Photo by Sophia.
I’ve been having an insightful shuffle through Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People. Mihaly is a seminal professor of Psychology and Management, and is the Founding Co-Director of the Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont. He writes:
“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. 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.”
Nine out of the ten people in me strongly agree with that statement. As someone paid to be creative, I sometimes feel kaleidoscopic in my views or opinions, and that “multitude” of expressions sometimes confuses those around me. Why does that happen? My thoughts make cohesive sense to me, yet others sometimes feel that I am contradicting myself or switching positions. What is wrong with me?
Mihaly describes 9 contradictory traits that are frequently present in creative people:
01
Most creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but are often quiet and at rest. They can work long hours at great concentration.
02
Most creative people tend to be smart and naive at the same time. “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 creativity workshops try to enhance.”
03
Most creative people combine both playfulness and productivity, which can sometimes mean both responsibility and irresponsibility. “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.” Usually this perseverance occurs at the expense of other responsibilities, or other people.
04
Most creative people alternate fluently between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. In both art and science, movement forward involves a leap of imagination, a leap into a world that is different from our present. Interestingly, this visionary imagination works in conjunction with a hyperawareness of reality. Attention to real details allows a creative person to imagine ways to improve them.
05
Most creative people tend to be both introverted and extroverted. Many people tend toward one extreme or the other, but highly creative people are a balance of both simultaneously.
06
Most creative people are genuinely humble and display a strong sense of pride at the same time.
07
Most creative people are both rebellious and conservative. “It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it’s difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic.”
08
Most creative people are very passionate about their work, but remain extremely objective about it as well. They are able to admit when something they have made is not very good.
09
Most creative people’s openness and sensitivity exposes them to a large amount of suffering and pain, but joy and life in the midst of that suffering. “Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.”
Sometimes what appears to be a contradiction on the surface is actually a harmony in disguise. My problem has been primarily one of communication. I am learning to let people know what I am thinking and why, and explaining myself in a way that helps them understand why I am discussing multiple perspectives instead of just cleanly stating my own. At first it might not make sense, but give me/us long enough, and it will.
I recognised myself in every single point made here; an unusual achievement in my experience. It may not make a great difference to those around me but it made me feel like less of paradox and more of a paradigm.
Graet psot! I now hvae smoehtnig to froawrd to all my co-wroekres so tehy bteetr udnretnsad why and wrehe I’m cmonig from. Bieng a caertvie gniues can be hrad semotmeis, ayawls lviing in the mnomet and not ayalws mikang sesne.
Cool except for the grammar flub at the end.
Un mensaje corto, construido con sabiduría y motivador para seguir intentándolo. Gracias!
Thank you for writing this. It made total sense out of a lot of things.
People who are saying “Hey, I’m like that! Thats GREAT! I finally have the answer to why I have been having problems!” probably aren’t who the author is referring to. 🙂 If you are in this deep, you would doubt everything, all the time, and most especially your personal ‘specialness’. Maybe you do have unique qualities.. I mean, everyone does.
Everyone has creativity, and everyone can relate to some of this, if not all of it, depending on where they are right now in life.
The issue here is not creativity really.. they are talking about Creatives.. aka Crazy People Who Do Amazing Things because they can’t stop themselves from doing them. Because they have a drive that makes the word persistence look like “lack of interest’. Creatives are obsessive.. REALLY obsessive. By any ‘normal’ standard, they would be considered unhealthy. They are relentlessly self critical, they kill their children often (ideas that dont pan out, but that they love), they suffer for their work, truly. They do it to themselves, because the only way to get there is to love love love what they are doing at that moment, and simultaneously being razor sharp critical when stepping back to look at what they have done.
Creatives can look like manic depressives, and maybe sometimes are. They are truly different, and in ways that are fundamental. They are skewed so far to the left, they can’t even see the right side. They have to create left handed coping mechanisms to deal with daily life, and often feel worthless because they are doing it.. thinking they are fundamentally flawed in some basic way.. that they are so smart and creative, but how in the heck can they not understand how to talk to people instinctively? Why am I so stupid I can’t bring myself to just pay my bills on time? That they have to use these mechanisms to interact with anyone and anything feels like a cheat, wrong, and somehow defeating.
But on they go, because they can’t do anything else.
Successful creatives.. those who have what the author calls “Flow”, are the fortunate few who have aligned their passion with culture and are being rewarded for it. They are those few who are passionate in a way that aligns with the modern world somehow, and their circumstance allows it. Or maybe they are independently wealthy, and were able to engage their passions indiscriminately. They have all been lucky somehow, having had opportunities that met with their abilities in abundance.
So, they are not good to look at for inspiration. It would be like looking at Warren Buffet to determine your financial moves. Useless, because although he is wildly successful in his field, he is an outlier and his success was as much from chance as it was from skill. Yes, you had to be relentless and creative to do what he did, but I would bet there are more than a few of those sorts of people out there who didn’t have his luck, but have his skill and determination and are not anywhere near his level of monetary success.
By and large, being a Creative is not fun, most of the time. I honestly don’t know why so many people wish for it. From my experience, they look like they have a much tougher life than most.
I used to be like that. I am very fortunate to have found my husband, he really spent a lot of time pushing me out of the self defeating spiral. Granted I still fall into it from time to time but it’s easier knowing he is there. Anyway, just wanted to say that yeah, you’re right, I think most creatives do have a pretty tough life, cause I certainly did! On the other hand, I think it’s these traits that make it rough for creatives, we are VERY misunderstood people and that can cause a lot of trouble. I have to admit, I’ve never fit in, and I cherish the friends I do have now because they certainly must care for me to put up with my “unusual” behavior.
You are ,obviously,full of it. Most creative people get depressed because the people around them make them feel they aren’t normal and have to fit in their world. Why is that? If it weren’t for people being creative there would not be anything electronic,no buildings, nothing. So,before you just spout off something you obviously can’t comprehend think,a lot,about every creative thing that has been made in our past andpresent .What the future will hold? Maybe, nothing if the world keeps supressing our creativity.
Excellent post! I could identify with almost all of these. I feel a little more legitimized in some of my quirks now.
Your post was liked by a friend on Facebook and it struck such a chord that I had to visit and read more closely. Have to agree with every word and acknowledge that these views would apply to me by my own assessment of myself and per other’s comments about me. As someone designing focusing on STEM, I’d also take this one step further and say that you’ve described a very mid-brain person — also very familiar territory. So I also need to recognize the creativity of your blog title font …. Thanks, Matthew, for this blog post.