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Anthony’s NotesA personal field guide
From the notebook

Creativity

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Book Cover

Highlights

  • It is easier to enhance creativity by changing conditions in the environment than by trying to make people think more creatively. And a genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of a sudden insight, a lightbulb flashing on in the dark, but comes after years of hard work. (Location 88)
  • To achieve creativity in an existing domain, there must be surplus attention available. (Location 214)
  • It also seems true that centers of creativity tend to be at the intersection of (Location 217)
  • different cultures, where beliefs, lifestyles, and knowledge mingle and allow individuals to see new combinations of ideas with greater ease. (Location 217)
  • Another consequence of limited attention is that creative individuals are often considered odd—or even arrogant, selfish, and ruthless. (Location 236)
  • Yet it is practically impossible to learn a domain deeply enough to make a change in it without dedicating all of one’s attention to it and thereby appearing to be arrogant, selfish, and ruthless to those who believe they have a right to the creative person’s attention. (Location 242)
  • creativity does not happen inside people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a sociocultural context. It is a systemic rather than an individual phenomenon. (Location 439)
  • Creativity occurs when a person, using the symbols of a given domain such as music, engineering, business, or mathematics, has a new idea or sees a new pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the appropriate field for inclusion into the relevant domain. (Location 522)
  • Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one. And the definition of a creative person is: someone whose thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain. It is important to remember, however, that a domain cannot be changed without the explicit or implicit consent of a field responsible for it. (Location 528)
  • Creative persons differ from one another in a variety of ways, but in one respect they are unanimous: They all love what they do. (Location 1886)
  • perhaps the most fundamental difference between people consists in how much uncommitted attention they have left over to deal with novelty. (Location 5840)
  • Another limitation on the free use of mental energy is an excessive investment of attention in selfish goals. (Location 5851)
  • And it is equally difficult when a person is rich and famous but devotes all of his or her energies to getting more money and fame. To free up creative energy we need to let go and divert some attention from the pursuit of the predictable goals that genes and memes have programmed in our minds and use it instead to explore the world around us on its own terms. (Location 5856)
  • Try to be surprised by something every day. (Location 5873)
  • Try to surprise at least one person every day. (Location 5878)
  • Write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others. (Location 5883)
  • When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it. (Location 5890)
  • Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to. (Location 5910)
  • If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable. (Location 5920)
  • To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity. (Location 5937)
  • Make time for reflection and relaxation. (Location 5992)
  • Shape your space. (Location 6011)
  • Find out what you like and what you hate about life. (Location 6054)
  • Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate. (Location 6066)
  • Develop what you lack. (Location 6106)
  • Shift often from openness to closure. (Location 6123)
  • Aim for complexity. (Location 6147)
  • Creative people are constantly surprised. They don’t assume that they understand what is happening around them, and they don’t assume that anybody else does either. They question the obvious—not out of contrariness but because they see the shortcomings of accepted explanations before the rest of us do. They sense problems before they are generally perceived and are able to define what they are. (Location 6172)
  • Find a way to express what moves you. (Location 6188)
  • Look at problems from as many viewpoints as possible. (Location 6199)
  • Figure out the implications of the problem. (Location 6226)
  • Implement the solution. (Location 6235)
  • Produce as many ideas as possible. (Location 6259)
  • Have as many different ideas as possible. (Location 6268)
  • Robert Galvin of Motorola trained himself to do a simple mental exercise: Whenever someone says something, he asks himself, What if the opposite were true? Imagining alternatives to what others hold to be true is probably going to be useless 99 percent of the time. But that one other time the practice of flipping to a divergent perspective might generate an insight that is not only original but also useful. (Location 6270)
  • Try to produce unlikely ideas. (Location 6273)
  • One exercise involves taking a random paragraph from the paper each day and seeing if you can find unique, more memorable ways of expressing the same ideas. (Location 6278)