The Creative Personality

Ten Paradoxical Traits of the Creative Personality

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Of all human activities, creativity comes closest to providing the fulfillment we all
hope to get in our lives. Call it full-blast living.

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. Most of the things that are
interesting, important, and human are the result of creativity. When we’re creative, we
feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The excitement of the artist at
the easel or the scientist in the lab comes dose to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to
get from life, and so rarely do. Perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy
—even when these experiences remain fleeting and leave no trace—provide a
profound sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also
leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future.

Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation
and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one
word what makes their personalities different from others, it’s complexity. They show
tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain
contradictory extremes; instead of being an “individual,” each of them is a
“multitude.”

Here are the 10 antithetical traits often present in creative people.

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet
and at rest. They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura
of freshness and enthusiasm. This suggests a superior physical endowment, a genetic
advantage. Yet it is surprising how often individuals who in their seventies and
eighties exude energy and health remember childhoods plagued by illness. It seems
that their energy is internally generated, due more to their focused minds than to the
superiority of their genes.

This does not mean that creative people are hyperactive, always “on.” In fact, they
rest often and sleep a lot. The important thing is that they control their energy; it’s not
ruled by the calendar, the dock, an external schedule. When necessary, they can focus
it like a laser beam; when not, creative types immediately recharge their batteries.
They consider the rhythm of activity followed by idleness or reflection very important
for the success of their work. This is not a bio-rhythm inherited with their genes; it
was learned by trial and error as a strategy for achieving their goals.

2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time. Another way of
expressing this dialectic is the contrasting poles of wisdom and childishness. As
Howard Gardner remarked in his study of the major creative geniuses of this century,
a certain immaturity, both emotional and mental, can go hand in hand with deepest
insights. Mozart comes immediately to mind.

3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and

irresponsibility. There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of
creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn’t go very far without its antithesis, a
quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance.

Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is
very firm about the importance of hard work: “Tell anybody you’re a sculptor and
they’ll say, ‘Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.’ And I tend to say, ‘What’s so
wonderful?’ It’s like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they don’t wish
to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as
Khrushchev once said, that doesn’t fry pancakes, you see. That germ of an idea does
not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage is the hard
work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture?”

Jacob Rabinow, an electrical engineer, uses an interesting mental technique to slow

himself down when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition:
“When I have a job that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I’m in jail. If I’m in jail,
time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it’ll take a
week. What else have I got to do? I’m going to be here for twenty years. See? This is
a kind of mental trick. Otherwise you say, ‘My God, it’s not working,’ and then you
make mistakes. My way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence.”

Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into
the night and persist when less driven individuals would not.

4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of
reality. Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is
different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas as fantasies
without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and
science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality.

5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted. We’re usually one or
the other, either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelines and
observing the passing show. In fact, in current psychological research, extroversion
and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits that differentiate
people from each other and that can be reliably measured. Creative individuals, on the
other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.

6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a
famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-
deprecation and shyness instead. Yet there are good reasons why this should be so.
These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton’s words, “on the
shoulders of giants.” Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware
of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective.
They’re also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements. And
they’re usually so focused on future projects and current challenges that past
accomplishments, no matter how outstanding, are no longer very interesting to them.
At the same time, they know that in comparison with others, they have accomplished
a great deal. And this knowledge provides a sense of security, even pride.

7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping. When tests of
masculinity/femininity 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.

Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender
but those of the other one, too.

8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative. It is impossible to be creative

without having first internalized an area of culture.

But the willingness to take risks, to break with the safety of tradition, is also
necessary. The economist George Stigler is very emphatic in this regard: “I’d say one
of the most common failures of able people is a lack of nerve. They’ll play safe
games. In innovation, you have to play a less safe game, if it’s going to be interesting.
It’s not predictable that it’ll go well.”
9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be
extremely objective about it as well. Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a
difficult task. Yet without being objective about it, our work is not very good and
lacks credibility. Here is how the historian Natalie Davis puts it:

“I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you write, so that
you can’t be so identified with your work that you can’t accept criticism and
response.”

10. Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and
pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment. Most would agree with Rabinow’s words:
“Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them.” A badly designed
machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when
reading bad prose.

Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and vulnerable.
Eminence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested
years in making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if
nobody cares.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and
emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is
especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.

Yet when a person is working in the area of his of her expertise, worries and cares fall
away, replaced by a sense of bliss. Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is
most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process
of creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving for
perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks
where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists
would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions
are better and the expectations more predictable.

From Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People, by Mihaly

Csikszentmihalyi, published by HarperCollins, 1996. This is an adaptation of the
original. You can read the full length excerpt in Psychology Today, Jul/Aug 96, or at
http://psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-19960701-000033&page=4
.