Five Paradoxical Traits of the Creative Personality
By: Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi
Of all human
activities, creativity comes closest to providing the fulfillment we all hope
to get in our lives. Call it full-blast living.
Creativity is a
central source of meaning in our lives. Most of the things that are
interesting, important, and human are the result of creativity. What makes us
different from apes--our language, values, artistic expression, scientific
understanding, and technology--is the result of individual ingenuity that was
recognized, rewarded, and transmitted through learning.
When we're
creative, we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The
excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes dose to
the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely do. Perhaps
only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy--even when these experiences
remain fleeting and leave no trace--provide a profound sense of being part of
an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that
adds to the richness and complexity of the future.
I have devoted 30
years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more
understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and
new things. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to
almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their
goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different
from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in
most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of
being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude."
Here are the 5
antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with
each other in a dialectical tension.
1. Creative people
have a great deal of physical energy, but they're also often quiet and at rest.
They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of
freshness and enthusiasm. This suggests a superior physical endowment, a
genetic advantage. Yet it is surprising how often individuals who in their
seventies and eighties exude energy and health remember childhoods plagued by
illness. It seems that their energy is internally generated, due more to their
focused minds than to the superiority of their genes.
This does not mean
that creative people are hyperactive, always "on." In fact, they rest
often and sleep a lot. The important thing is that they control their energy;
it's not ruled by the calendar, the dock, an external schedule. When necessary,
they can focus it like a laser beam; when not, creative types immediately
recharge their batteries. They consider the rhythm of activity followed by
idleness or reflection very important for the success of their work. This is
not a bio-rhythm inherited with their genes; it was learned by trial and error
as a strategy for achieving their goals.
One manifestation
of energy is sexuality. Creative people are paradoxical in this respect also.
They seem to have quite a strong dose of eros, or generalized libidinal energy,
which some express directly into sexuality. At the same time, a certain spartan
celibacy is also a part of their makeup; continence tends to accompany superior
achievement. Without eros, it would be difficult to take life on with vigor;
without restraint, the energy could easily dissipate.
2. Creative people
tend to be smart yet naive at the same time. How smart they actually are is
open to question. It is probably true that what psychologists call the "g
factor," meaning a core of general intelligence, is high among people who
make important creative contributions.
The earliest
longitudinal study of superior mental abilities, initiated at Stanford
University by the psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921, shows rather conclusively
that children with very high IQs do well in life, but after a certain point IQ
does not seem to be correlated any longer with superior performance in real
life. Later studies suggest that the cutoff point is around 120; it might be
difficult to do creative work with a lower IQ, but an IQ beyond 120 does not
necessarily imply higher creativity
Another way of
expressing this dialectic is the contrasting poles of wisdom and childishness.
As Howard Gardner remarked in his study of the major creative geniuses of this
century, a certain immaturity, both emotional and mental, can go hand in hand
with deepest insights. Mozart comes immediately to mind.
Furthermore,
people who bring about an acceptable novelty in a domain seem able to use well
two opposite ways of thinking: the convergent and the divergent. Convergent
thinking is measured by IQ tests, and it involves solving well-defined,
rational problems that have one correct answer. Divergent thinking leads to no
agreed-upon solution. It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great
quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective
to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are
the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure and that most
workshops try to enhance.
Yet there remains
the nagging suspicion that at the highest levels of creative achievement the
generation of novelty is not the main issue. People often claimed to have had
only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative
that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and
applying.
Divergent thinking
is not much use without the ability to tell a good idea from a bad one, and
this selectivity involves convergent thinking.
3. Creative people
combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.
There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative
individuals. But this playfulness doesn't go very far without its antithesis, a
quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance.
Nina Holton, whose
playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm
about the importance of hard work: "Tell anybody you're a sculptor and
they'll say, 'Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.' And I tend to say, 'What's so
wonderful?' It's like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they
don't wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the
exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn't fry pancakes, you
see. That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just
sits there. So the next stage is the hard work. Can you really translate it
into a piece of sculpture?"
Jacob Rabinow, an
electrical engineer, uses an interesting mental technique to slow himself down
when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition: "When I
have a job that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I'm in jail. If I'm in
jail, time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut
this, it'll take a week. What else have I got to do? I'm going to be here for
twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. Otherwise you say, 'My God,
it's not working,' and then you make mistakes. My way, you say time is of
absolutely no consequence."
Despite the
carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the
night and persist when less driven individuals would not. Vasari wrote in 1550
that when Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello was working out the laws of visual
perspective, he would walk back and forth all night, muttering to himself:
"What a beautiful thing is this perspective!" while his wife called
him back to bed with no success.
4. Creative people
alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. Great
art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is
different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas. as
fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the
whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and
create a new reality At the same time, this "escape" is not into a
never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it,
sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.
Most of us assume
that artists--musicians, writers, poets, painters--are strong on the fantasy
side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists. This
may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins
to work creatively, all bets are off.
5. Creative people
trend to be both extroverted and introverted. We're usually one or the other,
either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelines and
observing the passing show. In fact, in current psychological research,
extroversion and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits
that differentiate people from each other and that can be reliably measured.
Creative individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits
simultaneously.
