Creativity (16 page)
Authors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
T
HE
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ONDITIONS FOR
F
LOW IN
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REATIVITY
Creativity involves the production of novelty. The process of discovery involved in creating something new appears to be one of the most enjoyable activities any human can be involved in. In fact, it is easy to recognize the conditions of flow in the accounts of our respondents, as they describe how it feels to do the sort of things they do.
The Clarity of Goals
In certain conditions, the creative process begins with the goal of solving a problem that is given to the person by someone else or is suggested by the state of the art in the domain. Moreover, anything that does not work as well as it could can provide a clear goal to the inventor. This is what Frank Offner describes:
Oh, I love to solve problems. If it is why our dishwasher does not work, or why the automobile does not work, or how the nerve works, or anything. Now I am working on how the hair cells work, and ah…it is so very interesting. I don’t care what kind of problem it is. If I can solve it, it is fun. It is really a lot of fun to solve problems, isn’t it? Isn’t that what is interesting in life? Especially if people say one thing and you show that they have been wrong for twenty years and you can solve it in five minutes.
Or the goal may emerge as a problem in the domain—a gap in the network of knowledge, a contradiction among the findings, a puzzling result. Here the goal is to restore harmony in the system by reconciling the apparent disparities. The physicist Viktor Weisskopf describes the enjoyment involved in this process:
Well, in science, obviously, if I understand something, you know, a new discovery, it need not be my own, a discovery of somebody else, where I say, “Aha, now I understand natural processes that I did not understand before,” that is the joy of insight.
In music it is the insight into what the piece means. What it tells you, what the composer wanted to tell you, the beauty or expression or religious feelings, things like that.
For artists the goal of the activity is not so easily found. In fact, the more creative the problem, the less clear it is what needs to be done. Discovered problems, the ones that generate the greatest changes in the domain, are also the most difficult to enjoy working on because of their elusiveness. In such cases, the creative person somehow must develop an unconscious mechanism that tells him or her what to do. The poet György Faludy usually does not start writing until a “voice” tells him, often in the middle of the night, “György, it’s time to start writing.” He adds ruefully: “
That voice has my number, but I
don’t have his.” The ancients called that voice the Muse. Or it can be a vision, as it is for Robertson Davies:
You are always writing, and you’re always fantasizing. What I find very much in my own work, though I don’t know if it applies to the work of other people, is that an idea for a novel seizes me and will not let me go until I have given it careful consideration. And that is not to say that a complete story appears in my head, but very often what appears is a picture which seems somehow significant and which must be considered. Now, a great many years ago, I found that whenever I stopped thinking about something in particular, a picture kept coming up in my head. It was a picture of a street,
and I knew what street it was; it was the street on which I was born in a small Ontario village. And there were two boys playing in the snow, and one threw a snowball at the other.
Readers of Davies’s oeuvre will recognize in this picture the opening scene of
Fifth Business
, the first volume of his famous Deptford trilogy. In many ways, the writing of the book consisted in finding out what that image, charged with emotion and nostalgia, portended. The goal was to find out what were the consequences of throwing that snowball. Probably if Davies had told himself rationally that this is what the book would be about he would have thought it a trivial goal, not worth all the time and effort. But fortunately the goal presented itself as a vision, a mysterious call that he f
elt impelled to follow. Very often this is how the Muse communicates—through a glass darkly, as it were. It is a splendid arrangement, for if the artist were not tricked by the mystery, he or she might never venture into the unexplored territory.
Knowing How Well One Is Doing
Games are designed so that we can keep score and know how well we are doing. Most jobs give some sort of information about performance: The salesman can add up daily sales, the assembly worker can count pieces produced. If all else fails, the boss may tell you how well you are doing. But the artist, the scientist, and the inventor are moving on very different timelines. How do they know, day in and day out, whether they are wasting their time or actually accomplishing something?
This is indeed a difficult problem. Many artists give up because it is just too excruciating to wait until critics or galleries take notice and pass judgment on their canvases. Research scientists drift away from pure science because they cannot tolerate the long cycles of insecurity before reviewers and editors evaluate their results. So how can they experience flow without external information about their performance?
The solution seems to be that those individuals who keep doing creative work are those who succeed in internalizing the field’s criteria of judgment to the extent that they can give feedback to themselves, without having to wait to hear from experts. The poet who keeps enjoying writing verse is the one who knows how good each line is, how appropriate is each word chosen. The scientist who enjoys her work is the one who has a sense of what a good experiment is like and who appreciates it when a test is well run or when a report is clearly written. Then she need not wait until Octobe
r to see if her name is on the Nobel Prize list.
Many 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. Everyone has both bad and good ideas all the time, they say. But some people can’t tell them apart until it’s too late, until they have already invested a great deal of time in the unprofitable hunches. This is another form of the ability to give oneself feedback: to know in advance what is feasible and what will work, without having to suffer the consequences of bad judgment. At Linus P
auling’s sixtieth birthday celebration, a student asked him, “Dr. Pauling, how does one go about having good ideas?” He replied, “You have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.” To do that, of course, one has to have a very well internalized picture of what the domain is like and what constitutes “good” and “bad” ideas according to the field.
Balancing Challenges and Skills
The pursuit of a creative problem is rarely easy. In fact, in order to be enjoyable it should be hard, and of course so it is, almost by definition. It is never easy to break new ground, to venture into the unknown. When one starts out, the difficulties may seem almost overwhelming. Here is how Freeman Dyson describes this aspect of the process:
Well, I think that you have to describe it as sort of a struggle. I have to always force myself to write, and also to work harder at a science problem. You have to put blood, sweat, and tears into it first. And it is awfully hard to get started. I think most writers have this problem. I mean, it’s part of the business. You may work very hard for a week producing the first page. That’s really blood, tears, and sweat, and there is nothing else to describe it. You have to force yourself to push and push and push with the hope that something good will come out. And you have to go through that p
rocess before it really starts to flow easily, and without that preliminary forcing and pushing probably nothing would ever happen. So, I think that is what distinguishes it from just having a good time—you have a good time once you are really in the flowing phase, but you have to overcome some sort of barrier to get there. That is why I say it is unconscious, because you don’t know actually whether you are really getting anywhere or not. In that phase it just seems to be unadulterated torture.
The creative person is not immune to the conflict between the two programs we all carry in our genetic inheritance. As Dyson knows, even the most creative persons must overcome the barrier of entropy. It is impossible to accomplish something that is truly new and worthwhile without struggling with it. It isn’t just in competitive sports that the saying “no pain, no gain” applies. The less well defined the problem, the more ambitious it is, and the harder it is for the creative person to get a handle on it. Barry Commoner points out:
I enjoy doing things that other people won’t do. Because what are they? They’re usually things that are difficult and important—and that people shy away from. I have a general approach to thinking of the way in which issues develop. I’m interested in the origins of problems. And so I have a pretty good idea of where things are going, and what’s important and what isn’t important. And I try very hard to be at the cutting edge of problems. Very often that puts me so far out in front that people are upset about it, but that’s OK.
To be able to cope with such problems, the creative person has to have a great many personality traits that are conducive to discovery
and hard work, including the ability to internalize the rules of the domain and the judgments of the field. Commoner also gives a hint of another skill that creative individuals develop: a personal approach, an internal model that allows them to put the problem into a manageable context. The same idea is expressed by Linus Pauling:
I think one thing that I do is to bring ideas from one field of knowledge into another field of knowledge. And, I’ve often said I don’t think that I’m smarter than a lot of other scientists, but perhaps I think more about the problems. I have a picture, a sort of general theory of the universe in my mind that I’ve built up over the decades. If I read an article, or hear someone give a seminar talk, or in some other way get some piece of information about science that I hadn’t had before, I ask myself, “How does that fit into my picture of the universe?” and if it doesn’t fit, I as
k, “Why doesn’t it fit in?”
The strategies creative individuals develop are not always successful. They take risks, and what is risk without an occasional failure? When the challenges become too great for the person to cope with, a sense of frustration rather than joy creeps in—at least for a while. Our interview with John Reed took place a few years after Citicorp was bloodied in the market; its shares lost a great deal of their value almost overnight. Reed blamed himself for not foreseeing the contingency that caused the loss. As a result, at the time he felt that some of the fun had gone out of his job. W
hat used to be spontaneous turned into hard work; he had to force himself to be more of an accountant than a builder and leader; and the new skill he had to acquire required unfamiliar discipline.
The Merging of Action and Awareness
But when the challenges are just right, the creative process begins to hum, and all other concerns are temporarily shelved in the deep involvement with the activity. Here is Dyson again, describing how it feels after the initial struggle is over:
I always find that when I am writing, it is really the fingers that are doing it and not the brain. Somehow the writing takes charge. And the same thing happens of course with equations. You don’t
really think of what you are going to write. You just scribble, the equations lead the way, and what you are doing is sort of architectural. You have to have a design in view, in which you design a chapter, or a proof of a theorem, as the case may be. Then you have to put it together out of words or out of symbols as the case may be, but if you don’t have a clear architecture in mind then the thing won’t end up being any good. The trick is to start from both ends and to meet in the middle, which is essentially like building a bridge. That seems to me the way that I think, anyhow. So the ori
ginal design is somehow accidental and you don’t know how it comes into your head. It just sort of happens, maybe when you are shaving or taking a walk, then you sit down and actually work through and that is when the hard work is done. And that is very largely a matter of putting pieces together, finding out what works and what doesn’t.
Barry Commoner uses similar terms to describe the almost automatic quality of the flow experience when writing, expressing the feeling of merging action and awareness through the image of the flowing ink and the flowing of ideas:
I write with this pen [he removes a fountain pen from his breast pocket and holds it up]. And it’s very clear to me that my ability to think and write at the same time depends on the flow of ink. The thing I enjoy most is the flow of my own ideas and getting them down on paper. I will not write with a ballpoint pen, because it doesn’t really flow. That’s why I use a fountain pen. And only a fountain pen that really works very well.
The novelist Richard Stern gives a classic description of how it feels to become lost in the process of writing and to feel the rightness of one’s actions in terms of what is happening in that special world of one’s own creation:
At your best you’re not thinking, How am I making my way ahead in the world by doing this? No. You’re concentrated on your characters, on the situation, on the form of the book, on the words which are coming out. And their shape. You’ve lost…you’re not an ego at that point. It’s not competitive. It’s…I would use the
word
pure
. You know that this is right. I don’t mean that it works in the world, or that it adds up, but that it’s right in this place. In this story. It belongs to it. It’s right for that person, that character.
Avoiding Distractions
Many of the peculiarities attributed to creative persons are really just ways to protect the focus of concentration so that they may lose themselves in the creative process. Distractions interrupt flow, and it may take hours to recover the peace of mind one needs to get on with the work. The more ambitious the task, the longer it takes to lose oneself in it, and the easier it is to get distracted. A scientist working on an arcane problem must detach himself from the “normal” world and roam with his mind in a world of disembodied symbols that now you see, now you don’t. Any intrusion from
the solid world of everyday reality can make that world disappear in an instant. It is for this reason that Freeman Dyson “hides” in the library when he’s writing and why Marcel Proust used to seclude himself in a windowless room lined with cork when he sat down to write
À la recherche du temps perdu
. Even the slightest noise could break the thread of his teetering imagination.