Last updated: March 29, 1999
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How to Become More Creative in your Personal Life
From Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

There has been much interest in how to become more creative on a personal level. I have recommended Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Finding Flow for this information. This book recommends methods for increasing your feelings of autonomy and involvement in everyday life. One of Csikszentmihalyi's earlier books, Creativity, offers suggestions more specifically oriented towards increasing creativity. Below, I will summarize the recommendations from Creativity.

First, a word or two about the basis that Csikszentmihalyi has for making his recommendations. He has two principal sources of data:

• In Creativity, he uses approximately 100 case studies of contemporary, mostly Western creative individuals who were also interviewed extensively as part of the study. Obviously, the subjects were alive at the time of the study, but they were approximately seventy years old at the time, so that there was some basis for judging the continuing significance of their work.While the subjects were chosen for their creativity, not their fame, there are some well-known people on this list.
• In Finding Flow, he uses a statistical analysis of a large bank of questionnaires. The people who completed the questionnaires were selected as much as possible as being typical citizens, not selected on the basis of reputation or creativity. These people were given pagers. At randomly-chosen times, these people were beeped. At such times, they completed an extensive questionnaire about what they were doing at the time, and how they felt about their activities and themselves. This has been a continuing study over a period of years or perhaps even decades, and has been augmented by experimenters in other countries, studying both general and specific groups.

Now, I want to quote the closing paragraph of Creativity, primarily for the last sentence. "As you learn to operate within a domain, your life is certainly going to become more creative. But it should be repeated that this does not guarantee creativity with a capital c. You can be personall as creative as you please, but if the domain and the field fail to cooperate -- as they almost always do -- your efforts will not be recordded in the history books. Learning to sculpt will do wonders for the quality of your life, but don't expect critics to get ecstatic, or collectors to beat a path to your door. The competition among new memes is fierce; few survive by being noticed, selected, and added to the culture. Luck has a huge hand in deciding whose c is capitalized. But if you don't learn to be creative in your personal life, the chances of contributing to the culture drop even closer to zero. And what really matters, in the last account, is not whether your name has been attached to a recognized discovery, but whether you have lived a full and creative life.

OK, so here is Csikszentmihalyi's list from Creativity, of the path towards becoming more creative in your personal life. Bear in mind that these are the main headings, without the lengthy discussions attached to each. The whole list is the last thirty pages of the book.

• "Acquire Creative Energy. Free yourself from being overly self-protective, overly selfish, or concerned about money or fame. The basic necessities of life must also be assured for you.
  • Acquire curiosity and interest
    • Try to be surprised by something every day
    • Try to surprise at least one person every day
    • Write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others. Review these writings to look for patterns.
    • When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it.
  • Cultivate Flow in everyday life ["flow" for Csikszentmihalyi is the state of being highly attentive to what is happening around you, usually being focussed on something in particular. Atheletes sometimes describe this as being "in the zone", for example when you are a baseball player, when you see the seams of the baseball being pitched at you.]
    • Wake up each morning with a specific goal to look forward to.
    • If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable.
    • To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity. [Subdivide what you enjoy into special cases and other parts.]
  • Habits of strength
    • Take charge of your schedule
    • Make time for reflection and relaxation
    • Shape your space
    • Find out what you love and what you hate about life
    • Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate
  • Internal Traits
    • Develop what you lack
    • Shift often from openness to closure
    • Aim for complexity
• "The application of creativity energy
  • Problem finding
    • [Find] a way to express what moves you
    • Look at problems from as many viewpoints as possible
    • Figure out the implications of the problem
    • Implement the solution
  • Divergent thinking
    • Produce as many ideas as possible
    • Have as many different ideas as possible
    • Try to produce unlikely ideas
  • [Choose] a special domain. [Explore many domains, but to be creative you will probably have to specialize.]