356Ten things highly creative people do differently:
1. Imaginative play
2. Passion
3. Daydreaming
4. Solitude
5. Intuition
6. Openness to experience
7. Mindfulness
8. Sensitivity
9. Turning adversity into advantage
10. Thinking differently
TOC
357Picasso said of his own creative process, "A painting is not thought out and settled in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one's thoughts change. And when it's finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it."
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358The history of scientific thinking about creativity has been defined by polarization, starting with a popular 1926 theory of the creative process that set the stage for decade's worth of debate among psychologists.
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359The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. Bill Watterson.
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360While IQ and academic aptitude were relevant (to a moderate degree), they did not explain the particular spark of the creative mind.
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361...a key consistency among creative people: These people seemed to become more intimate with themselves--they dared to look deep inside, even at the dark and confusing parts of themselves.
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362This ability to adapt to changing circumstances with fluidity and flexibility is reflected in three main super-factors of personality, that are highly correlated with creativity: Plasticity, convergence, and divergence. Details follow.
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363Topic: Default mode network
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364Creative thought doesn't emerge solely from the imagination network. A different brain network--the "executive attention" network, which helps us direct our attention--is also crucial here. Execute control processes support creative thinking by helping us deliberately plan future actions, remember to use various creative tactics, keep track of which strategies we've already tried, and reject the most obvious ideas.
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365People who set aside a special time and place in their lives for creative thinking and work--for instance, waking up with the sunrise each morning to write in the quiet of the early hours or meditating before a painting session--also tend to score higher on measures of creative potential. In contrast, those who are more motivated to develop a final product tend to score lower in creative potential and intrinsic motivation and higher in stress and extrinsic (reward0-driven) motivation. Those who derive enjoyment from the act of creativity and feel in control of their creative process tend to show greater creativity than those who are focused exclusively on the outcome of their work.
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366As with happiness, it seems that the more you strive for creativity, the less likely you are to achieve it. Creativity can't be bottled and sold, or tapped into at will--it works in seemingly mysterious and paradoxical ways, and rarely at our own convenience.
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367To build these skills, we must encourage risk taking and originality, and give people the autonomy to decide how they learn and create. We must offer them the time they need for personal reflection, daydreaming, and inner exploration. We must make tastes more meaningful and relevant to their personal goals and help people find and develop their unique purpose and identity. To foster creativity, it is important to build people's confidence and competence to learn new information and deal with adversity, make tasks conducive to flow by engaging them in the appropriate level of challenges, and help them develop supportive, positive social relationships.
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368Story: Shigeru Miyamoto and Super Mario Brothers
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369Like Miyamoto, many eminent creators in the arts and sciences engaged in imaginative play as children and maintain that youthful sense of play in their work as adults.
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370Studying the lives of promising young entrepreneurs, innovators, and scientists, psychologist Larisa Shavinina found that great business innovators like Richard Branson, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates exhibited entrepreneurial behaviors in childhood.
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371For children, play becomes a way of experimenting with the meanings of objects by using their innate curiosity to turn the unfamiliar into something familiar.
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372It's important that children grow up in a home environment in which adult interactions support their natural desire to play in this way. Research has shown that pretend play is more common among children whose parents talk to them often, read or tell bedtime stories, and explain things about nature or social issues to them. Research has also found that in schools, encouraging pretend games either in the curriculum or at recess can enhance imaginations and curiosity.
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373Book: Brian Boyd, On the Origins of Stories
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374You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. Richard Lingard (attributed in text to Plato)
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375Children's free time has been steadily declining since 1955. See endnote.
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376Re: War on play and stopping reduction in play time. See endnote 26
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377At Swiss Waldkindergartens, or forest kindergartens, children between the ages of 4 and 7 spend the entirety of their school days playing outside. Come rain or shine, the kids run around in the woods, play games together, build structures with found objects, and explore their natural surroundings. The goals and expectations for the children are fairly minimal--learning how to write their names on the ground for instance--and math and reading are not taught until first grade. Et seq.
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378Passion has no expiration date. Footnote 9
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379Talent is associated with a "rage to master"--an intense and sustained drive for excellence--in the individual's chosen activity or medium, according to Wimmer.
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380While working they focused like a laser beam, entering a psychological state of flow, which is characterised by complete absorption, concentration, joy, and subjective loss of time.
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381Psychologist Robert Vallerand and his colleagues make a distinction between harmonious and obsessive passion, which are most importantly distinguished by how a passion has been internalized in the person's identity. Et seq.
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382In a nutshell, harmoniously passionate people are impelled to create, whereas obsessively passionate people are compelled to create.
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383The shade of one's passion colors the entire journey of creative achievement, from start to finish. Endnote 29.
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384There are three defining features of inspiration:
Evocation
Transcendent Awakening
A striving to transmit, express, or actualize a new idea, insight, or vision.
Endnote 33
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385Inspiration favors the prepared mind.
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386Edison's famous inspirational equation suggests that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. As most creative people are well award, this is a gross oversimplification. For one, we've seen that inspiration and effort feed off of each other in a dynamic interplay; indeed, they need each other for creativity to flourish. Writers who are more inspired, for example, actually do more work. Inspiration during writing is positively related to the productivity and efficiency of the final product. Inspired people are more likely, not less likely, to do the hard work to achieve their goals.
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387If you want to become significantly better at anything, you have to fall in love with the process of doing it. You have to fall in love with building the identity of someone who does the work.
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388Oettinger employs a technique called Mental Contacting (?) which involves imagining the desired goal, and then visualizing the obstacles (both the internal and external) that might realistically get in the way of your ability to achieve that goal.
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389Falling in love with a dream is frequently the starting point. Then, people who fulfill their creative dreams over the long haul balance optimism about the future with realistic strategies for getting closer to their goals, inspiration with hard work, and dreaming while doing (?)
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390Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens. Carl Jung
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391Creative thinkers know, despite what their parents and teachers might have told them, that daydreaming is hardly a waste of time. But unfortunately, many students learn to suppress their natural instincts to dream and imagine--instead they're taught to fit into a standardized mold and to learn by the book, in a way that may not feel natural and that very well may suppress their innate desire to create. But as two prominent psychologists recently noted, "not all minds who wander are lost"--in fact, the mind's wandering is vital to imagination and creative thought.
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392From the beginning of [Jerome Singer's] research, he found evidence that daydreaming, imagination, and fantasy are related to creativity, storytelling, and even the ability to delay gratification.
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393In a review of the latest science of daydreaming, Scott and colleague Rebecca McMillen noted that mind wandering offers very personal rewards, including creative incubation, self-awareness, future-planning, reflection on the meaning of one's experiences, and even compassion.
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394Creative work requires a connection to one's inner monologue, and it is from this stream of desires, emotions, and ways of making sense of the world that new ideas and novel perspectives arise.
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395TS Eliot was ahead of his time in recognizing the role of mind wandering in creative incubation, which he referred to as "idea maturation"(?) in his 1933 work The Use of Poetry and the use of Criticism. Eliot argued that creativity required an "incubation period" during which the mind could unconsciously process preexisting ideas--and for this reason, he believed that illnesses forcing the artist to take to bed and avoid the usual distractions of their daily routines could be surprisingly beneficial for creative work.
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396People who are active dreamers tend to feel that they are the creators and protagonists of their own lives--or as Nietzsche said, they make life a work of art.
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397In 1913, Jung came up with a creative visualization technique called "active imagination" which looks to daydreams to harness the wisdom of the unconscious mind to help solve the problems of the conscious mind. Jung claimed that the free visualizations and mind wandering involved in the technique helped him heal from the emotional problems he was undergoing at the time by giving him new insights on his situation. He referred to the communication between the unconscious and the conscious mind that occurs during this process as the "transcendent function"--transcendent because it makes it possible for the mind to shift in and out of consciousness.
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398Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence--whether much that is glorious--whether all that is profound--does nots spring from disease of thought--from moods of minds exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their grey visions they often glimpse of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of a great secret. Edgar Allan Poe
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399Research conducted by Scott in collaboration with the world's largest showerhead supplier, Hansgrohe, found that 72 percent of people around the globe reported experiencing new ideas in the shower.
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400How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live! Methinks that moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow. Henry David Thoreau
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401Successful innovators are often adept in harnessing both of these important mental states as their creative process calls for them. A connection to our inner selves and our stream of consciousness is undeniably what makes us creative. We all have the potential to become artists precisely because we dream. We should allow ourselves to balance the focused mind with the wandering mind, and skilled daydreamers do this naturally. Research has found that those whose daydreams are most positive and most specific also score high in mindfulness.
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402It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. Ralph Waldo Emerson
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403The creative act is a process that often unfolds in solitary reflection, and indeed, the portrait of any artist is often one of solitude. The trope of the reclusive writer and the introverted artist stems from a significant truth of creativity. In order to make art, we must find the space to become intimate with our own minds.
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404...The act of creating requires us to find time to ourselves and slow down enough to hear our own ideas--both the good and the bad ones. Some degree of isolation is required in order to do creative work, because the artist is constantly working through ideas or projects in his mind--and these ideas need space to be developed. The creative person's mind is "shifting his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it" Asimov wrote in an essay, first published in 2014. The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarasing. For every new good idea you have, there are 100, 10,000 foolish ones, which you naturally do not come to display.
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405The capacity for solitude may be a sign of emotional maturity. See also endnote 16.
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406One can be instructed in society. One is inspired only in solitude.
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407Work alone. "Most engineers and inventors I've met are like me--they're shy and they live in their heads. They're almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone-best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention's design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. Steve Wozniak
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408The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. Albert Einstein.
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409In the realm of scientific observation, luck is granted only to those who are prepared. Louis Pasteur, quoted by Albert Hofmann
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410Fahrenheit 451 author Ray Bradbury even insisted that a writer ought to avoid developing his rational thinking skills, for fear that they'd get in the way of his intuition.
College wasn't a suitable plan for writers, Bradbury said, because learning to overintellectualize things threatened to crush to intuitive mind with reason and analysis. The writer himself kept a sign above his typewriter for 25 years that read "Don't Think." As Bradbury explained in a 1974 interview, "The intellect is a great danger to creativity--because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth--who you are, what you are, what you want to be."
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411The ancient Romans believed that one cannot be a genius--rather, one HAD a genius, a sort of fickle, disembodied creative spirit that could come and go at will.
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412We now know that intuition is a form of thinking--but it's a different mode of cognition than the one we use for conscious, effortful deliberation. Intuition arises from unconscious, or spontaneous information-processing systems and it plays an important role in how we think, reason, create, and behave socially.
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413Dual-process themes(?) of human cognition:
Type 1 processes: Outside conscious awareness
Type 2 processes: more effortful and controlled.
Nonconscious processes may indeed be faster and structurally more sophisticated than our conscious thinking systems.
SEE ALSO Kahneman, Thinking Fast & Slow
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414Nonconscious processes may indeed be faster and structurally more sophisticated than our conscious thinking systems.
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415Implicit learning, a critical type 1 process, is frequently a catalyst for moments of creative inspiration and insight.
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416Spontaneous processes play the largest role during the generative phase of creative thinking, when we're coming up with new ideas. Then, during the exploratory phase of creative cognition, we tap into the conscious, rational mind to play around with the ideas we've generated, and uncover their uses.
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417Poincare wrote "Just as I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, though nothing in my former thoughts seemed to have prepared me for it...I made no verification...but I felt absolute certainty at once.
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418The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution. Albert Einstein.
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419Reference to Sarnoff Mednick's Associate Theory of Creativity
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420Reference: The upside to your dark side, Todd Kashdan
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421Anders Ericsson 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.
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422The three major forms of cognitive engagement
Intellectual Engagement [Sciences]
Affective Engagement [Artistic Creativity]
Aesthetic Engagement(?)[Artistic Creativity]
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423Looking at creativity across the arts and sciences, Scott and colleagues found that openness to experience was more highly correlated with total creative achievement than other factors that had been traditionally associated with creativity, like IQ, divergent thinking, and other personality traits. Together, these findings suggest that the drive for exploration, in its many forms, may be the single most important personal factor predicting creative achievement.
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424Another important cognitive process associated with creativity is latent inhibition--a filtering mechanism in the brain that determines whether we respond to an object in our environment with wonder and novelty (known as "latent inhibition") no matter how many times we've seen it before and mentally tagged it as being irrelevant to our current goals and needs. Eminent creative achievers at Harvard were found to be seven times more likely to have a reduced latent inhibition--meaning they had a harder time filtering out seemingly irrelevant information from others. But here's the thing: The information did turn out to be relevant!
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425Scott found that those with a reduced latent inhibition had a greater faith in their intuitions, and their intuition was in fact correct.
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426The downside of this quality is that it might make creative people more prone to distraction than others. Darya Zabelina found that people with a "leaky" sensory filter--meaning that their brains didn't filter out as much irrelevant information from the environment--tend to be more creative than those with stronger sensory gating. Zabelina observed that highly creative people are more sensitive to noises in their environment--a clock ticking, a conversation in the distance--than less creative people. "Sensory information is leaking in--the brain is processing more information that it is in a typical person."
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427A Swedish study found that dopamine systems in healty, highly creative adults are similar in certain ways to those found in the brains of people with schizophrenia. In both cases, there was a lower density of dopamine D2 receptors in the thalamus--a brain area associated with sensory perception and motor function, which also plays an important role in creative thought, suggesting one possible link between creativity and psychopathology.
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428Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box.
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429Schizotypy--personality continuum ranging from normal levels of openness to experience and imagination to extreme manifestations of magical thinking, apophenia [seeing patterns that don't exist], and psychosis.
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430Schizotypy is also related to the flow states of consciousness and absorption.
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431The researchers link their findings to latent inhibition, arguing that a leaky sensory filter is a common thread running through schizotypy, openness to experience, flow, and absorption.
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432If mental illness is defined as extreme difficulty functioning in the real world, then the complete inability to distinguish imagination from reality is surely going to increase the likelihood of mental illness. However, if one has an overactive imagination but also has the ability to distinguish reality from imagination and can harness these capacities to flourish in daily life, then that is far from mental illness.
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433One study conducted on people with no history of neurological or psychiatric illness found that the most creative thinkers were those who were able to simultaneously use their executive attention resources to engage in an effortful memory task while continuing to keep brain activity from their imagination network active.
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434In a 1997 study, psychologist Dean Keith Simonton found that periods of imagination have preceded periods of extraordinary creative achievement in various cultural contexts.
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435The greatest innovations can occur when the wisdom of one discipline is brought into another, seemingly unrelated one. Indeed, Simonton found that the most successful opera composers mix genres in their opera compositions and also create nonoperatic compositions. The composers seem to avoid overtraining by engaging in cross-training.
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436Creative observation is a skill that requires a balance of paying attention to the world around us and tuning in to our own inner landscape--a balance of mindfulness, a focused, nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment; and mind wandering.
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437Creativity requires a balance of extended focus with more inner-focused, free imagination network processes like future thinking, reflection, introspection, and memory consolidation. Although focused attention can be a gateway to creative thinking, optimal creativity likely results from both mindful and mind-wandering states of mind and, importantly, in the ability to switch easily from one mode of engagement to the other as needed.
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438Scheeeter(?) showed that people who performed an undemanding task (during which their mind was presumably wandering) performed better on a subsequent test of creative thinking than those who performed a demanding task that required more focused attention.
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439Jackson embodies a personality contradiction seen in many performers--they are both incredibly "out there" and open, and also highly sensitive. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified openness and sensitivity as oppositional personality elements that not only coexist in creative performers, but form the core of their personalities. This paradox helps explain how performers can be bold and charismatic on the one hand and emotionally fragile on the other.
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440If we think of creativity as "connecting the dots" in some way, then sensitive people experience a world in which there are both more dots and more opportunities for connections.
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441Research led by psychologist Elena Aron has identified sensitivity as a fundamental dimension of human personality. Aron and others found that highly sensitive people tend to process more señory input and to pick up on more of what's going on in both their internal and external environment.
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442Boyce and Ellis adopted the Swedish metaphor of "Dandelion and Orchid children," referring to dandelion children as those who survive and thrive in nearly every environment, just like dandelion flowers prosper regardless of soil, sun, drought, or rain. Orchid children, on the other hand, are those whose survival and flourishing depend heavily on their environment.
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443If you're tapped into your creative side, there's a good chance that you'll see yourself in at least one of Dabrowski's five types of overexcitability. Psychomotor, sensual, intellectual, imaginational, or emotional. Et seq.
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444An artist must be nourished by his passions and by his despairs. Francis Bacon.
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445Hero's Journey
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446Post-ecstatic growth.
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447By definition, any work that is considered Avant-garde is initially rejected, until it earns critical approval, becomes mainstream, and is in turn eventually uprooted by something new.
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448Creativity is the greatest rebellion in existent. Osho
As Asimov declared in his famous 1959 essay on creativity and idea generation, the world in general disapproves of creativity.
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449Creativity Bias
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450When it comes to creativity, we tend to celebrate the victor. When a creative work earns the approval of cultural gatekeepers and is integrated into the mainstream, THEN we applaud the ingenuity of its creator.
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451In fact, most children are natural nonconformists. Unfortunately, either at home or at school (or both) many children grow up in environments that devalue independent and creative thought and instead reward imitation, memorization, and rote leaning. The suppression of free thinking and imagination often starts in the educational system.
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452In fact, teachers have been found to display a clear preference for students who show less creativity. Research has shown that creative students tend not to be favored by teachers. Judgments of a teacher's favorite student were negatively correlated with creativity, and judgments of a teacher's least favorite student were positively correlated with creativity. While teachers said that they liked creative students, they (somewhat bafflingly) defined creativity using terms like well-behaved and conforming. When given adjectives more typically used to describe creative people, the teachers said that they dislike these kinds of students.
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453Book reference. Colin Wilson, The outsider.
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454Systemic analysis of the career trajectory of people labeled geniuses show that their output tends to be highly uneven, with a few good ideas mixed in with many more false starts. While consistency may be the key to expertise, the secret to creative greatness appears to be doing things differently--even when that was failing.
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455According to Dean Keith Simonton, true innovation requires that creators engage in a sort of Darwinian process in which they try out many possibilities without fully knowing what their eventual public reception will be. Especially during the idea generation stage, trial and error is essential for innovation. Simonton's theory does not mean that creators are working completely in the dark; ideas are not generated in complete ignorance of their ultimate value to society, instead, new ideas just aren't guaranteed to be fruitful.
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456First, creative geniuses simultaneously immerse themselves in many divers ideas and projects. Second, and perhaps more important, they also have extraordinary
productivity. Creators create. Again and again and again. In fact, Simonton has found that the quality of creative ideas is a positive function of quantity. The more ideas creators generate (regardless of the quality of each ideal) the greater the chances they would produce an eventual masterpiece.
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457Thomas Edison--One of the greatest inventors of all time--had roughly a 1/3 rejection rate for all the patents he filed.
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458Gestalt Psychology: Functional Fixedness--a cognitive bias that limits the way we use an object to what it was originally intended for and keeps us from seeing new usages.
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459Perception, and therefore imagination, is limited by the categories that we've learned from our past experiences. For this reason, the nonconformist may seek out changes in the environment as a way to sharpen their perception. To break free from traditional ways of thinking and labeling, one must "bombard the brain with new experiences," which forces a re-evaluation of existing categories and a creation of new connections.
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460In a study of more than 3000 entrepreneurs and business executives, business professors Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen found that noninnovators don't make as much of an effort to think differently as innovators do. The study found that innovators spend 50% more time trying to think differently and that those who consistently tried to think in new ways and make new connections did succeed in thinking differently--all it required was the effort.
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