How Creative are you?

I’ve been lax adding to my blog as I’ve been dealing with family issues. Sorry.

Are you creative? (Or hope you are): Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who named the concept of “Flow,” the mental state of complete immersion, focus, and enjoyment in a task, described NINE traits that are frequently present in creative people. MOST CREATIVE PEOPLE…

01

… have a great deal of physical energy, while often quiet and at rest. They can work long hours with considerable concentration.

02

… tend to be smart and naive at the same time. He said, “[Creativity] involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure, and that most creativity workshops try to enhance.”

03

… are both playful and productive, which can sometimes mean both responsibile and irresponsibile. He said, “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.” Usually this perseverance occurs at the expense of other responsibilities or other people.

04

… alternate between imagination and fantasy, but with a secure sense of reality. He said, “In both art and science, movement forward involves a leap of imagination, a leap into a world that is different from our present.” The attention to real detail allows a creative person to imagine ways to improve.

05

… tend to be both introverted and extroverted. While many people tend toward one extreme or the other, highly creative people are a balance of both simultaneously.

06

… are genuinely humble yet with a strong sense of pride.

07

… are both rebellious and conservative. He said, “It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it’s difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic.”

08

… are very passionate about their work, but extremely objective about it as well. They are able to see when something they have made is not very good.

09

… are open and sensitive, which exposes them to considerable suffering and pain, but also joy in the midst of that suffering. He said that:“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,” he said, “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.”