Last updated: 3/31/02
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How to Become More Creative in your Personal Life
(1) From Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,
(2) From "How to Grow Up Creatively Gifted" by E. Paul Torrance
(3) David Bowen's combination of Gardner and 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

1. Summarize the recommendations from Creativity
2. Give E. Paul Torrance's list of "How to Become Creatively Gifted" on Pp 68 & 69 of "The Nature of Creativity ed Robert J. Sternberg, Cambridge University Press 1988
3. Give my own combination of some recommendations about how you can get to love a field, from Howard Gardner and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

1. 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 personally 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 recorded 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.]"

2. "How to Grow Up Creatively Gifted" by E. Paul Torrance

1. Don't be afraid to "fall in love with" something and pursue it with intensity. (You will do best what you like to do most.)
2. Know, understand, take pride in, practice, develop, use, exploit, and enjoy your greatest strengths.
3. Learn to free yourself from the expectations of others and to walk away from the games they try to impose on you.
4. Free yourself to "play your own game" in such a way as to make good use of your gifts.
5. Find a great teacher or mentor who will help you.
6. Don't waste a lot of expensive, unproductive energy trying to be well-rounded. (Don't try to do everything; do what you can do well and what you love.)
7. Learn the skills of interdependence. (Learn to depend upon one another, giving freely of your greatest strengths and most intense loves.)

3. David Bowen: How do you get to love something - a field or domain?

1. Interest and commitment
2. Success and acceptance - a child earning serious by a knowledgeable adult
3. Turn-ons or instant gratification (my own guess)
   1. "Aha" or "Eureka." Gardner writes about ten years as being the time between major creative advances by the same person. This does not mean ten years between "aha"s; there are many smaller "aha"s along the way.
   2. Epiphany or arriving at a comprehensive overview
   3. "Flow" or, in sports, "The zone". Csikszentmihaly, Flow and Finding Flow
4. Can you love something too much? - Csikszentmihaly's 96 subjects in Creativity Vs Gardner's 7 subjects in Creating Minds.
5. A domain and a time for you to be creative? It is unusual to be even somewhat creative in more than one domain. Why? Gardner attributes this to "multiple intelligences," a concept which he originated, that the are a relatively small number of separate areas of intelligence (or, in Gardner's word, "intelligences") and any one person is strong in at most1 or two of these (for more, see the section on "Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences" on the web page "How Revolutionary Were the People in Creating Minds". But I like to put this together with the fact that all creative people, including Gardner's very creative subjects, are eventually passed over by the field, within their own lifetimes. Why, having dramatically changed the domain and the field, can't these people continue to lead? Perhaps it is because they have a way of thinking and/or feeling that is needed for a particular advance, and once that advance has happened, they do not have the way of thinking or feeling that is needed for the next advance. Of course, they may just become "rusty" or arrogant or exhausted. But sticking with my first idea on this, that these people are suited to a particular advance, maybe our intelligences are narrower than the nine areas of Gardner and we are much more specialized - not only to one of the nine intelligences, but to a particular problem within that area. One personal lesson that I take from all of this is that, if you think you have a contribution to make, and you wait or hang back or be cautious, that opportunity will not wait around for you. Take that chance!
6. Another interesting point about Gardner's book is his finding that all of his highly creative subjects had two sources of support at the time of their major breakthroughs - someone within the field to provide intellectual support, and another source of personal support (sometimes these two were in the same person). What is going on here? Why not just do your thing by yourself? Here is my guess: There are several cases in which the creative person wrote about being afraid at the time of their breakthrough, afraid of the large step they were thinking of taking. Johannes Kepler wrote about this, and James Darwin also. I don't find this in Creating Minds, but maybe Gardner was not looking at this. I think it makes sense - you are about to challenge the field, and you could just fall flat on your face. So being nervous or afraid would be natural. So that would be why the two types of support were universal in Gardner's subjects. As Cher said about having a great body, "If it was easy, you could buy it in a bottle."