Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Posted on April 5th, 2005
On the long side, but still a worthwhile read. I had a good time reading Finding Flow back in February, so reading Creativity was a change to go into deeper detail on some of the same ideas.
The book is primarily an exploration of the facets of creativity, starting off with the distinction between small-c creativity and and big-c Creativity. The former is subjective, whereas the latter is the stuff that drives culture forward and redefines the state of the art.
The material of this exploration comes from a series of interviews the author conducted with leaders in various domains: art, science, business, politics, and invention. Snippets of these interviews are quoted at length to illustrate the various ways that people have achieved their creative success.
Only in the last chapter of the book does the focus shift: Csikszentmihalyi calls it a switch from "objective description to prescription." There he offers several suggestions for how to assess your creative energy, or lack thereof, and how to make better use of it.
The practicality of this last chapter makes it much more immediately relevant than the rest of the book if you started reading page one looking for how-to suggestions and "what should I do?" answers. That's a false expectation though. Even so, making it through the middle section of Creativity was the hard part for me. Without any prestanding interest in the interviewees being quoted (well, except for Oscar Peterson) I got lost several times in the particulars of one person's achievement of scientific breakthrough, or another person's analysis of where they draw their writerly inspirations. By the time the last chapter rolled around and offered that final course change, the middle chapters had mushed together into a vague mental blob.
But what I don't want to forget, and will quote here, are some of the conclusions offered by the book. Like this one:
There is no question that the human species could not survive, either now or in the years to come, if creativity were to run dry. Scientists will have to come up with new solutions to overpopulation, the depletion of nonrenewable resources, and the pollution of the environment— or the future will indeed be brutish and short... Whether we like it or not, our species has become dependent on creativity.
Or this one:
The only way to stay creative is to oppose the wear and tear of existence with techniques that organize time, space, and activity to your advantage. It means developing schedules to protect your time and avoid distraction, arranging you surroundings to heighten concentration, cutting out meaningless chores that soak up psychic energy, and devoting the energy thus saved to what you really care about. It is much easier to be personally creative when you maximize optimal experiences in everyday life.
Reading that reminds me of 43Folders (also available in Wiki form). Which happens to be just the place I heard about this book to begin with.