573It is easier to enhance creativity by changing conditions in the environment than by trying to make people think more creatively.
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574...creativity results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate the inventor.
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575Introduction of MEMES
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576Creativity...is a process by which a symbolic domain in the culture is changed[...]for example, memes must be learned before they can be changed.
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577To achieve creativity in an existing domain, there must be surplus attention available.
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578Each of us is born with two sets of contradictory instructions--a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instructions for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk--the curiosity that leads to creativity belongs to this set. We need both of these programs. But whereas the first tendency requires little behavior the second can wilt if it is not cultivated. If too few opportunities for curiosity are available, if too many obstacles are placed in the way of risk and exploration, the motivation to engage in creative behavior is easily extinguished.
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579Occasionally the refusal was due to the belief that studying creativity was a waste of time.
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580The rate of acceptance varied among disciplines. More than half of the natural scientists, no matter how old or busy they were, agreed to participate. Artists, writers, and musicians on the other hand, tended to ignore our letters or declined, less than a third of those approached accepted. It would be interesting to find out the causes of this differential attrition.
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581Pessimism is a short view of life.
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582But after several years of intensive listening and reading, I have come to the conclusion that the reigning stereotype of the tortured genius is to a large extend a myth created by Romantic ideology and supported by evidence from isolated and--one hopes--atypical historical periods. In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their creative work than to the personal sufferings caused y the unhealthful conditions of a Russian society nearing collapse.
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583Therefore, creativity doesn't happen inside people's heads, but in the interaction between a person's thoughts and a sociocultural context.
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584Who is right: The individual who believes in his or her own creativity, or the social milieu that denies it. Et seq.
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585So the first question I ask of creativity is not WHAT it is, but WHERE is it?
Interrelations of a system made up of three main parts
Domain: Symbolic rules and procedures
Field: Individuals who are gatekeepers
Person: Person
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586So the definition that follows from this perspective is: creativity is any art, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one. And the definition of a creative person is: Someone whose thoughts or actions change a domain or establish a new domain. It is important to remember however that a domain cannot be changed without the explicit or implicit consent of a field responsible for it.
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587Raphael was creative in the 16th and in the 19th centuries, but not in between or afterward.
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588Perhaps the most important implications of the systems model is that the level of creativity in a given place at a given time does not depend only on the amount of individual creativity. It depends just as much on how well suited the respective domains and fields are to the recognition and diffusion of novel ideas.
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589Today many American corporations spend a great deal of money and time trying ton increase the originality of their employees, hoping thereby to get a competitive edge in the marketplace. But such programs make no difference unless management also learns to recognize the valuable ideas among the many novel ones, and then finds ways of implementing them.
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590Despite the multiplicity of domains, there are some common reasons for pursuing them for their own sake. Nuclear physicists, microbiology, poetry and musical composition share few symbols and rules, yet the calling for those different domains is often astonishingly similar. To bring order to experience, to do something that allows humankind to go beyond its present powers are very common themes,
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591These numbers suggest that the competition between memes, or units of cultural information, is as fierce as the competition between the units of chemical information we call genes. In order to survive, cultures must eliminate most of the new ideas their members produce. Cultures are conservative, and for good reason. No culture could assimilate all the novelty people produce without dissolving into chaos.
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592It is possible to wreck a domain either by starving it of novelty or by admitting too much inassimilated novelty into it.
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593Luck is without doubt an important ingredient in creative discoveries. A very successful artist, whose work sells well and hangs in the best museums and who can afford a large estate with horses and a swimming pool, once admitted ruefully that there could be at least a thousand artists as good as he is and yet they are unknown and their work is unappreciated. The one difference between him and the rest, he said, was that years back he met at a party a man with whom he had a few drinks. They hit it off and became friends. The man eventually became a successful art dealer who did his best to push his friend's works. Et seq.
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594A person who wants to make a creative contribution not only must work within a creative system but also must reproduce that system within his or her mind.
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595And then you must have the ability to get rid of the trash which you think of. Et seq.
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596There's one other thing you do when you invent. And that is what I call the existence proof. This means that you have to assure that it can be done. If you don't assure it, you won't even try.
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597Robert Galvin says that creativity consists of anticipation and commitment. Anticipation involves having a vision of something that will become important in the future before anybody else has it; commitment is the belief that keeps one waking to realize the vision despite doubt and discouragement.
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598Zum sehen geboren / Zum schauen bestellt
Born to see/my task is to watch
Goethe
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599Csikszentmihalyi references Wallas
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600Impara l'arte, e mettila da parte
Learn the craft, and then set it aside.
Old Italian saying
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601...People who keep themselves busy all the time are generally not creative. So I am not ashamed of being idle. Freeman Dyson
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602Intentionality does not work in the subconscious
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603A new solution to quantum electrodynamics doesn't occur to a person unfamiliar with this branch of physics, no matter how long he or she sleeps.
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604After an insight occurs, one must check it out to see if the connections genuinely(?) make sense. The painter steps back from the canvas to see whether the composition works, the poet rereads the verse with a more controlled eye, (?), the scientist sits down to do the calculations or run the experiments. Most lovely insights never go any farther, because under the cold light of reason fatal flaws appear. But if everything checks out, the slow and often (?) work of elaboration begins.
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605Relay system with positive reinforcement, et seq.
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606By random mutations, some individuals must have developed a nervous system in which the discovery of novelty stimulates the pleasure centers in the brain.
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607What is enjoyment
1. There are clear goals every step of the way
2. There is immediate feedback to one's actions
3. There is a balance between challenge and skills
4. Action and awareness (?) are merged
5. Distractions are excluded from consciousness.
6. Self-consciousness disappears.
8. The sense of time becomes distorted
9. The activity becomes autotelic(?)
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608Paradoxically, the self expands through acts of self-forgetfulness
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609Many creative scientists say that the difference between them and their less creative peers is the ability to separate bad ideas from good ones, so that they don't waste much time exploring blind alleys.
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610Mental models of the universe
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611Forgetting time, self, and surroundings
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612Schools generally fail to teach how exciting, how mesmerizingly beautiful science or mathematics can be; they teach the value of literature or history rather than the adventure.
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613Information is not distributed evenly in space but is clumped in different geographical nodes.
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614Finally, access to the field is not evenly distributed in space. The centers that facilitate the realization of novel ideas are not necessarily the ones where the information is stored or where the stimulation is greatest.
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615Children can show tremendous talent, but they cannot be creative because creativity involves changing a way of doing things, or a way of thinking, and that in turn requires having mastered the old ways of doing or thinking.
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616If being a prodigy is not a requirement for late creativity, a more than usually keen curiosity about one's surroundings appears to be. Practically every individual who has made a novel contribution to a domain remembers feeling awe about the mysteries of life and has rich anecdotes to tell about effects to solve them
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617An astonishing number said that one of the main reasons they had become successful was because they were truthful or honest, and these were virtues they had acquired from a mother's or father's example.
cf. honesty of action.
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618Until very recently, creative persons tended to learn their craft by apprenticing to a master, or by teaching themselves the element of a domain through trial and error. Higher education was open to very few, and until two centuries ago, it was mostly reserved for scholars and clergymen [...] But nowadays it is almost unthinkable for a person to change a domain without first having learned it in college. Even poets and painters are expected to get advanced degrees.
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619Focus and Drive
Curiosity and drive are in many ways the yin and yang that need to be combined in order to achieve something new.
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620Careers of creative individuals
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621The [writers] usually start a workday with a word, a phrase, or an image, rather than a concept or a planned composition. The work evolves on its own rather than the author's intentions, but it is always monitored by the critical eye of the writer. What is so difficult about this process is that they must keep the mind focused on two contradictory goals: not to miss the message whispered by the unconscious and at the same time force it into a suitable form.
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622The loss of community and increasing psychological isolation are in part due to the enormous advances in mobility, brought about by the discovery of self-propelling vehicles such as trains and cars.
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623There is a basic law of human ingenuity that we try very hard to ignore. The greater the power to change the environment, the greater the chances of producing undesirable as well as desirable results.
cf. Jordon Peterson
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624The greatest art, East or West, was not produced when the artists set the agenda, but when patrons insisted on certain standards that benefitted them. Patrons wanted primarily to be admired by the public, so the art they demanded had to appeal to and impress the entire community. In this sense, medieval and renaissance art, commissioned by popes and princes, was in reality more democratic than it has become since the art world gained the power to separate itself from the rest of society--as a field with its own peculiar tastes and criteria of selection.
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625Yet it is important to keep in mind that most breakthroughs are based on linking information that usually is not thought of as related. Integration, synthesis both across and within domains, is the norm rather than the exception.
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626No 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.
7: Training, expectations, resources, recognition, hope, opportunity, and reward.
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627Yet too many resources also can have a deadening (?) effect on creativity. Et seq.
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6284 sets of obstacles
Exhausted by too many demands
We get easily distracted/can't protect energy we have
Laziness/lacking discipline
Not knowing what to do with our energy.
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629In terms of using mental energy creatively, perhaps the most fundamental difference between people consists in how much uncommitted attention they have left over to deal with novelty
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630The first step toward a more creative life is the cultivation of curiosity and interest, that is, the allocation of attention to things for their own sake.
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631But narrowing attention to a single domain does not mean limiting the novelty one is able to process; on the contrary, complex domains like poetry, history, physics, or politics reveal (?) constantly expanding perspectives to those who venture to explore them.
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632How to be creative.
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633It should be realized that one way of controlling is to relinquish control.
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634Cars have become important extensions of the self, for many people, the car is more like a castle than the house is. It's in the car that they feel most free, most secure, most powerful. It is where they can think with the greatest concentration, solve problems most efficiently, and come up with the most creative ideas.
That is why it is so difficult to get people to use public transportation instead of their cars.
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