The biggest name in creativity–and the research thereof–would have this to say about how best to spin this yarn: Take a hike. Take a shower. Stare idly at the Alps, or if that doesn’t fit your upcoming travel plans, try a glance at, say, Lake Michigan’s sandy shore. Then, bleed a little. Sweat a lot. And, baby, let it flow.
Mr. Big Name, and we mean this figuratively and literally–you’ll see that we exaggerate not–is known to all the world, has been since birth, as–get ready–Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (try this E-Z pronunciation guide: first name, two syllables, ME-high; last name, five, CHICK-sent-me-high-ee). Or, just plain Professor Mike.
Anyway, you’ll find the moniker maximus slapped on the cover of his newest book, “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention,” coming any day now to a bookstore near you. It’s from HarperCollins, and it’ll set you back $27.50 and the couple of days it takes to plow through its 456 pages.
It’s not about lightning striking or shouts of “Eureka!” in the night. It’s about the long haul in the long lives of nearly 100 creative minds, the “thunderous `Aha!’ built up over a lifetime, made up of a chorus of little `Eurekas,’ ” writes Csikszentmihalyi, a professor of human development at the University of Chicago since 1971. “It is the extraordinary people whose voices fill these pages who tell the story of the unfolding of creativity.”
And it is Csikszentmihalyi, himself steeped in stories of creativity through all time, who turns out a tome that shatters the romantic notion of the creative kook. These are not asocial souls, locked up in their garrets, spinning out earth-shattering ideas or inventions.
On the contrary, the author found out, these are, except for their intellectual output, folks who live fairly ordinary everyday lives. You’ll get a peek into, say, writer Richard Stern’s rigid daily routine that dictates when to drink coffee in the morning and whether to drink wine in the evening. Or personal computer pioneer Alan Kay’s semi-serious claim that the firm he worked for lost tens of millions of dollars by refusing to install a $14,000 shower in a corner of his office, as most of his new ideas came while showering.
And you’ll pick up a few prescriptions for living the creative life, such as the one emphasizing something called mental meandering. That is, taking a hike, boarding a bus for a cross-country trek or just plain staring into space. (And your boss thought you were slackin’ off.) A nice view out the window won’t hurt, either, anything that loosens up the sensory flow. Thus, a few months in the Italian Alps, Csikszentmihalyi writes, is sure to stir your best stuff.
There’s especially good news for anyone over 29 years, 364 days. You ain’t dried up yet. Old findings in the field of creativity would have had us believing that the third decade of life was the peak time for the ol’ light bulb flashing over the noggin. After that, the dismal psychologists told us, it was all downhill.
Not so. Every creative interviewee in this book has huffed and puffed and extinguished at least 60 candles on his or her last birthday cake, a deliberate choice of the author to weed out the “flash in the pan.” And so we are regaled with these gerontological gold mines: Giuseppe Verdi wrote his opera “Falstaff” at 79; Benjamin Franklin invented the bifocal lens at 78; Frank Lloyd Wright completed his work on the Guggenheim Museum at 91; and Michelangelo was painting the frescoes in the Pauline chapel of the Vatican in his 70s.
But what’s most striking about this work, and sure to set Csikszentmihalyi up for more than a little tomato-tossing, is the definition he sets forth for creativity.
It is, he says, “a novel idea or product which is socially valued and carried to fruition.” It’s not good enough to say someone’s creative simply because he or she spun out a new idea in the relative vacuum of his or her own little haven, a lightning bolt of genius that no one ends up noticing or incorporating into the culture.
“Once you put that in, that it must be valued,” says the professor, “you realize you need somebody else to say it’s valued, and it can’t be the person himself or everybody would say they were creative.”
Say, for instance, you’re in art school, and everyone thinks you’re hot. Then you graduate, and suddenly the kid who had been sitting next to you, drooling over your shoulder, doesn’t count. Now, you’ve got to cut it with the art critics, the dealers and ultimately the beautiful people forking over big bucks to hang your splattered canvas at home.
It boils down to that, says Csikszentmihalyi. If your ideas or innovations aren’t soaked up by the world outside your den, then, well, you might be original, and you might be personally creative, but you don’t make it into the club called Creativity-with a capital C.
That there will be critics of this externally-driven definition is no surprise to Csikszentmihalyi.
Heck, even his graduate students at the U. of C. badger him with “Yeah, but’s” in the seminar he’s teaching this quarter.
And, says Vera John-Steiner, a psycholinguist at the University of New Mexico, “within experimental psychology, this is not considered (pure, quantifiable) science. There is a remaining tension.” But, for the most part, she says, the rest of psychology has come around to see the wisdom in Csikszentmihalyi’s interdisciplinary approach. And John-Steiner, too, as one who has studied the creative mind, stands behind it.
The critical distinction is planted in pragmatism. You can’t just foster solitary creativity, the prodigy toiling alone in his garden of creativity. You’ve got to work on two fronts–the creative mind itself and the culture that must assume a stronger role in promoting and recognizing the birth of new ideas or products. If there’s not a world weighing and welcoming those novelties, the mind that sparks them will likely lose its momentum. Or worse.
This approach to creativity, taking into account socio-cultural, psychological and historical perspectives, is imperative for a society that can’t afford to lose its creative edge, says Csikszentmihalyi, 61, a Hungarian immigrant built like an ox, who probably wouldn’t topple, no matter the critic.
“We need more respect in the system for the recognition of novelty, to give more chances to break new ground,” he says, citing the Westinghouse prize for innovations in science and technology among teenagers as one that’s energizing “every reasonably good high school in the country.”
He goes on: “We need better ways for firms and institutions to accommodate novelty. These days there are many corporations, from Walt Disney to Motorola, who train middle managers to be more creative, but then (those managers) go back to their jobs and are not recognized by upper management.” (To that, Margot Brown, Motorola spokesman, replies: “It’s not a Disney or a Motorola problem; it exists in corporate America. The very fact that we go to the lengths we do–to teach creativity to our middle managers–is both an acknowledgement of the problem and of the possibilities.”)
But, Csikszentmihalyi says, “From capital investment to educational changes, there are lots of ways,” to make ours a culture that incubates, hatches and holds high whole flocks of creative minds.
And when Csikszentmihalyi speaks, he is heard.
“He’s one of the most important social and behavioral scientists at work anywhere in the world today,” says Harvard University’s Howard Gardner, the cognitive psychologist who himself broke ground several years ago with his theory of multiple intelligences, positing that there are seven types of intelligence, not just one.
Of Csikszentmihalyi’s new work, Gardner says, “In this area of his life, this is his magnum opus. He has many areas of his life, I’ll let him choose which is his ultimate magnum opus.”
One other area of Csikszentmihalyi’s life with which you might be familiar was put to paper in 1990 in a best-selling book titled, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” also from HarperCollins. No fewer than 240,000 copies of “Flow,” published in 13 languages, are floating about the bookshelves of the buying public.
So, in Chinese, Japanese or Hungarian, you can read his findings on what really, truly makes us Homo sapiens happy (and it’s not what you think). It’s that intoxicating rush that comes whenever we are engaged in a mental or physical challenge that so wholly absorbs us we lose track of time and anything other than the task at hand. Thus, the flow.
The dedicated professor has been studying creativity for 30 years. He has been intrigued by it since, as a boy of 10, he was bewildered by his relatives who so deluded themselves to the ugliness of the World War upon them that they argued against his mother’s fleeing Hungary for Italy. “The mosquitoes are terrible this time of year in Venice,” they said. Csikszentmihalyi and his mother caught the last train out of Budapest.
And little Mihaly became forever fascinated with the workings of the human mind, a mind that could so completely shut out what it didn’t want to know, a mind that also could create the hell that would seize so many souls.
He got the bright idea for his big work on big thinkers and their bright ideas seven years ago. Reclining in the Colorado Rockies that summer, he got a call from Larry Cremin, then president of the Spencer Foundation, a Chicago-based philanthropy in the business of boosting education research worldwide.
Cremin had quite a deal: Explore whatever it is that most intrigues you. And reap nearly $400,000 in grants over five years. Csikszentmihalyi had his three ideas in the mail before you could say, well, Csikszentmihalyi.
One, the study of creativity in later life, hooked Cremin. The checks, he told the professor, would be in the mail.
So, Csikszentmihalyi leaped into the raging waters of his research. He drew up a wish list to end all wish lists: the best, the brightest, the most fertile minds on the planet.
Two hundred seventy five in all: Mortimer Adler, philosopher. Edward Asner, actor. Nadine Gordimer, author. Eugene McCarthy, ex–senator. Linus Pauling, chemist. Oscar Peterson, musician. Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of polio vaccine. Musician Ravi Shankar. Dr. Benjamin Spock, parenting guru. Some of the many.
He wanted to pick their brains. Find out about their proudest moments, their highest hurdles. How they worked. How and by whom they were influenced or inspired. And, never mind their ages, their goals for the future.
“Some of the big fish escaped the net,” he lamented one recent lunch hour, between bites of tuna-on-whole-wheat. “Saul Bellow. Georg Solti. Norman Mailer” are three who wriggled away.
Everyone on Csikszentmihalyi’s list received an interview request; of those, about a third gave the nod, a third said no and a quarter never were heard from.
The declines, sometimes, were keepers.
The secretary to Saul Bellow wrote: “Mr. Bellow informed me that he remains creative in the second half of life, at least in part, because he does not allow himself to be the object of other people’s `studies.’ In any event, he’s gone for the summer.”
The photographer Richard Avedon scribbled: “Sorry–too little time left!”
Management expert and onetime teacher of Asian art history Peter Drucker sent this reply: “. . . (M)y dear Professor Csikszentmihalyi, I am afraid I have to disappoint you. I could not possibly answer your questions. I am told I am creative-I don’t know what that means . . . I just keep on plodding.
“. . . I hope you will not think me presumptuous or rude if I say that one of the secrets of productivity (in which I believe, whereas I do not believe in creativity) is to have a VERY BIG waste paper basket to take care of all invitations such as yours–productivity in my experience consists of NOT doing anything that helps the work of other people but to spend all one’s time on the work the Good Lord has fitted one to do and to do well.”
