Creativity Flow and Psych

Creativity Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

The author seems to be describing what it takes to be successful, not necessarily good.  In science you do need the equipment and funding in order to research, but in art there could be a great artist that doesn’t produce much work or get any recognition.  This doesn’t make them less great, just less known and less lucrative in their endeavors. 54-55 

“You cannot assume the mantle of creativity just by assuming a certain personality style.” (56)

By describing creative people as people filled with complexities (57).  Most average people end up developing one distinct realm of personalities whereas creative people embody many different categories. “The ability to move from one extreme to another as the occasion requires” (57)

1. Creative individuals have a great deal of physical energy, but they are also often quiet and at rest. 
2. Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naïve at the same time.  How smart they actually are is open to question.
3. The related combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.
4. Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other.
1. The whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real, and create a new reality.
2. It is an evolutionary process, where current reality becomes rapidly obsolete, and one must be on the alert for the shape of things to come (65)
5. Creative people seem to harbor opposite tendencies on the continuum between extroversion and introversion.
1. Up to a point you welcome being interrupted because it is only by interacting with other people that you get anything interesting done.  It is essentially a communal enterprise.
6. Creative individuals are also remarkably humble and proud at the same time.
7. Creative individuals to a certain extent escape this rigid gender role stereotyping.  When tests of masculinity/feminity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.
8. Generally, creative people are thought to be rebellious and independent.  Yet it is impossible to be creative without having first internalized a domain of culture.  And a person must believe in the importance of such a domain in order to learn its rules; hence, he or she must be to a certain extent a traditionalist.
9. Most creative persons are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.
10. Finally, the openness and sensitivity of creative individuals often exposes them to suffering and pain yet also a great deal of enjoyment.