgotten after our death. There would be no speech, no songs, no tools, no ideas such as love, freedom, or democracy. It would be an existence so mechanical and impoverished that none of us would want any part of it. To achieve the kind of world we consider human, some people had to dare to break the thrall of tradition. Next, they had to find ways of recording those new ideas or procedures that improved on what went on before. Finally, they had to find ways of transmitting the new knowledge to the generations to come. Those who were involved in this process we call creative. What we call culture, or those parts of our selves that we internalized from the social environment, is their creation.

Every new meme—the car, the computer, the contraceptive pill, patriotism or multiculturalism—changes the way we think and act, and has a potentially dark side that often reveals itself only when it is too late, after we have resigned ourselves that the innovation is here to stay.

The power to create has always been linked with the power to destroy.

The more well-off we become, the less reason we have to look for change, and hence the more exposed we are to outside forces. The result of creativity is often its own negation.

Each field expects society to recognize its autonomy, yet each feels in the last analysis accountable only to itself, according to the rules of its own domain.

For billions of years, evolution has proceeded blindly, shaped by random selective forces. We were created by chance.

No matter how gifted a person is, he or she has no chance to achieve anything creative unless the right conditions are provided by the field.

it is possible to single out seven major elements in the social milieu that help make creative contributions possible: training, expectations, resources, recognition, hope, opportunity, and reward.