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 enjoyed this article. It made me smile and appreciate being a creative. Thank you
We are all very complex . After reading this interesting blog and comments, I felt both buoyed and a bit sad. I felt a bit sad because I was reminded that not all people speak the language as “creatives”. Why should we have all the fun and permission to think outside the box? Then again, I felt comforted to see that there are others who have so many ideas that it could, indeed, take several personalities to manifest those ideas.
Is it wrong to think, hope, that all human beings have the sleeping “creative” living within them?
I liked reading the article until I read the comments beneath that categorized a ‘Creative’ as an advertising exec or a marketing person. So is this article about the sensitivity of ad execs? Or artists, are artists and creatives different species. I’m not really familiar with the term ‘creative’.
A dear friend sent this link to me yesterday. I read it and experienced a profound range of feelings. I feel that as humans we have three responsibilities. First, to see the dots. Second, to connect the dots as creatively as we are able. Finally, to do something with those connections. These are the dots I saw. . .
From the time I was a small child, I felt different. It seemed like every direction I looked, I saw the world differently than those around me. I drew all the time. As a young boy, I was sensitive, was not afraid of girls and loved reading. I was okay with being different, but, being different also seemed to mean being lonely. It also seemed to equate to being taunted and made fun of. Reading this post at 54, reminded me a lot of being different in the schoolyard at 10.
The kinds of experience I am describing taught me one thing well, to hide. Hide myself, my feelings, my truths. It has taken most of 54 years to come clean about that. Much of that time I had relationship trouble, and wrestled with self-doubt. Still sometimes wonder if I am crazy. Most of those taunters through grade school, college and eventually life; had a word for me, but, it took forty-five years for me to be willing to apply it to myself. Its a funny word. . . artist.
I prefer the word ‘artist’ to the word ‘Creative’, which has been commoditized like so many things we used to value. There is a connection to be made between Creativity and courage. Brene Brown speaks most elequently about in her TED talk on vulnerability. Are we all ‘creatives’ or ‘artists’, it is possible, I do not know. What I do know is that the voices I saw here that were most willing to be authentic and vulnerable and speak their truth have got it for sure. Perhaps those voices that carried the Rage and Indignation and Fear I read also have it but, are not willing to be vulnerable enough to share it? I realized last night, in the wee hours, that the only other place I have seen Rage expressed in this way was when people used to make fun of gays.
-Randall Richard Rogers
I’ve always been described as complex by everyone else. Ive also always known they were right, for I would say the same. Amazing to see such an accurate description, rather like a mirror image, a most concise portrait. If ever asked to describe myself the first word is always ” creative”.
And gets more difficult from there without sounding really strange. I am all that you described in this article. Totally freeing seeing it so well written. Thank you.
I’ve always been described as complex by everyone else. Ive also always known they were right, for I would say the same. Amazing to see such an accurate description, rather like a mirror image, a most concise portrait. If ever asked to describe myself the first word is always ” creative”, I have always been an artist first, though most people dont understand that, so I stick with creative.
And gets more difficult from there without sounding really strange. I am all that you described in this article. Totally freeing seeing it so well written. Thank you.
I’ve always been described as complex by everyone else. Ive also always known they were right, for I would say the same. Amazing to see such an accurate description, rather like a mirror image, a most concise portrait. If ever asked to describe myself the first word is always ” creative”.
And gets more difficult from there without sounding really strange. I am all that you described in this article. Totally freeing seeing it so well written. Thank you.
so true. but sometimes i’m stumped if it’s really because i am creative or just an unfortunate weirdo.
nice post.
Insightfulpost that explains A Lot! Stark truths to look out for and temper perhaps (re: extreme focus and ignoring people). Please keep writing Matthew. Can you do procrastination next? Or as I like to put it: “research”.
Anticipatingly yours, Narjas