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In this year, I have received feedback from readers and from other authors. I have seen what podcasters and journalists found most interesting, from rethinking creativity as a decision making process to the nature of passion as something we develop (rather than find) to the fact that there are no inherently good or bad emotions for creativity and to the ways our social connections can support successful creativity. And how all of this can be applied to building our own capacity for creativity, as well as supporting others as leaders, mentors, or educators.

The most important thing about creativity

Often, I get asked what is one key to creativity. I understand where the question is coming from. One is a place to start. But I don’t think that is a helpful question in the case of creativity.

Imagine one key – trait or ability – being dropped onto a calm surface. Perhaps it can ripple. We come to understand its role and apply it. Like ripples on the water.

We come to understand that openness to experience predisposes people to have broad interests. Which in turn can become raw material from which to make connections in thinking to come up with new ideas. Broader thinking takes us to more original territories and we start noticing our own creativity, a powerful force in building creative confidence. Indeed, openness to experience has been called the personality disposition for creativity.

When asked to pick one most important attribute of creative individuals, many scholars pick openness to experience. Myself included. There are good reasons for choosing it if we really had to pick just one.

But others might pick divergent thinking. Or problem finding and construction. Or intrinsic motivation. Or creative self-efficacy.

And they could all be argued for convincingly. Meta-analyses examining the relationship between each of these attributes and creativity exist. They predict creative achievement in real life to a remarkably similar extent. If we just look at these numbers, there isn’t a clear winner in the most important attribute of creativity contest.

When asked what is one key to creativity, scholars answer. But we answer because people give answers when asked a question. Not because there is necessarily a truly good or valid answer.

I would pick openness to experience because as a personality psychologist I know about pervasiveness of personality and how it colors our thinking, feeling, and action, as well as how early it appears developmentally.

A cognitive neuroscientist might argue for divergent thinking. Because that is what their methods can assess. You cannot at this time do functional brain imaging for tasks that last anywhere from hours to months or more, as is the case for creativity that makes a difference in the real world. So scientists have to argue for approximations of some processes in the laboratory. Divergent thinking seems like a good candidate because it intuitively looks like creativity.

None of these answers are silly.

But none of them are doing justice to what it really takes to make creativity happen and what we know about creativity.

What we really know about creativity

We could start with what creativity is not.

Creativity is not a trait. Conceiving of creativity as a trait suggests that it is a largely internal psychological attribute that is mostly stable. Some people have more of it (are gifted) and others less.

Creativity is not a trait even though we use the adjective ‘creative’ to describe people. People are often creative in one domain and not others; not something that is typically trait-like. And creativity is something that very much can be built and developed.

How about creativity being a skill? It acts like skills do: we can train creative thinking and get better at it through training.

But that is limiting too.

If creativity is a skill, what skill are we talking about?

The World Economic Forum identified five groups of skills in the broad category of problem solving: creativity, originality, and initiative; analytical thinking and innovation; complex problem solving; critical thinking and analysis; reasoning, problem solving, and ideation. All are necessary for real life creativity.

The same list also includes active learning and learning strategies and resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility. These are not creativity skills per se, but without them, creativity will not happen.

Rather than conceiving of creativity as a trait or a particular skill, it is best to think of it as a process that requires a confluence of attributes. Here are the big groups:

Traits like openness to experience make it easier for a person to broaden their attention, emotional range, and try something new.

Then, there are cognitive abilities, from identifying gaps in existing knowledge to making connections between not obviously related ideas to being able to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of what we are doing as we are doing it.

Creative thinking abilities act on a bed of existing knowledge, which is often dismissed in our discussions of creativity because of a belief that all the knowledge of the world is at our disposal (on the internet and through AI tools). The trouble is that without starting knowledge we will not be well equipped to search, ask, or recognize the quality of what we are presented.

Because creative work attempts something original, it is riddled with uncertainties. Which are emotionally challenging. And because we are attempting something original, there are likely false starts or bottlenecks along the way. We have to navigate these rough seas to make it on the coast of creative achievement. For that, we need capacities that are emotional in nature. They are not creativity skills in themselves. They will not helps us come up with ideas, but they will help us make them happen by aiding persistence.

Last, but not least, creativity is social. The nature of our social environments can make or break potential for creativity. If people are afraid to voice ideas, they will not do it. If they have to share only solutions and not problems, they will do so, even if solutions did not have a chance to benefit from collective wisdom. If either irrational exuberance or acute caution dominate the climate, creativity will suffer.

If creativity is not a trait and it is not a skill, what is it? Michael Mumford talked about the creativity syndrome. And that is the best term we have. If we are serious about making creativity happen, we should not focus on one attribute.

Instead of a pebble making circles on the water, a better metaphor for creativity would be Wassily Kandinsky’s Circles in a Circle. We can spotlight creativity as a beautiful ‘thing’, but for it to come into being, many other things need to come in place.

The Creativity Choice is my synthesis of what constitutes the creativity syndrome. From considering what constitutes barriers to action to thinking and emotional tools for action to social conditions that create an ecosystem for it.

If you take just one thing from the book or just one thing about creativity, I hope it is that no single “thing” makes creativity happen on its own. Creativity is as beautiful as Kandinsky shows it to be.

If you’ve been enjoying this newsletter and found The Creativity Choice meaningful, I would be deeply grateful if you shared a brief review on a site like Amazon or Goodreads. Even a few sentences make a difference. Reviews help other readers discover the book and decide whether it speaks to them — and they matter more than most people realize.

Thank you for helping me celebrate The Creativity Choice birthday!

In my last post, I started diving into assumptions about how we think about creativity that I wanted to challenge in The Creativity Choice. As I started writing, I realized that I will need more than one piece. So this is part two. Although it could have been the only part if I wanted to condense and focus on the core of what got me inspired to write this book.

I am posting this on the UN Creativity and Innovation Day. And it is intentional. Because I think this is the chance to look ahead.

What we get wrong in understanding creativity is talking about it as a cognitive process. As if what we need to know about creativity to truly understand it is about thinking – coming up with ideas, solving problems.

The truth is that thinking alone cannot explain creativity that is meaningful in real life. There is no action without caring to act.

Another issue is that thinking and feeling are not separable. We can say that one influences the other, but it is even more fundamental than that. They are part of each other. Emotion scientists talk about appraisal – judgments of the nature of emotion-eliciting situations (e.g., are they challenging or threatening) – as part of how emotions emerge. And creative thinking is curiosity in action.

My biggest frustration about messages about creativity out there [waves hands] is that we do not talk about the emotional side of creativity.

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Frustration: “Find your passion” messages

Have you ever seen the quote, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”? I think it is funny that it is variously attributed to Confucious or Mark Twain (neither are correct, origin seems unknown). This sentiment is particularly associated with creative people.

The assumption here is that if only you love what you do, creativity will not be difficult.

You have to find your passion. This message implies that the passion is there, playing hide and seek with the rest of you, and the task is to reach deep and bring it to the surface. Alas, it does not work like that. We do not come into the world with a given passion; we develop our passions by trying out activities and by developing expertise and mastery.

Loving what you do matters. People who are motivated to do creative work have intrinsic motivation, which means they enjoy what they do and they are attracted by the challenge of it. But that is not enough.

Intrinsic motivation and passion,are energize the creative drive. However, the drive also needs direction or focus. It needs to answer what is a good, important and fruitful direction. Noticing points of dissatisfaction or frustration can provide focus and imposing constraints (which are almost definitionally frustrating) is a way to direct thinking to more original paths.

Frustration: Creativity is primarily about problem solving

Problem solving is mentioned so frequently together with creativity that it has become almost synonymous with it. Solving problems sounds like an orderly process. You focus, work on coming up with solutions, and check out that they work as intended or needed.

But successful creative problem solving is rather different than this. It requires that much of the time is spent on working out the problem. Asking questions about it. If we are working in a team, listening to everyone’s take on it. Wondering about what these takes suggest or imply. Considering whether various ways of seeing the nature of the problem can be integrated.

Yet, we don’t often do this with intention. Because it is emotionally difficult. If we are focusing on the problem, it appears we are not focusing on solutions (or seemingly making progress). Therefore, tension. Therefore, not enough time on what actually makes the solutions creative.

Frustration: Emotions are messing up your thinking

The belief that emotions lead to irrational and necessarily flawed thinking is deeply ingrained in our culture. When I tell people that I study emotions and creativity, they can imagine emotions being expressed in artistic creation (and that is a good thing) and they can imagine emotions being in the way of creativity – fear of failure interfering with action, frustrating creative blocks diminishing motivation, anxiety-provoking challenges shutting down exploratory thinking.

Sure, all of this happens. But there is also great power in emotions. And people are rarely aware of it. Emotions are conveying information that we can use in making choices along the way and different feelings boost particular kinds of thinking. In these ways, emotions help, rather than hurt creativity.

To use the power inherent in emotions, we need to know what they are saying and put it to use. That takes skill.

Frustration: Regulating emotions to help creativity is about making yourself feel good

Research on emotions and creativity started by asking which feelings help and which hurt creativity. Implicit in this research was the view that creativity equals coming up with ideas. A reliable answer emerged from studies of creative thinking in the laboratory – positive energized moods, such as being happy or amused – is helpful.

Therefore, reasoning went, to be more creative, we have to regulate emotions to feel more positive.

The fine print in these studies was that this finding is limited to very quick creative idea generation. Once people have more than 4 minutes to think, it does not matter whether they are feeling happy. And, of course, in everyday life, we rarely, if ever, think of ideas for less than 4 minutes.

Another problem yet is that the research was limited to creative thinking when the problems were already presented to people. For instance, they were asked to come up with ideas about different uses for a tin can or list what might happen if people became invisible at will. In real life, problems are not obvious or are much more vague. Perhaps you are working in higher education and developing a new honors program or capstone experience – what could or should it be? Or you are working in organizational learning and development. What is needed?

Sometimes, when our goal is creativity, regulating emotions means approaching discomfort without an explicit intention of making yourself (or others) feel immediately better.

I keep being amazed (in the most exquisitely frustrating way) that this assumption about regulating emotions to help creativity is about making yourself feel good is widespread even among many scholars. Recently, we got reviews on a paper dealing with emotion regulation for creativity saying that surely we are not proposing that people might willingly make themselves feel discomfort. Yes, indeed, we are proposing that. Not just proposing, there is evidence that this is important.

If you have a nagging feeling something is off in your work – whether that is a painting, a design for a new product, a research paper, or any other creative endeavor – you can regulate that sense of displeasure to make yourself feel better (by focusing on the positive or doing something distracting and fun) OR you can regulate it by staying in the discomfort for a while and trying to work out what it is pointing at.

The first is likely to result in what psychologists call premature closure. And the second will likely maximize the potential of what you are working on.

What is better than celebrating creativity diving intro frustrations that become inspiration that become action that become a book.

A few months ago, I was at a dinner after a great conference day. There was a person I met that day and the conversation came around to our recent work, as it does when we make an acquaintance. I mentioned how I tend to be inspired frustration and that this was a major motivation for writing The Creativity Choice. I thought something was missing out there in how creativity is discussed in our culture and I wanted to provide an alternative, rooted in the science of creativity.

To my surprise, a colleague I have known since graduate student days and who is a very successful communicator, said that this personal impulse did not come across when he read my book.

This comment in a Brazilian steakhouse made me pause and reflect on my choices.

I have made a deliberate decision not to lean heavily into provocative framing. If I was going to wade into psychodynamic waters, I could wonder whether this decision has to do with history being my first love. Provocative framing makes me think of the word provocation, taking my mind to diplomatic pretenses that started wars.

The word provocation has a very different meaning in contemporary communication. A meaning of challenging assumptions and eliciting emotional reactions in a way that can ignite action. I can get behind all of that.

So I asked myself, if I was to make explicit the assumptions I wanted to challenge and actions I was after, how would I put it?

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Frustration 1: Creativity is not just idea generation

I drive a lot and I listen to a lot of podcasts. Not only I study creativity, but love learning how people do what they do. Which translates to podcasts on building things and starting things and writing things. What interviewers focus most on and what they are impressed by is the idea. How did people possibly think of [whatever they did].

The frustrating part is that ideas are not the most difficult part of the process. After a recent talk I gave, someone from the audience told me how they came up with the idea for we now know as AirBnB several years before the existing one. He did not end up developing and building this idea. Which is the truly difficult part.

Where I grew up, on the Adriatic coast of Croatia, the concept of renting out spare rooms in one’s house was a common practice since at least the 1960s. The AirBnB idea was not revolutionary. It even existed already. What was difficult and what made its success is the platform they built and spread. In other words, it was not about having the idea of renting rooms or apartments.

Creativity scholars did not help this problem of conceiving of creativity as coming up with ideas because this part of the creative process is the easiest to study and we as a field indeed spend most of our time and effort studying it. We can ask people to list all the ways they can think of a brick of a paper clip could be used. People make a list and in 3 minutes time, we have data. Once upon a time, when creativity studies was a new area of research, this was important. Now, I think it is becoming a symptom of a desire and social push for sheer quantity of publications.

Frustration 2: What does getting comfortable with discomfort mean anyway?

Another source of frustration is in the advice we hear for creativity. One of the worst offenders in my probably not so humble opinion: To be creative, you have to become comfortable with discomfort.

This is one of those pieces of advice that sound deep. But what if we take it apart?

Discomfort is uncomfortable.

What does it mean to be comfortable with discomfort?

Also, who can be comfortable with discomfort?

If I cannot be comfortable with discomfort, what does that say? Does that mean I cannot be creative? Not made of the right cloth?

No, no, it does not.

I have taken creative risks, embarked on and completed projects that took time and effort and which had rather uncertain outcomes. This was not comfortable. I did not become comfortable. Rather, I did it in spite being uncomfortable.

Of course, I am not unique. Research suggests that creative people are better described as risk-bearers than risk-seekers.

Frustration 3: You need to be confident to be creative

We are told that you have to have creative confidence. This is the message in popular books and confidence is at the center of theories of creative action.

My point of frustration about this creative confidence is a subtle one. It is not that I don’t believe confidence matters, but I think that how we talk about confidence is not helpful for most people.

Psychologists ask participants in their studies questions about how confident they are in their ability to come up with creative ideas and develop them and ask them to rate the extent they agree. For example, the questions look like the following:

I have confidence in my ability to solve problems creatively.

I can confidently present my ideas to experts or professionals.

I am good at coming up with a lot of different ideas.

I am confident in my ideas even when they are unpopular.

I feel comfortable completing creative tasks.

I trust my creative abilities.

For each of these items, people are asked how much they describe their self-perception on a scale from (usually) 1, meaning definitely no, to 5, meaning definitely yes. What research reliably finds is that higher scores are related to engaging in more creative behavior.

This is where research on creative confidence gets lost in translation when communicated to non-scientists: The correlation between confidence and real-life creativity does not mean that we have to be fully confident to be creative. Rather, it means that those who are relatively more confident are more likely to be creative than those who are relatively less confident.

In everyday discourse, our view of confidence is something like a full tank of fuel. That kind of confidence is not required for creativity. It helps to be closer to full than to empty, but you don’t have to be fully topped off to get started.

In everyday discourse, we also tend to see confidence in terms absence of self-doubt. Creative confidence that is important for creative action is not such a thing. It is more of “I think I might be able to do this” than “There is no doubt in my mind I can do this”.

How can confidence and doubt coexist? Or, a better question, how can we deal with the coexistence of confidence and doubt? That is a matter for another key, but underappreciated and underdiscussed set of skills that help creativity happen by bridging having ideas and doing something with them.

For that, stay tuned for next week…

If you are curious about

- other myths about creativity that can come in our way, check out Chapter 1: Creativity is a choice

- the kinds of risks common in creative work, Chapter 2: Creativity takes risk

- what is creative confidence and how to build it, Chapter 3: Yes, you can

… of The Creativity Choice

The idea of grit is as American as the proverbial apple pie. The American dream myth is based on the premise that dogged hard work is what makes that dream come true. We tell our children that everything is possible. If they can imagine it and work on it, we can make it happen.

So, surely, creative people are gritty. Right?

Let’s start with step one. Defining what we mean.

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What is grit?

Grit as a psychological attribute is a combination of consistency of interests and persistence.

Imagine a child who wants to play soccer. They get started, go to practice for a couple of weeks, and seem to excited about all things soccer. Then, one weekend they don’t feel like it. The following week they skip another practice. And then another. They don’t wanting to do soccer any more. Now they want to try tennis.

You have seen this before. Last year they tried track and volleyball. Losing interest in each.

In other words, there is no consistency in their interests, no stick-with-it-ness, no persistence.

By contrast, imagine a child who gets excited about a Spelling Bee. They do well in the competition in their classroom and when the teacher asks them to participate in the school-wide contest, the child decides to study hard for it. And they keep at it, eventually qualifying for the city-wide competition and gearing up for the state Spelling Bee. This is a gritty kid.

Do creative people consistently stay with their interests?

The psychological definition of consistency of interest as a component of grit includes:

- Not getting distracted by new ideas and projects

- Interests not changing from month to month or year to year

- Setting a goal and not changing it along the way

- Not getting obsessed with a certain idea or project for a short time and then losing interest

Does this apply to creative individuals? Well, artists routinely work on multiple pieces at the same time. They abandon some and pursue others. They might even destroy some, literally taking them apart or cutting them into pieces to use a portion of it for something new. Setting a goal, but later choosing to pursue another direction and pursue a different goal is essentially the name of the game.

Writers often describe being surprised by the directions they take. They think they have a plan, but then their characters take them in new directions as if having a mind of their own. In interviews, writers describe starting a story or a book and abandoning it for something else, sometimes coming back to it years later. Again, according to the psychological definition of consistency of interests, these writers would not be considered to fit the bill.

B. F. Skinner, one of the most influential psychologists of the 20^th century, advised scientists to drop whatever they are doing if they come across something interesting.

Research shows that consistency of interest has no relationship with creativity in samples of adolescents and young adults (students in high school and college) See article here. In adult samples, we find that more consistency of interests is related to less creativity. If you want to read the whole article: here.

Teens and young adults might need to stay with an interest long enough to gain experience and expertise that helps build creativity. On the other hand, professionals benefit from diversity of interests that provides material on which to draw inspiration. Staying with a single interest, goal, or idea to the exclusion of others might not provide breadth that can lead to original connections.

Creative individuals do not tend to have consistent interests. They start with one idea and that idea changes on the way of developing and building it. Their goals transform and change directions because they are trying to do something that has not been done before and takes a lot of experimentation.

How persistent are creative people?

This one is easy. Creative people are persistent. Sometimes stubbornly so. Sometimes defying what could be considered reasonable.

The psychological definition of persistence includes:

- Overcoming setbacks to conquer important challenges

- Achieving goals that took years of work

- Being diligent and hardworking

- Finishing what one begins

In a recently published study of more than 500 professionals in different industries, we found that more persistence, predicts greater creative achievement. The same results are found in long-running study in which persistence assessed in college predicted occupational creativity three decades later.

Stories of persistence of creative individuals can go from impressive to dramatic to close to inconceivable. Mathematician Yitang (Tom) Zhang worked on a problem in number theory for years without making much progress. During that time, he was a lecturer at a university, position that did not enable him even to pay everyday living expenses and he had to supplement his income by keeping books at a Subway restaurant. But he continued to work on it and eventually had a breakthrough. This was so important to his field that he went from a lecturer to a full professor overnight and received the MacArthur award colloquially known as “the genius grant”.

Persistence is certainly necessary on the non-genius level of creativity too. In addition to months to years from an idea to study design to data collection, analysis, and writing, scientists often face multiple rounds of peer review when trying to publish their work. The review process takes at least a year and often multiple years during which scientists have to address different, and sometimes inconsistent, lines of feedback. We can tell similar stories about developing a new app or piece of software, launching a business, developing and testing curricula, or virtually any other kind of human endeavor.

So, are creative people gritty? No, not in the psychological sense of the term. Although for many well-defined goals (doing well on a Spelling Bee!) staying with a single interest and persisting on it go together and help achievement, this is not so for creativity. Creative achievement thrives on having wide interests and cross-pollinating from one to another and jumping from one to another. But creative achievement takes time and overcoming obstacles or finding a way out of dead ends. And that takes persistence. Much persistence. Creative individuals are persistent, but not consistent.

Persistence is key to creativity on long-term goals that take ideas, run with them, and transform them into performances and products. But that process is… well, difficult. It takes stamina.

Chapter 7 of The Creativity Choice is specifically about how we can manage emotions in a way that supports persistence.

And Chapter 8 is how to get unstuck when experiencing creative block.

If you’ve been enjoying this newsletter and found The Creativity Choice meaningful, I would be deeply grateful if you shared a brief review on a site like Amazon or Goodreads. Even a few sentences make a difference. Reviews help other readers discover the book and decide whether it speaks to them — and they matter more than most people realize. Thank you for helping the ideas travel.

I have been watching a lot of Olympics these days. Since I was a kid, I loved ski jumping, and in recent years I have been fascinating by all the freestyle skiing and snowboarding disciplines. Both for the reason that I don’t seem to have the capacity to understand how the athletes do it. To me, it is magic-level incomprehensible. And I know impressive feats of creativity can feel like that to observers too.

One performance that got me completely wowed was actually in a different sport altogether – Ami Nakai in the short figure skating program. It was original, she was the only skater with a successful triple axel, it was elegant, with movement and music merging one from the other, and it appeared effortless.

Her performance seemed to defy all that we consciously know about how much work it takes to become capable of such performance. From the first steps on the ice to this triumph of skill and beauty, Ami had to learn each spin and jump and how to put them together. And she had to perfect them with practice. Lots and lots of practice. We know all of this, yet it feels as if her Olympic performance was easy. Natural.

Because she was in a state of flow.

OK, flow is a state of consciousness and I certainly did not have the pleasure of speaking with her about what it was like to skate this short program. But I am implying from we could observe.

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What is flow?

Flow was first described by the great Mihalyi Csikszentmihlayi. As he studied people’s subjective experience in different activities, he noticed a pattern. When we engage in something challenging, yet we have the skills to meet the challenge, at times we enter an altered state of consciousness in which:

• We are fully absorbed in what we are doing

• We feel fully in control

• We are completely focused on the task, as if the rest of the world recedes in a background

• The task itself seems to have clear and unambiguous goals, with one action seamlessly rolling into another

• There seems to be immediate feedback on each action and an instant realization of how we are doing

• Self-consciousness falls away, eliminating doubt or hesitation

• Subjective experience of time is altered and we get surprised after emerging from this state how much time has lapsed

Is it really flow?

If you noticed the bullet points above only and did not read or absorb the lead to them, you missed the defining condition for the true flow state – match between high task demands and high task-relevant skills.

We might not have self-doubts when doing something easy, but that lack of worry does not indicate flow.

Our sense of time could be warped when we are bored (just recall how endless mind-numbing lectures in school could feel), but that does not indicate flow. Time flies when we are having fun too, like catching up with friends or enjoying the beach, but that is not flow.

We might have clear goals, articulated in a step by step plan for the day in our favorite productivity app, but that does not mean we are in flow.

Flow can come when you work on big tasks. Tasks that do not fit into 15-min increments we listed to keep us on track with busy work and create a feeling of productivity. Flow happens when we have the courage to act, even if there are uncertainties about whether our ambitions are even possible.

This is the paradox of flow. We enter it when we take a plunge into the unknown, but a consequence can be fully experienced certainty and self-consciousness that so often stands in our way falling by the wayside.

This is why we are most likely to enter the state of flow when we are doing something we are intrinsically motivated for. When we enjoy the activity, find it meaningful, and thrive on the challenges it poses, we will be more willing to do it even when we know how difficult it will be.

Flow is not limited to creative work, but creative work has the basic requirements for flow. It is challenging, people tend to be intrinsically motivated to do it, and it requires great skill. True creative work – not just bursts of inspiration or coming up with new ideas in a brainstorming session – demands from us to solve one problem after another and takes time.

Creative work makes flow more likely and when flow happens, it makes creative work more successful.

Is flow necessary for creativity?

In a recent conversation, a journalist implied that we have to be in a state of flow to be creative. This assumption was part of the question about how to intentionally enter flow.

So let me address both of these questions directly.

First: No, we do not have to be in a state of flow to be creative.

But I am not surprised by this assumption. In our cultural discourse, there is a strong association between flow and creativity. The association is real, but just like all other associations in psychology, there is no perfect overlap. We who communicate about science need to be explicit and careful.

Creativity – progress on creative work – happens in big chunks of uninterrupted flow, and it happens in back and forth with colleagues, small pockets of time between meetings, and tortuously painful times when nothing seems to be going our way and only a tiny trickle makes it out of our minds.

A creative product, like a book or even an article, commonly includes bits and pieces we gave birth to under all of these circumstances. I am writing this piece on an airplane. My thoughts and keyboard strokes were interrupted by the woman sitting on my left passing coffee to her husband to my right (over my computer!), by the snack and beverage service, and by a distraction of Superman 2 on the screen next to me (and I have to admit being a Superman fan).

When I was writing The Creativity Choice, there were times I was in flow and managed to write 3,000 words in a session by what felt to be sheer magic. There were other times when I wrote 1,000 words in a session, and others when I struggled, only to end up with perhaps 200. Now, looking at the finished product, there is no way to say which parts came from which experiences.

If you are in flow, creative work can feel magical, but progress is what ultimately matters. So, go on. Do.

If you’ve been enjoying this newsletter and found The Creativity Choice meaningful, I would be deeply grateful if you shared a brief review on a site like Amazon or Goodreads. Even a few sentences make a difference. Reviews help other readers discover the book and decide whether it speaks to them — and they matter more than most people realize. Thank you for helping the ideas travel.

I use AI, as, I dare to say, we all do. I use it to write formal emails, as I can find myself paralyzed in not being able to find the right tone. I use it to experiment with its features and see what it can do. I use it to create summaries of bodies of text, such as open-ended responses in interviews I conducted, or to get an insight into how my own writing can be recapped and condensed.

In this process, I have discovered some things about its usefulness in creative work and in communicating about creative work.

Lessons in AI magic and AI frustrations

So, I experimented with three AI tools to see how it would create a newsletter logo.

I started with Copilot, and then went to Gemini and ChatGPT. My starting point was to give it some guidelines. I love squirrels. They are ingenious in tasks relevant to them (getting to food!) and they are also just the cutest. If you love squirrels too and want to see them master obstacle courses designed with spectacular human creativity, check out Mark Rober’s Squirrel Olympics YouTube videos.

Also, I mentioned that the newsletter is about creativity and that it might be fun to have the squirrel interact with a Rube Goldberg-like contraption.

After Copilot generated its first couple of images, I made additional specifications. With more experimentation and reframing, I ended up with the following prompt that I then used in a new Copilot chat, and also Gemini and ChatGPT:

I am looking to design a new logo for my newsletter. I would like it to be square and include the following elements: 1. On top, the words “The Creativity Choice” in sleek contemporary signature handwriting style, blue font, underlined yellow; 2. In the middle, a picture of a Rube Goldberg-like contraption in yellow and a blue squirrel (with yellow outline); 3. Below the picture, the words “Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle” in sleek contemporary signature handwriting style, blue font, underlined yellow.

Here are the outcomes, in my order of preference:

As I was playing with earlier versions of the design, I ran into the issue of the machine not understanding or testing reality. After three tries to get a different handwriting-like script, neither Gemini or Copilot delivered. They said they made the change to the script, but they did not. Something that would have been very easy for a human to both spot and change. They offered language about the kinds of different scripts they could try, and even when I used the language they suggested, no change happened. And that was frustrating.

In my personal preference, ChatGPT came on top. It was most responsive and I thought most nuanced (the contraption is delightfully odd, while being squirrel-relevant with an acorn). Copilot comes last in my ranking. Rube Goldberg would have found the device rather lacking, and the squirrel looks dazed and not present.

I got these logos quite quickly. They were not bad.

But definitely not great. They are clearly limited by my (lack of) expertise in design and best practices in logo creation. I am a faithful listener of 99% Invisible and loved grading of US state flags on YouTube (which of course, reminded me of Fun With Flags on The Big Bang Theory), so I know enough to be clear that these are not great. Even if it was a good exercise and a lesson in what these tools can do.

The AI can do a lot, but how creative its output is will depend on the creativity (for the particular kind of task) of the person working with it. Human creativity remains crucial.

How helpful are AI insights?

I write about having ideas and then not always following up on them. I had an idea of analyzing the content of all my guest appearances on podcasts to summarize what questions are commonly asked. But I never followed through. Then, Mark Blackwell (thank you again, if you are reading this!) did something similar in preparation for our interview on his podcast, Arkaro Insights. He provided NotebookLM with links to 27 of my podcast appearances up to that point and asked it to summarize the key lessons. Mark also graciously shared the prompts and outputs with me.

The response started with core points:

· Creativity is a process of decision-making towards outcomes that are both original and effective—not a gift reserved for the few

· 70% of people believe creativity requires complete freedom, yet research shows constraints actually enhance creative output

· Teams that spend 53% of their time on problem framing rather than idea generation produce the most creative solutions

· Different moods serve different creative purposes: positive energized states fuel divergent thinking; subdued or pessimistic moods sharpen critical evaluation

· Weak network ties drive exploration and new perspectives; strong ties support development and refinement

· AI performs at average human creativity levels but cannot match top human creative performance—nor can it identify problems or take initiative

· Three leadership actions: explicitly ask for creativity, leverage emotions strategically, and build psychological safety through permission to explore

So far, pretty good. The only one that I would highlight as being a bit much is oversimplifying a study showing that successful problem solving teams spent 53% of time focusing on problem finding, rather than generating new ideas. When NotebookLM described this in more detail, it went so far to call it The 53% Rule. Caution needed. One study obtained that number. One study does not make that number magical. Rather, the research shows that much of the time should be spent on problem finding (that could mean 53%, 58% or maybe 64%).

When NotebookLM elaborates on individual insights, its tendency to get overly certain when we should be talking about likelihoods become apparent.

Another example. One of its headline insights stated, “The Freedom Fallacy: Why Constraints Enable Creativity.” Very polished sounding, very social media-ish. Not false, but firmer than it should be.

Constraints can and often do benefit creative ideas. But they do not do so always. Details about constraints matter. Constraints benefit creativity when they can focus thinking and direct it in more original directions. One of my favorite studies showed that people come up with more creative greeting card rhymes when they have to incorporate unusual words (e.g., writing an I love you message including the word ‘vest’).

We have all seen constraints of the “do more with less” kind that can break people. So, not all constraints are created equal or helpful.

In summarizing lessons about the social side of creativity, NotebookLM stated, “The Network Effect: Weak Ties for Exploration, Strong Ties for Development.” Indeed! But it also missed something else that is crucial – the importance of climate for creativity (especially when we are talking about work contexts) and psychological safety as the basis for such climate. I don’ t know why it missed this, but the list of insights seems to be focusing more on the quick, simply, and immediately actionable, rather than something(s) that need to be built through time and consistent effort.

That on the other hand, is not just an AI bias, but I would say our societal one too. Of course, AI got its biases from the corpus that reflects the culture in which it was generated.

Coda.

We all use AI. The question is not whether we are going to use it. The question is how. Are we going to use it reflexively, on autopilot, like other imposed shoulds we pick up because we get swept into doing what everyone else seems to be doing? After emerging from my own year of burnout, I am more mindful of personal decisions and the question of why do something and how.

As I grapple about bigger questions of life, I figured to recommend a book from a connection that started on LinkedIn and grew into the real world.

Most productivity advice tells you to do more, optimize more, and hustle more. If that does not work for you, you are not alone. My friend spent years figuring out why that approach leaves us burned out and empty.

In Unhinged Habits: A Counterintuitive Guide for Humans to Have More by Doing Less, Jonathan Goodman shows how to break bad habits and build a rich life by mastering the art of strategic subtraction. It will get you thinking. And experimenting.

Speaking of what AI can and cannot do. If you find this newsletter helpful or intriguing and have checked out The Creativity Choice, I would be grateful (as in really really really grateful) if you would be up for leaving a book review. It makes a big difference.

For more details on the topics above, check out The Creativity Choice:

Constraints and creativity: Chapter 4

Problem identification and construction: Chapter 5

Network effects on creativity: Chapter 9

Climate for creativity: Chapter 10

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So, here is my take on creativity and AI. With an important note that I am talking at the beginning of 2026 and I am talking about LLM-based AI tools. I am not talking in 2336, for instance, when according to Star Trek history android Data is created. I am not going to pretend that I have the ability to foretell the far away future. I am curious and excited about there one day being a Data, but also apprehensive (if you know Star Trek, you know Data has a ‘brother’ Lore).

Setting aside fears of robot overlords, here is where we are right now. For a conversation that directly prompted me to write this out, here is a video from a recent chat with Mark Blackwell on the Arkaro podcast.

Does AI come up with creative ideas?

As soon as generative AI tools came on the market, researchers started conducting studies on creativity of ideas they produced. These studies gave the same kinds of tests of creative idea generation to AI and groups of humans. Some prominent examples. In the Alternate Uses Task, the goal is to come up with ideas for different potential uses for everyday objects (e.g., brick); the Consequences Task asks for ideas about what would happen if unlikely or fanciful hypothetical scenarios transpired (e.g., if humans no longer needed sleep); the Divergent Associations Task prompts respondents to come up with 10 nouns as different from each other as possible (excluding proper nouns). Answers are then evaluated for originality.

Studies have found that on average, AI tools generate more original responses than human participants. This is a reliable finding.

But I think it is important to consider these results a bit more closely.

It is true that scientists often compare average performance of different groups, such as AI and humans in this case (or artists vs. scientists or men vs. women etc.). However, we can also ask different questions.

When we ask whether AI tools are more creative than creative people, we get a very different answer. Yes becomes a no. If data are analyzed to compare not averages, but most creative responses of AI and humans, the answer is that AI is not coming on top.

I have heard some critics say this kind of analysis is massaging of results when you don’t like what common analyses show. And I have to disagree. This is defining creativity in a way that we define it in everyday life. We are not impressed by averages of ideas that teams come up with in their brainstorming sessions. Rather, we are impressed by the most creative ideas that come from those sessions (and end up being developed further and transformed into products or performances). The highest creativity that is possible is what makes a difference in the world.

Contemporary scientific research often deals with averages and examines performance of people from the general population, rather than recruiting and studying those who show evidence of creativity in what they do in the real world. The reasons for this are many and many are practical in nature, driven by pressures of academia (if you are going to take time to recruit designers or engineers or scientists, you will not be able to publish as many papers!). Perhaps this a topic for its own post if it might be of interest. Research of creativity in not particularly creative people is one of my biggest critiques of my field.

But much of foundational historical research on creativity was not built on samples of college students or people who complete surveys for extra money. Frank Barron, one of the founders of creativity studies, defined creative individuals as those who were in the top 15% for all eight different measures of creative thinking and in the top 2% for at least two of them. Donald MacKinnon and the team at the University of California at Berkely studied people who were nominated as creative by their colleagues (e.g., architects, mathematicians etc.). And Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi in his monumental work studied Nobel prize winners and other similarly highly creative individuals.

AI is useful even if it does not produce the most creative ideas

Even if AI does not produce the most creative ideas when compared to people who have developed their creative potential, it does not mean that it is not useful.

This is the case when writers, for instance, consult an AI about character development or plot elements. Even if they do not end up using the exact words produced by the machine, the exercise might be helpful. It can provide leads that become inspiration. Or a human creator can take an idea and then transform or express it in their own style and by adding the lived experience.

A friend in a recent LinkedIn post expressed it best. Consulting AI is helpful to check for obvious ideas. AI is great at the obvious (and humans sometimes/often are not aware of the obvious). It is great at it because it is based on what already exists in a corpus of work floating out in the culture. It can retrieve it and by consulting it we can make sure we are not missing something that we should not miss. That is truly helpful in creative work.

How might human creativity be shaped by AI?

Full disclosure, it did not occur to me to consider this question on my own. It was a question I was asked in an interview for a business magazine in Korea. And it got me going.

I don’t think that AI will fundamentally change the nature of human creativity. It will become a tool that supports it, whether as a partner in searching for inspiration, doing background research, or assisting with formal aspects of creative work.

In my opinion, two big things are likely to change. One is a societal difference in relevance given to creativity by many organizations. When humans were the only ones who could generate something new, even when the explicit goal was not necessarily creativity, some creativity could happen by sneaking in. Now, businesses that strive for efficiency above all will likely conclude that AI ideas are good enough. If close to full automation becomes their choice, bursts of highly creative products might become more rare. Something highly creative will be pushed into the domain of those who are willing to not only be good enough, but be set apart.

Another way I expect that evolution of AI will affect human creativity is more optimistic and psychologically more interesting. I think it will bring to people’s awareness the importance of identifying and framing problems. Decades of research show that people come up with most creative solutions when they spend much of their time and effort on examining the problem from different perspectives, whether they are creating a still life painting or solving work-related problems. AI tools can generate ideas, but they are not sensitive to problems or have agency to ask questions. As we see that we are not the only ones who can generate ideas, we will realize to a greater extent what we have to do and do well. In interacting with the world, we notice what works well and what does not, and use those observations and feelings as inspiration for what problems to pursue. Frustrated by the grocery shopping experience? It is an inspiration to ask how it could be different and a motivation to solve this problem (by starting a company like Instacart).

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Because it turns out that this included 38 art experiences, I broke it into two parts. This is part 2 (the first part is here, in case you want to revisit it).

I have taken all the pictures. July through December, here it goes.

Rouen, France. Cathedral that Monet painted many times in different light of day. This picture looks just like the sunset version. Life inspiring art. Art inspiring life. Unadulterated joy.

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, France. Creativity is not just the Monets of this world. There are other creative impressionists (Alfred Sisley here) and other cathedrals. If we only think of what scientists call Big-C creativity, it can quickly become discouraging, even for us who are professionally creative.

Cologne, Germany. Museum Ludwig. Rouen cathedral yet another way. Creativity goes in many directions. And honoring those before us does not diminish it. Quite to the contrary, it can inspire and delight.

Cologne, Germany. Cathedral stained glass window by Gerhard Richter. This window is less than 20 years old (dates to 2007). As soon as I saw it, I thought that it represented all the colors of the traditional windows throughout the cathedral mixed into a kaleidoscopic abstraction. And that is exactly the story the guide told. Art is a mirror to the world and we can peek into it. Did you know that the word empathy was originally coined to describe the experience of art? Feeling into art, to be precise.

Muenster, Germany. After the War, many churches in Germany were left without their stained glass windows and in the reconstruction faced a dilemma whether to try to recreate what was lost or do something different and more in the spirit of the present. Many places went with the latter and leaned into abstract expressionism. A creativity choice. One showing art as a living thing.

Christiania, Copenhagen, Denmark. Having close to absolute freedom can (and will?) devolve a society or a social experiment. Christiania was born of a desire for freedom, but ended up needing some guardrails when hard drugs became a serious problem. Despite full freedom of action seeming attractive and our belief that it facilitates creativity (about 70% of people across cultures seem to think that!), some constraints help creativity. In one study, when people were asked to write creative greeting card messages for different occasions (e.g., birthday, thanks, well wishes), they were more creative when constrained by having to use a specific unusual word, such as ‘frog’ or ‘vest’. This constraint nudged them away from the common themes for these messages and directed them to more original mental spaces.

Copenhagen. Design Museum Denmark. When asked how he would describe the next decade, the designer who created the first radio with no buttons answered “systematic creativity.” Very appropriate for our present moment. Systematic creativity implies our agency, purposeful and reliable creativity, and suggests the importance of social and organizational systems to support it.

Royal Copenhagen Porcelain. We tend to think of globalization as a phenomenon of our time. But Europe was fascinated by the white and blue Chinese porcelain since the 17th century. Portuguese, Dutch, and Danish (here) porcelain came as a response to the demand for Chinese products. From imitation to creativity of their own styles. Research shows that copying unfamiliar art increases creativity on subsequent drawing. And European porcelain makers grew their own creative practices.

Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Making History: 200 Years of American Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Georgia O’Keeffe, the amazing Georgia O’Keeffe. She made me want to see her world. I cannot paint myself, but love exploring macro photography. She did not identify as an abstract painter, but one who paints what she sees. Her creativity was in looking and seeing what others did not. That took courage. Which reminds me of my favorite quote by her, “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from a single thing that I wanted to do.” Indeed, you do not have to be comfortable or assured to create. But you have to do it.

New Hampshire Art Association. Unfortunately, I have not taken a note of the artist and the reverse search did not help. But it reminded me of the Moomins, which is always heartwarming. Creativity that makes the world a better and a gentler place. Transformative creativity.

New York, Times Square subway station. Nick Cave, "Each One, Every One, Equal All" I was exhausted, going through a crowded subway stop looking down. And then, as I climbed the stairs… This wonder. Art can open the mind and eyes and hearts. I paused. Really, stopped in my tracks. In pure delight. And then other people stopped. Not many, but some. To see what I was looking at smiling. They saw it too. Making the day brighter.

New York. Fashion Institute of Technology Museum, Dress, Dreams, and Desire: Fashion and Psychoanalysis. People are often motivated to do creative work to help them cope with something challenging or to help others. And these motives can overlap. In expressing anger, anxiety, and vulnerability in the (spiky) dress, Viktor and Rolf were conveying shared feelings.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. ENCODED: Change the Story, Change the Future. I know the picture is poor quality (it is a frame from a video), but I hope you take a note anyway and check out the link. This might have been my favorite art event of the year. Native American artists created augmented reality pieces superimposed on iconic works of American art. I personally don’t think that wrongs can be made right (almost ever) and the American original sin cannot be righted. But we need to talk about it, and we need creativity to make people pay attention. Different pieces touched me in different ways, but this one pictured made me want to scream in agreement. No! Those land acknowledgements on institutional websites do not make a difference, they just make us feel like we are doing something (I speak here as a member of a social category that benefitted from the atrocities committed). Resources! Thank you to for letting us know about this event and contributing to it.

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Salvador Dalí, Morphological Echo. Experientially, creative ideas sometimes come from a place of mystery. Rather surreal. But what is subjectively akin to magic actually draws on accumulated knowledge and experience. Broader knowledge and range of experience, greater chance we can combine them in original ways to come up with creative ideas.

Pucker Gallery, Boston, MA. Friedensreich Regentag Hundertwasser, I Fiori Segreti Del Re. How do we see the world? Can we bend what we see? Can we shape it? Creatively?

Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO. The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism. Paul Cézanne called Pissarro the first impressionist. (And Pablo Picasso called Cézanne the "father of us all", so he should know). Pissarro was the only artist who exhibited at all eight impressionist exhibitions. This is one kind of creativity, staying and experimenting within the limits of a style. Our culture values more radical forms of creativity, but the importance of steady experimentation becomes more obvious when we think of a scientist who doggedly stays with a particular topic of research and makes consistent progress that in time creates a great difference.

Portsmouth, NH Holiday Arts Tour. Artist, Lisa Grey. My first impression of this piece was centering in a world that is off center. In a conversation with the artist I learned that it was a collaboration with a colleague half a continent away. They mailed their work back and forth, each adding to it in multiple layers, until they decided the work was complete. Much of creativity is collaborative. And all of it is social, even if we work alone. Ideas do not come out of a vacuum.

Artist, Allen Norelli. A brunch with friends can become an art event when one has a chance to check out work in progress and notice this one tucked in the basement. Worm hole. [According to Star Trek: ] They are unstable, but if you are at the right place at the right time, you can get very far very fast. This is a bit like luck. If you notice the opportunities and approach them prepared, the unexpected and the creative can come to be.

Cancun, Mexico. Colleagues of mine at the University of Pennsylvania conducted a study of how people experience murals in different neighborhoods in Philadelphia. Murals sparked emotional responses, but also made the neighborhood seem more inviting, quieter, and cleaner. Art can help build community.

Wishing you all a year full of art. Or whatever fills your cup.

More about the social side of creativity in Chapters 9 and 10 of The Creativity Choice.

This survivalist-meets-mindfulness approach is not my cup of tea. If you know me, you would now chuckle, because that is a gross understatement. I will choose city over the woods any day. But I admire the purposeful pause and reflection practice.

The year that is behind me was more than intense and I very much needed a pause. For me, two things help — travel and art. We traveled to Mexico for the holidays and I was able to truly breathe. And as I try to center myself, I did what I don’t do enough of; I opened my Photos and looked at all the pictures of art last year. These came from exhibitions, in major museums and local galleries, plus art, architecture, and design in places we traveled.

I could have been more productive today and written a few different pieces. But this was restorative. And that is a good thing, to quote Martha Stewart.

So, below is my year in art. All pictures are mine. My self-imposed constraint was that I could pick only one per art exhibit or event. Along the art are creativity tidbits that they made me think of.

Consume as you please. Here in chronological order. Because it turns out that I go to a lot of art events, this is part 1, January through June. Stay tuned next week for the rest of the year.

Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. Conjuring the Spirit World: Art, Magic, and Mediums. I don’t know how David Copperfield disappeared the Statue of Liberty. Knowing would ruin the magic for me. But I do study the creative process and the magic is not tarnished by understanding. We are creatures of multitudes.

New York. Art in the subway. Creativity is everywhere. It takes heart to go towards wonder.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350. Creativity takes the right environment. And part of it is getting lucky to be at the right place at the right time (In Siena, the golden period ended with the great plague).

Hudson Yards, New York. Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy - The Shed. Play is at the heart of creativity. Joyful, fun, serious. This event was more fun than I thought was legal.

Poster House, New York. Fantastical Streets: The Theatrical Posters of Boris Bućan. As a child, I walked by this poster many (many!) times completely captivated. Don’t think I fully understood it, but I was drawn to it. Reminds me of ambiguity and struggling with uncertainty that is at the center of creativity.

Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Jo Sandman: Skin Deep. Inspiration comes from unexpected places and thrives in supportive communities. If I could travel in time, I would love to visit the Black Mountain College. If you don’t know of it, google is your friend. I don’t think you will regret falling into this particular rabbit hole. What would a similar place look like now?

Scottsdale, Arizona, Wonderspace. There are studies showing that places with arts and artists thrive economically. Wondering if it is broader than that and really about wonder.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. Inspiration (and creativity) from constraint. Of materials and landscapes.

Mary Colter’s Lookout Studio at the Grand Canyon. Why do we all know Frank Lloyd Wright’s name, but not Mary Colter’s?

Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA. Edvard Munch: Technically Speaking. He painted this scene many times. Experimenting. Looking. Trying. Writing is similar. Because a lot of it is revising. Communicating is similar. Exploring different versions of the message. Design is similar…

Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH. Nicolas Party and Surrealism. The first surrealist manifesto was published in 1924. Revisiting surrealism some 100 years later brings more creativity. I came to the science of creativity reading and drawing inspiration from the first wave of research in the 1950s and 1960s. And never stopped asking how can we learn from the past, engage with it, and re-initiate leads that might have been abandoned.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson. Humanity is big in this art. Beauty. And also ugliness of how we treat each other. What can we learn? How can we seek our humanity and center in it, now that we are on the verge of a new technological era of the artificial?

Providence, RI. Artist, Megan Hall. Present meets past meets future. I think that is what creativity does. Draws on what has been done, does it now, looking ahead.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits. Creativity happens in the social context. The postman made famous in this portrait was a friend who visited Van Gogh when he was hospitalized. And would he have been able to paint without his brother’s support? And without his sister-in-law’s championing, after Theo died, would we know of him?

Museum of Modern Art, New York. Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers. Speaking of time. She was moving into abstraction before Kandinsky did, but not showing her works. Kandinsky independently moved into abstraction. We have agency, but that agency is embedded in our time and place.

New York. Robert Indiana, Hope. Our times are backwards, making hope ever more important. A few years ago, I did a study that showed that artists are more likely than people in general to have psychological strengths (including hope) while also having some vulnerabilities (such as stress and anxiety). It might help to remind ourselves that they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Creation makes us vulnerable, but requires hope that we can make it anyway.

New Hampshire Art Association, Portsmouth, NH. Artist, Darren Taylor. We admire creativity when it captures some essence. This painting is the Kusama-est Kusama portrait I saw. Not just dots, but the intensity. It reminds me how Steve Jobs could tell the essence of what people wanted even when they (we) could not tell ourselves.

More on inspiration, where to look for it, and find it, in Chapter 5 of The Creativity Choice :)

The great Monty Python asked a great question: What have the Romans ever done for us? If you want to see it for yourself again, you do so here.

As the impassioned speaker gets carried away, from the audience there is a suggestion:

“The aqueduct”

He stops in his tracks: “What?”

“The aqueduct”

So he acknowledges, grudgingly: “Oh, yeah, yeah, they did give us that, that’s true, yeah”

There is another suggestion from the audience: “And sanitation”

Hmm, he has to acknowledge this too: “Oh yeah, sanitation. Remember what the city used to be like. Yeah, all right, I’ll grant you, the aqueduct and sanitation are two things the Romans have done.”

“And the roads”

Cannot be ignored, “Well, yeah, obviously the roads, I mean, the roads go without saying. Don’t they? But apart from sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads?”

“Irrigation”

“Medicine”

“Yeah, yeah, fair enough”

“And the wine”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s something we’d really miss”

Which brings me to an obvious next question, What have the arts ever do for us? Let’s see…

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The arts taught us to tolerate uncertainty and doubt

Creativity is uncertain. If you are going to do something original, you cannot be certain that you can do it (you can hope and suspect) and you cannot be certain how relevant people will react to what you create. The former creates anxiety and self-doubt, the latter a sense of reputational risk (Are they going to think this is silly? Will they think I am stepping on toes?; ‘they’ being who ever happen to be important evaluators and decision makers, from teachers and mentors to critics and reviewers and bosses).

Yet, Vincent van Gogh said, “I am always doing what I can’t do yet in order to learn how to do it.” Pursuing challenges builds skills and confidence and it increases the chance of experiencing flow, a state of consciousness Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi who first described it called optimal experience (Note to self. Write about creativity and flow. Stay tuned. That would be a nice way to start a new year).

And the wonderful Georgia O’Keeffe said, “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life; and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.” Discomfort does not need to stop us in our tracks. If you simply cannot become comfortable with discomfort (whatever that means anyway), be like Georgia O’Keeffe.

The curve of confidence is not smooth even for the most eminent artists, but they accept it. Pablo Picasso called Paul Cezanne “the father of us all”. If you had doubts, consider the roller-coaster Cezanne was riding when he wrote:

“It is so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvass.”

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.”

“Painting is damn difficult. You always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.”

But also:

“The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.”

“With an apple, I will astonish Paris.”

Indeed, research shows creative confidence is the lowest at the start of the process (“in front of a blank canvass”) and greatest just as we are approaching the end (and about to astonish Paris).

The arts show us how to find inspiration

Inspiration comes from everywhere and it comes from non-obvious places. Leonardo da Vinci wrote in The Treatise on Painting, “I will not omit to introduce among these precepts a new kind of speculative invention, which though apparently trifling, and almost laughable, is nevertheless of great utility in assisting the genius to find variety in composition. By looking attentively at old and smeared walls, or stones and veined marble of various colors, you may fancy that you see in them several compositions, landscapes, battles, figures in quick motion, strange countenances, and dresses, with an infinity of other objects. By these confused lines the inventive genius is excited to new exertions.”

That is just beautiful. Sometimes I wish we still spoke like that.

Artists look and notice. And they collect. They collect objects they find fascinating or intriguing. Picasso’s studios were cluttered with everyday objects like old newspapers, wrapping paper, or bits of clots, but he also had a collection of African masks and sculptures from Oceania. And they became inspirational.

Designers stockpile bits and pieces for future use, sometimes incorporating them into their work years later. Writers do the same thing. In Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green talked about using the Notes app on his phone as a depository of observations that can become a spark.

The arts show us that emotions are not the enemy

When I asked artists in a study what emotions they feel in the process of daily work on turning their ideas into something tangible, they talked about joy, happiness, and excitement, but also frustration, sadness, and anxiety. They did not think of emotions as something to put aside, but to draw on, whether that be creating a story by imagining what is going on in a life of a woman looking overwhelmingly sad walking in front of their house or expressing the calm of a snowy day in a painting.

The power of emotions to fuel creativity is not limited to artists. Artists may express what they see directly, but the rest of us can use emotions to point us in the direction of needs to be addressed or opportunities to be pursued. Notice your students are bored or detached? Time to try something new. You are frustrated by a work process? Perhaps it could be redesigned.

An artist in my study said, “Failure is the most common experience in creation. I’ve done enough pieces to know that failure, feelings of uncertainty, can be overcome in ways that are not always immediately visible.”

Of course, they did not enjoy failure. But they knew it is part of the process. It is part of any creative process, but artists understand that it does not necessarily indicate a lack of ability or capacity to create. Rather, it is something to overcome and manage. And they know that when stuck, two big kinds of strategies help. The first is to step away and come back to the work in a new sitting. And the second is to use all the ways we know how to open our thinking, “I follow methods learned in school: do the same theme/idea/ composition again in a different size, material. I may take a picture of the painting, print it out in smaller size, cut it up to re-arrange the composition, etc.”

These are not the only things the arts have ever given us. Not by far. But it is a good place to pause and ponder and take to heart.

An index of sorts. The Creativity Choice has more on:

Uncertainties and risks in creative work: Chapter 2

Finding inspiration and identifying problems: Chapter 5

Harnessing the power of emotions to optimize creativity: Chapter 6

Dealing with creative blocks: Chapter 8

The goal of education is to build potential. Creativity matters and building creative potential matters. This does not happen to be a piece about whether schools kill creativity (I think the answer to that is more complex than it seems; stay tuned for another time). Here, I want to talk to educators and schools committed to developing creative potential.

I keep being asked what small actions people could take quickly to develop creativity. So here is my list. It is not going to teach all there is to know about creativity, but it might be a place to start.

When I started writing this, I had educators in mind. But these lessons and strategies are broadly applicable. After I finished the piece, I went back and added to each strategy a note about how it could apply more generally. If you are a parent. Or a professional in just about any domain of human endeavor.

Teach what to expect in the creative process

Creative process is not linear. That means there will be ups and downs. Not all ideas will be good and ultimately worth pursuing. There will be obstacles or dead ends. Ideas will change as we develop them and we will have to revise and edit (more than once!).

It is important to teach this explicitly. If students do not understand the nature of the creative process, they can misinterpret their challenges as indicating their lack of creative ability. Hearing it and seeing evidence that even experienced and by all measures good writers (or artists or scientists or designers etc.) change and revise their work will help.

You can introduce these ideas to children as a parent. It took me a number of tries until I truly convinced my son that I too have to edit my writing and that editing and revising is not diagnostic of an inability to write well.

If you are a professional, chances are you understand creativity is not linear. But chances are also that reminding yourself of it when self-doubts surface might help you re-center.

Build on existing interests (and develop new ones)

Ideas do not come from a vacuum. Inspiration comes from drawing on different interests. Pablo Picasso was inspired by objects he collected, such as art by his contemporaries or African masks, and a long-running correspondence with Henri Matisse. Salvador Dali was inspired by science, early on by psychology and psychotherapy that were emerging at the time and later by nuclear physics. He was deeply engaged in these fields, subscribing and reading journals and writing notes in the margins.

Educators can capitalize on student interests. A teacher discussing the first amendment can suggest that a student who is interested in the arts connect the lesson to historical instances of the first amendment challenges related to the arts. The outcome will be inspiration and boosted motivation.

Parents often curate opportunities for children, especially young ones. Allowing children to explore diverse interests will be more helpful for creativity than grittily sticking to one interest in a building a resume kind of way.

Similarly, in our professional lives we hear a lot about staying focused. Yes, but not to the exclusion of openness. You don’t know what will be for you what calligraphy was for Steve Jobs. Source of inspiration from an interest unrelated to your focus.

Nudge self-talk

Working on creative projects includes frustration. Frustration of not making as much progress as we were hoping, frustration of running into obstacles, frustration of our creation not quite living up to our vision (yet!). Out of frustration, we often tell ourselves we should be better and do better.

When they are frustrated, ask students what they would say to a friend if they described going through something similar. Chances are they would not tell a friend they simply need to be better. Instead, they would show kindness. If they can extend some of that kindness to themselves. And the outcome of this little exercise is self-compassion, which can take off the sharpest edge of frustration. It will not transform it to calm or happiness, but it will likely make it possible to re-engage and start making progress again.

I surely don’t have to tell you that this one applies to everyone. Yes, you too.

Ask for creativity

Researchers found something surprising. They conducted experiments in which one group of people was given the standard instruction on a creative thinking test – come up with as many ideas as you can. Another group got that instruction plus two additional words – be creative.

The group that was asked to be creative was consistently more creative than the one that did not explicitly get instructed to be creative.

A simple action: educators should ask students to be creative. The outcome will be that students recognize the opportunity for creativity and get a sense that they have the permission to be creative.

Ask your children to be creative. In their drawings, writing, Lego builds… and see what happens. It can get them used to the word, the concept, and its value. And ask people you work with or even yourself how you can approach a problem creatively. Your mindset can switch from the search for one solution to experimenting with different approaches.

Harness supports for creative thinking and doing

Even when creative work is solitary, it is influenced by others, either directly or indirectly. Different kinds of relationships help different stages in the creative process. Weak ties – contact with people at the edges of our networks, those we don’t talk to often, are best for idea generation. On the other hand, strong ties – contact with people close to us, are most helpful when we work to develop and implement ideas.

Why? Because we don’t know how those we don’t often talk to think. And chances are they think in ways different from ours and can provide valuable new perspectives.

When we talk to those we are close with, they will provide support. Acknowledge our ideas. And they are able to build on them, thus helping us to develop ideas.

So, simple action. Educators can proactively scaffold student thinking and provide just the right kind of support at different times in student projects. Pairing students with peers they don’t often talk to early in the developing a project will make coming up with ideas smoother. And pairing students with friends later on in the creative project will make the process of developing ideas smoother.

You can also do this purposefully in your professional life. Reach out to people at the edges of your social network when considering new ideas and concentrate on team members or close colleagues when working to develop them. You have to be intentional and willing to engage when you don’t have all the answers.

Making quick and easy changes is not insignificant. It will not be sufficient to develop creative potential and enable it to be realized. But it can be the first step. When small steps have a visible impact, we gain creative confidence and become willing to take more and more ambitious action.

An index of sorts. The Creativity Choice has more on:

Building on diverse interests and inspiration: Chapter 5, on problem finding

Nudging self talk as part of the managing emotions: Chapter 7

Asking for creativity: Chapter 4 on the creative drive

Harnessing supports for creative thinking and doing: Chapter 9

Task is to describe The Creativity Choice by filling in the gaps:

_____________ meets _____________ but _____________

The Creativity Choice is…

Mindset meets Grit, but for creativity

How we think of creativity is indeed the first step, one that helps the decision to embark onto the path of doing something creative or discourages us from it. If we consider creativity to be a trait, something you are born with or not, it can be easy to start thinking we might not have it. The giveaways of the trait mindset are primarily talking about creativity in terms of talent, brilliance, and being gifted.

If we think that creativity can be built and developed, then it becomes a matter of doing it. Grit is a ready association to determination and the power of doggedly doing. The science, including my own research, shows it is not exactly grit that creative people have, but a calculated pursuits of diverse interests, with continuous flexible adjusting of how we approach the work.

One thing we know about creativity quite reliably is that the first ideas are often not the most original. And I figured, let’s play this analogy game some more.

Creative Confidence meets Atomic Habits, but for creative doing

This one is variation on the theme of the first analogy. But that is how creative thinking works. One idea sparks another in its vicinity. Just this time, instead of mindsets about creativity, we are talking about confidence which fuels the creative process. Once in motion, we also need to sustain it, and that is a matter of building strategies that can help along the way. They can be habits – I always write in the late afternoons – but they are also principles and guides to help us plan and shape the approach to work.

Creativity Inc. meets Outliers, but for the rest of us

Creativity Inc. is one of my all time favorite creativity books. It is a story of Pixar and how they do their magic. If one reads carefully, there are a lot of lessons relevant for creative work on complex projects and large teams. But just like Outliers, it can be hard to imagine ourselves in those situations and seeing the world like the amazingly successful.

Drive meets Creativity but with how to put it to work

Drive makes the key point about the importance of what motivates us and how. Intrinsic motivation, being driven by the enjoyment and challenge of work, is important for the world of work and creativity in particular. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention tells a story of eminent creators who have done it, who have lived creativity. The Creativity Choice focuses on the how and what we can do to make creativity happen. Essentially, it goes behind the scenes and pulls apart the tangled strands that when braided together can transform ideas into performances and products.

Wired to Create meets Permission to Feel, but for our everyday creative work

Building on the science of personality and development, Wired to Create asks what is different about creative people. The biggest lesson is that of openness to experience – an approach to thinking and action that is expansive, from having broad interests (on which inspiration can be built) to an attitude of allowing oneself to daydream and explore new ideas and perspectives. Permission to Feel is a powerful guide to understanding that our emotions are not good or bad, but that they provide information about the world around us. And it teaches us that we have agency in relation to them. The Creativity Choice asks how the often hidden emotional side of creativity can work for us and we with it so that we take the ideas and our openness to experiences and make them into something tangible.

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Now, this was a fun exercise. And it made me think of creativity exercises more broadly. What would be the effect of regular practice of creative thinking? Oddly, the science of creativity does not have an answer (yet). I have some hypotheses. First, if we routinely practiced creative thinking, it might become more habitual. That is, when facing a problem, we might ask ourselves how we can approach it creatively. And second, if we practiced creative thinking, we might be less likely to experience anxiety when creative thinking is called for.

Of course, we can create our own creativity gym, but that is yet another thing to do. And let’s face it, might not happen. But there are creative thinking gyms out there ready to try. In full disclosure, I might be biased toward Messier, an app with lots of choices for creative thinking practice, whatever medium or topic you like. I am one of the scientific advisors for the app. You might not ‘feel’ creative when you get that notification, but learning how to engage creative thinking on demand is certainly important in real life. Or if you like something you can hold in your hands, there are card sets that provide prompts and creative inspiration. My favorite: Creative Sprint and Zig Zag Creativity Cards

There are still a few signed copies of The Creativity Choice available from Zibby’s bookstore. You can get yours here. And here is me signing it.

Please hit the ‘Like’ button if you enjoyed this article. It helps other find it.

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There is a common belief that children are more creative than adults. A recent study in six countries around the world showed that this belief is held by 68% of people overall.

Alas, if we start by defining creativity and then use this definition to measure it at different ages, we find quite the opposite.

Definition first. Creativity is something that is both original and appropriate or effective in some way. When we talk about children, it makes more sense to examine creative potential than achievement. Preschoolers are not starting new business ventures, elementary school students are not developing new ways to treat disease, and middle schoolers are not having solo exhibits at major museums. There are rare exceptions of child prodigies, but they are not what we are here for today.

Creative potential has two major forms: abilities to think creatively and traits that describe preferences or typical ways of engaging with the world.

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Potential for creative thinking

Creative thinking abilities have been studied in children and adults for decades. Researchers wanted to learn as much as possible about creative thinking potential that does not depend of knowledge or education and developed game-like tests. One such test asks people to thinking of all the ways that an everyday object could be used. How could you use a brick? Or a knife? Or a tin can? Another test asks people to imagine what would happen if something whimsical was true – if we could talk to animals, if it was possible to become invisible at will, if sleep was not necessary any more. Other tests present a set of simple shapes (e.g., circles) and ask people to use them as a starting point and complete as many drawings as they can.

When tests like these are given to preschool-aged children all the way to adults, a general trend of increase in creative thinking abilities is found. There is no evidence of a decrease in the ability to think creatively when children enter school. Or, there is no evidence that school kills children’s ability to think creatively.

Analyzing results across 41 studies with more than 40,000 participants, results show an increase in the ability to come up with many different answers, ability to produce diverse answers, and answers that are more original. There is one point in early adolescence when creative thinking ability dips – scientists call it the 7^thgrade slump. But this slump is short lived and creative thinking abilities continue to climb into later adolescence and adulthood.

Why do these thinking abilities increase? Because creative ideas do not come out of a vacuum. Ideas are pulled from and built on experiences. Younger children simply have fewer experiences than older ones and adults. Older adolescents and adults can come up with more ideas about what would happen if people could become invisible at will because they were in a broader range of life situations, including uncomfortable or difficult ones where invisibility could come in handy.

Potential for creative action

Another part of creative potential is about imagination and curiosity. These are the traits of creative potential because they describe a desire to engage with fantasy, explore and be playful, and try out new things.

This is where the impression of children’s greater creativity comes from. Young children are spontaneous and uninhibited. They are not bound in their imagination by what is possible or probable in the physical world. They don’t know what laws of physics are and therefore cannot be bound by them as they build fantasy worlds.

Imagination is at the core of the personality trait of openness to experience. And indeed, this trait decreases sharply from childhood to middle adolescence and then starts increasing, although more slowly.

When we think that creativity is higher in children than adults, we are adopting a view of creativity as a trait. However, fantasy and imagination are not sufficient for creativity. Remember the definition of creativity? Originality that is part of childhood whimsy becomes true creativity only when it can be appropriate or effective. Have an original idea for a board game? It will only be creative if it has game attributes – it can be played with a set of rules and has internal coherence. These abilities to develop something complex where all parts work together increases with age.

When we think that children’s creativity is greater than that of adults we also put value on freedom and being unconstrained. We think that is the basis of great creativity. But counterintuitively, creativity is actually greater when constrained.

That might be a topic for another post.

To learn more about how to transform creative potential into action and achievement, check out my new book, The Creativity Choice.

Sneak peak:

When we talk about creativity, we celebrate all that it is - new insights, new solutions, revolutionary breakthroughs.

But what is creativity? Scientists define it unanimously as something that is in the same time original and effective.

And our mind goes to new vaccines that cure previously deadly or disabling diseases, our favorite gadgets or consumer products, works of literature or art that move and enrich.

But new ways of cheating on a test are creative too (if original and effective), terrorist actions can be creative, the invention and social/cultural influence of social media are creative, communications that spread dangerous ideologies are creative.

Our intuition that creativity = better world is not true.

It can be, but it does not have to be. And knowing that can help us to be mindful.

Other intuitions about creativity are not helpful either.

That it is primarily about art and design.

That children are most creative and lose it with time (and through education).

That you have to be confident to be creative.

Join us for more. And if you prefer to read about it, stay tuned here for a recap.

One of the stops on our journey was Amiens, a city in the Somme River Valley. It got on our list for its cathedral (more than double in size than the Notre Dame in Paris!), but the most memorable was the visit to the house of Jules Verne.

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My son read many of his books in middle school and is a big fan. We were going to visit the house to give him a break from all the churches all the time. I read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 7^th grade, but I read it because it was required and not because I wanted to. So, I was not primed to be personally excited about this house museum.

But creativity (including learning about creativity) is about broad interests and surprises.

What I knew about Jules Verne can fit in a few bullet points. He was one of the great 19^th century writers who published in serialized magazines. He is monumentally popular, the third most translated author in the world, after Agatha Christie and Shakespeare. And I knew that he was the father of science fiction, having anticipated travel to the Moon and submarines and flying machines. Plus some I did not know he anticipated, like holograms and video conferencing.

We tend to take ‘father of’ to mean that the individual in question envisioned pieces of the future in his vast imagination. Because genius.

But I have written here about creativity being social.

The truth is that even when we take the message of creativity being social to heart, we need to remind ourselves of it. I certainly know creativity is social, but was surprised to learn that the father of science fiction might not have been without the influence of his editor and publisher.

Jules Verne did not start writing what we now consider science fiction. He made his literary debut with a stage comedy, followed by a historical adventure and a travel story.

Only when he started working with Pierre-Jules Hetzel who also published literary greats such as Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Émile Zola, did Jules Verne venture into themes he is some 150+ years later famous for. Hetzel founded an educational magazine for young readers with a goal of bringing together scientists, authors, and illustrators to both educate and entertain. He saw potential in Verne and his meticulously researched narrative of far away places, their nature, and history, and offered him a long-term contract. He would publish Verne’s novels serialized in the magazine and they would appear in bound book form toward the end of the year (in time to be gifted for Christmas).

Hetzel encouraged Verne to think big and steered him into exploring scientific and technological developments. Thanks to the correspondence between the two men, we can see how much the publisher influenced the writer. Without this relationship, it is possible that Verne would have continued his career in finance and theater, but not become a prolific novelist.

If he met a different publisher, perhaps he would have still become a novelist, but continued to write about travel, exploration, and history.

The observation that the genius of Jules Verne emerged in relationship with another great creator does not diminish his accomplishments. He wrote wildly popular books that captured the imagination of children and adults alike for a long time. But he did not think of it all on his own. That is how creativity works.

There is comfort in this realization. We do not have to sit in front of our computers and expect to solve all the problems and envision all the visions on our own. A great like Jules Verne did not. The rest of us will not either. It does help to be open to making connections and considering new perspectives and directions.

I have been working on an emotion diary app How We Feel for a while. It helps people describe their emotions, provides words for those times when we just cannot find the right term to pinpoint what is going on in our lives, builds our emotion vocabulary, and provides tools to expand our repertoire of strategies to more effectively manage our emotions. You can check it out here if curious; it is free to use.

Part of working on this app is to learn from customer feedback. The app has 144 pre-built feelings, but much of the feedback ends up expressing a desire or a need for additional emotion words. And that is what got me thinking of the word creative as a feeling.

Of course, I heard people talking about feeling or not feeling creative. I just never before paused to consider what is behind it and whether it is really helpful to talk about creativity as a feeling.

Well, I don’t think it is.

Let’s start with what is behind this statement and then see why it is not helpful.

When we say we feel creative we imply that:

1. Creativity depends on a particular kind of feeling or emotion

2. People associate feeling creative with positive and energized moods that broaden thinking and make us playful and daring.

3. By implication, what we do when we do not feel this way, well, is not creative.

Creativity is indeed influenced by our feelings. We can be inspired by seeing someone suffer, for instance. This is how Doug Dietz, design and development lead at General Electric, created an MRI experience tailored to children who were terrified of going through the diagnostic machine (He made it into a pirate adventure, making previously scary noises and crammed space into a meaningful and fun experience). Or we can draw on our own emotions and those of people around us in writing (e.g., Amanda Groman’s poem The Hill We Climb expresses hope) and art (from Edward Hopper drawing from disconnection in his early years as a struggling artist to Ansel Adams’ profound reverence for the vast landscapes of the American West).

These examples show that creativity we can see and experience in works of art or design or products that impact our lives comes from a broad range of feelings. There isn’t one kind of feeling that is uniquely associated with creativity.

Yet, we say we feel creative when we feel buoyant. Energized. Enthusiastic.

How do we square this?

The problem is that we consider creativity to be an act of unrestrained idea generation. It is true that in pleasant energized moods our thinking is more expansive. If you had to think of new ideas for topics to cover in a newsletter or a series of essays, feeling happy is truly helpful. We can indeed come up with more ideas and more original ideas in a short period of time and we feel more confident in our abilities when we are happy.

But this is not the only kind of mood that can lead to creative ideas. When we are activated in an unpleasant way, we can also come up with creative ideas, such as thinking of how to redesign something we find frustrating or ideas for making a technology more accessible.

Another issue in saying that we feel (or do not feel) creative at any given time is the implication that what we do in different mental and emotional states is not creative. We think that it is not creative when we sit to review and revise what we have drafted before – whether that be something we are writing, a design prototype, or a new work process.

And that is where the problem lies. If you accept that creativity ends with something tangible, it is not just an idea for an essay, but an essay written. It is not just a thought, “That could be a great song lyric”, but completed lyrics to a song. It is not something shared with a colleague about how work can be improved, but actual design of a new work process. To get from a thought in our heads to something in the world, we need not only to think in broad ways – something we call creative thinking in everyday life – but we also need to test these ideas, revise them when we discover they don’t work in reality like we imagined them in our minds, and generally improve them. This is all part of the creative process, although it does not ‘feel’ creative and we do not do it when ‘feeling’ creative.

What we mean by feeling creative is just a very narrow slice of the creative process. One that we unfortunately idealize and even fetishize. But not the hardest one. Not only one kind of feeling will help creativity, but many – enthusiasm that broadens thinking, downcast moods that narrow it and enable us to evaluate and critically think about what we drafted, determination to push us on, curiosity to keep us asking questions, frustration to make us volunteer to solve those problems we see.

There is much more about emotions and creativity in The Creativity Choice: how to use them (Chapter 6), how to manage them (Chapter 7), and how to cope with them when they get overwhelming in times of creative block (Chapter 8).

Last week, The New York Times Well section ran a 5-day creativity challenge. The basic premise of the series was that creativity can be learned and that it can be practiced. Small acts of creativity can prime us to think in more creative ways in our everyday and professional lives.

Creativity skills can indeed be learned. We have studies analyzing the collective scientific literature and the evidence is reliable.

Whether small acts of everyday creativity, like exercises in this challenge really boost creativity in other activities, like solving everyday problems, enhancing our relationships, or making us more creative in our jobs has not been explicitly studied. I think it is a valid hypothesis to test, but it still remains to be done.

Personally, I think that creative thinking exercises can enhance our creativity in other aspects of life if we use them as a reminder that many situations without a single correct answer can be approached with a creative mindset. This is what my husband often does by explicitly saying, “How can we do this creatively?”

The challenge started with a warm-up activity – doodling. The task of the day was to complete 10 drawings, each starting with a circle. Creativity scholars call this a divergent thinking task. These kinds of exercises can take different forms, from asking for drawings to thinking of different uses for common everyday objects (e.g., a tin can) to thinking of consequences of wild and unlikely events (e.g., what would happen if people could become invisible at will). They all have in common having multiple possible responses.

Day 2 of the challenge focused on constraints (and featured The Creativity Choice). Counterintuitively, creativity can benefit from constraints. It does not seem like it subjectively because hearing that we have to follow rules that limit our choice tends to feels frustrating. The daily challenge was to compose a poem using only the words provided.

Recent research shows that approximately 70% of people (in six different countries!) believe that creativity is the greatest when we have full freedom of action. But without being given any guides or guardrails, the mind tends to go to the most common (and therefore not very original) ideas. Constraints can direct thinking into more creative directions. If you are asked to think of uses for a knife and told to list only uses in gardening, you will not start with something so commonplace as cutting food or spreading butter.

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Day 3 of the challenge was about daydreaming. Our culture is obsessed with productivity, maximizing and optimizing just about everything. And mind-wandering is defined as mental time not on task. By definition, we are not optimizing productivity and this can feel like a waste of time. But this is not so when it comes to creativity. Research shows one in five new ideas arriving when the mind wanders. And this is particularly true when we experience an impasse or a creative block.

Letting our thoughts wander allows them to go into new directions. Which in turn can help us connect concepts or ideas in new ways.

Day 4 challenged us to put more effort into coming up with ideas. When researchers compared people’s expectations of which ideas would be most creative to objective measures of which ideas were most creative, a striking thing happened – reality was the exact opposite of intuition. People expected the first ideas to be the best, perhaps because our culture celebrates the sparks of inspiration that seemingly come out of thin air. In reality, with more time and effort, people come up with more creative ideas.

The final day of the challenge asked people to try a new experience, with lots of fun suggestions, from joining a community walk to adding pickled onions to different recipes to listening an audiobook with an ensemble cast. Openness to experience is the best predictor of creativity, no matter what people do. Being open to experiences means being curious, enjoying playing with ideas and new perspectives. Because those who are open to experiences do not stay narrowly focused on a single interest, but sample from different fields, they are able to make connections that others do not.

I followed this challenge on Instagram and noticed something curious. The daydreaming post had most likes by far, more than 5 times as many as other posts. The post with the fewest likes was the one asking people to boost their creativity by putting in more effort.

In the words of ChatGPT, the daydreaming post is calm, reflective, and gentle. It describes the difficulty of the challenge as low to perhaps moderate because some people might find it tricky to intentionally daydream. On the other hand, it describes the sentiment behind the 10% more effort post as motivational, urging effort and persistence, and of high difficulty because it requires pushing mental effort beyond what people consider comfortable.

As I reflected on engagement with this challenge, I wondered what it says about our desire for creativity. We say we want it, but do we want it even if it is hard? Are we willing to put the time, effort, and learning into it? Or do we prefer to find comfort in the thought that daydreaming can be good for creative thinking? The caveat to daydreaming, just like to serendipity and what we usually call luck is that they happen and are helpful only when we have a prepared mind. Daydreaming or mind-wandering are particularly helpful when people are experiencing a creative block. These are times when we tried, but failed. And usually we react by trying harder and spending more time on the problem or task.

The truth is that there is no way around it – creativity that is not limited to fantasy or flights of fancy, but solves problems, develops performances, or products, is hard.

So, do you really want to be creative?

Your answer is yes, I really want to be more creative. The Creativity Choice brings science of creativity answers to help bridge the gap between having ideas and making them happen.

I write about the importance of growth mindsets for creativity and research showing that creativity attitudes and skills can be learned. I have even developed and tested programs that can help build creativity.

So, I was very excited when my son’s elementary school adopted a STEAM program. The school was going to teach creativity.

They started with divergent thinking games. Think of all the uses for … a shoe… a knife… tin can.

This was fun and fun is important. But it was also a missed opportunity.

Because there was no observation or reflection about it. Children could have learned that the first ideas are not the most creative ones. When I spoke with my son, then and since, I would tell him that if I could only impart one lesson about creativity it would be that the first ideas are rarely the best.

Research shows that people’s intuition about the flow of ideas and the reality are in exact opposition. People think that their first ideas are the most creative perhaps because of the belief that the spark of creativity matters above all. Because these ideas can be experienced having come upon them.

As I have been doing the grand tour of creativity-related podcasts with The Creativity Choice, I noticed that this fact about creative ideas seems counterintuitive even to experienced creators. Seems. But once the conversation gets going and they reflect on the creative process, it quickly become clear that indeed the initial ideas change, evolve, and are even often completely abandoned for something completely different in the course of creative work.

This would have been a great lesson to teach 3^rd graders.

Also, this is rather liberating. If your first idea is not great, it is not because you were not endowed by magic creativity fairy dust and it does not mean you will not produce anything of value. It means that you have to continue thinking and working. With effort and engagement with the problem, ever better ideas will emerge.

What students learned from divergent thinking games is that creative thinking can go in different directions and have many answers. But they did not learn that the mind starts with what is obvious and gets more original as we persist.

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Another exercise in this STEAM program was a design challenge. Students were asked to devise a way for a gondola to travel a short distance carrying a small object and they were provided materials they could use.

There was a catch. Students were not allowed to play with the materials. Instead, they were asked to think about it and write down step by step what they would do to build the gondola. Planning is one of the skills of executive functioning and teachers wanted to teach both creativity and executive functioning.

The trouble is that planning does not work in the creative process in this form.

The students tried, but failed. Of course they failed. It is simply not possible to plan creative work step by step. And it is not possible to do something creative without playing with the materials, feeling them, trying them out, experimenting with one combination and then another.

Process of experimentation is important for artists putting together a still life drawing, for start ups comparing different features of their products, and for professional designers at work. How much people do it makes a big difference. Artists who spend more time in this process of playing with art objects create pieces judged by art professors and critics as more creative. Startups that do it have 20-40% greater chance of surviving.

I am not sure what students learned in this challenge. My son concluded that he was not good at it. I suspect other students might have gotten the same message.

But researchers have shown that professional designers who were not allowed to physically manipulate their materials did not tend to be successful either. Not because they were not capable, but because such manipulation is necessary for successful creativity.

Let’s go back to that elementary school classroom. What if the next day students worked on a design challenge by being encouraged to explore building materials? They could have seen the difference in outcomes without play and with it and learned that exploration is not frivolous, but a way to solve problems creatively.

That was a missed teaching opportunity. Not because of bad teachers. These were exceptionally caring teachers who realized the importance of creativity. Rather, because teachers are themselves not taught about the nature of creativity.

So we continue taking myths about creativity with us to the world of work. Unless we are proactive in learning the lessons we might have missed. Growth mindset in action.

Frank Barron, a creativity scholar in the first golden age of creativity research during the space race of the 1950s and 1960s, described creative individuals as “at once both naive and knowledgeable, destructive and constructive, occasionally crazier yet adamantly saner”. As the United States competed with the Soviet Union, it became apparent that we needed to better understand who was creative and who could be creative. Barron was in the middle of creativity research at the University of California at Berkeley where he and his colleagues studied different groups of people like graduate students, mathematicians, artists, and architects. They did not test a single hypothesis or idea at a time, but involved study participants in multiple days of assessments, including cognitive tests, personality questionnaires, observations, and discussions. If creative individuals could be “at once both naive and knowledgeable, destructive and constructive, occasionally crazier yet adamantly saner," what did that look like?

In my lab, we recruited two groups of people to examine this question: visual artists who were faculty at top art schools and a general sample of people who were not selected to be especially creative. We decided to study artists because they have to be professionally creative (although, of course, art is not the only way to be creative). All participants completed measures of creativity in their everyday life. They were not just asked about artistic creativity, but also creativity in the sciences, technology or invention, writing, entrepreneurship, design, humor, or cooking.

We asked all participants to complete a set of assessments of various psychological resources and vulnerabilities. All psychological vulnerabilities studied – including stress, anxiety, and depression – were shown in previous research to negatively affect both mental and physical health. We did not examine anxiety and depression as mental illness diagnoses, but rather asked questions about everyday experiences of anxiety and depression-related feelings and symptoms. For example, we asked how often in the previous week people “found it difficult to work up the initiative to do things," how often they “found it hard to wind down," or “experienced breathing difficulty (e.g., excessively rapid breathing, breathlessness in the absence of physical exertion)."

All psychological resources we studied – hope, psychological well-being, and ego resiliency – were shown in previous research to predict positive life outcomes. Hope is the “I will get through this” attitude combined with a consideration of multiple and flexible ways towards one’s goals. Ego resiliency is one’s capacity to successfully recover from difficulties; those with high ego resiliency describe themselves as having a “strong” personality, as recovering quickly from being startled, as able to find things that keep them interested in their daily lives, and as managing to leave a positive impression on others. Similarly, psychological well-being includes a sense of purpose in life, personal growth, self-acceptance, a sense of competence in responding to everyday challenges, a sense of autonomy, and positive relations with others. These qualities are psychological resources because they predict more positive outcomes when facing illness (such as multiple sclerosis) or when having to deal with challenging life experiences (e.g., being a parent of a child with a behavioral disorder), and are related to biomarkers of physical health (e.g., lower cardiovascular risk, gene expression profiles related to less inflammation). These psychological resources contribute to mental and physical health even after taking into account adjustment before the illness or other challenges and taking into account the severity of symptoms.

What did our study find? First, artists showed more anxiety and stress, but also greater hope, ego resiliency, and psychological well-being. In this way, artists are both better off than the general population (because they have higher psychological resources) and worse off (because they have higher psychological vulnerabilities).

In addition to examining each of the vulnerabilities and resources separately, we studied combinations of resources and vulnerabilities. For most people, more vulnerabilities are related to fewer resources. It makes sense that if people experience more symptoms of stress, anxiety, or depression, they are less likely to have hope or be psychologically well. However, this pattern of higher vulnerabilities and fewer psychological resources does not apply to everyone. About a quarter of people have both average vulnerabilities and average resources and one in ten have above-average vulnerabilities and resources.

Artists were more likely to show both vulnerabilities and resources than non-artists. We recruited artists as they are known for their creativity, but we were not interested in only artistic creativity. We also examined creativity more generally, beyond visual arts, and found that more creative individuals are more likely to be at the same time above average in psychological vulnerabilities and resources.

In other words, Frank Barron was right. There is something “occasionally crazier yet adamantly saner” about creative individuals. Creative individuals are not uniquely better off (or happier) or worse off (as the stereotype of the suffering artist implies). Rather, they balance vulnerabilities and resources. It is likely that their resources help them respond to the challenges they face. The exact nature of vulnerabilities and resources might depend on the specific domain of creativity – whether we are talking about artists, or scientists, or entrepreneurs – something that we will have to study in the future.

Reference

Ivcevic, Z., Grossman, E., & Ranjan, A. (2022). Patterns of psychological vulnerabilities and resources in artists and nonartists. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 16(1), 3–15. https://doi.org/10.1037/aca0000309

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Today is publication day for The Creativity Choice! Congratulations to me!

I have been doing research, writing, and generally thinking about creativity for a very long time. Two decades since getting a doctorate, longer since I figured out that creativity is THE topic for me. What got me started on this journey is a description of creative individuals offered by Frank X. Barron, researcher from the first big wave of creativity research in the 1950s and 1960s, spurred by the space race between the US and USSR. He remarked that creative people are, “occasionally crazier, yet adamantly saner than the average person.” If that does not sound interesting, I don’t know what does.

I had questions. What is it in creative personality that allows people to embody seemingly contradictory attributes? What is the process by which people come by ideas? And how do they develop them into performances and products? What is in between a hunch of a vision that makes us open a blank document on our computers and something like a published book?

This process made me deeply aware that we learn by study, but we come to truly know through action. I knew a lot of pieces of the creativity puzzle, but now had to put them together and answer why and how each of them mattered. And I faced a challenge of not just teaching about creative work, but also applying the lessons I was teaching. Because if I cannot take my own advice, I reasoned, other people would not be able to do it either.

What came into full relief to me and what I wanted to convey to the reader are three groups of messages:

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What gets us started on creative work?

We often ask, “How did they think of that?”, implying that we would never have thought of it or known how to do it, whatever the ‘it’ might be. The flip side of what gets us started on creative work is the question of barriers to making that decision. What is in our way?

Creativity research points to two groups of major barriers. One is about the uncertainties of the creative process. We are doing something new and original and therefore do not have a roadmap. We cannot be sure whether we would be successful (Can I actually write this book?) and we cannot be sure how others will react to our work (Would people think this is the same old story?). Psychologically, these uncertainties are experienced as risks. We do not have to be risk-seekers and eager risk-takers, but creative work requires accepting and tolerating some risks.

The other big barrier to creative work is the feeling we do not have enough confidence. And I get it. I did not always believe that I could write a book. When we say we don’t have enough confidence, we are really saying we want to feel fully certain of our abilities to do something (there it comes again; creativity and dealing with uncertainty). However, what we really need is to have just enough in our tank of confidence to get us to through the first small task. Progress begets more confidence and we can proceed onward.

What keeps us going?

The second big question is about strategies to make it through the long and difficult process of realizing an idea. Behind this umbrella problem are other more specific ones: What drives creativity? How do we identify problems and develop solutions? What happens with emotions during creative work? And how to get out of a creative rut?

I have found that many answers to these questions come across as as surprising:

• Creative drive is based on intrinsic motivation and passion, but also becomes focused by engaging with constraints. Although research shows that approximately 70% of people believe that creativity is most successful when we have full freedom, that is not so.

• Problem finding is key to creativity. More important than problem solving. Problem finding does not mean just identifying a problem worth our attention, but it also means framing and reframing the problem from different angles. Research has shown repeatedly that successful problem solving involves more time spent on problem finding than on coming up with new ideas.

• It is easy to imagine all the ways emotions can come in the way of creative work. Becoming anxious or overwhelmed or frustrated at yet another obstacle. But emotions can also be a source of inspiration (and not just for artists!) and they can help us be maximally effective in what we do.

• We have more agency about our emotions than we think. Understanding the process of how emotions arise suggests different strategies to influence the course of our experiences and help us nudge them in a better direction.

What makes creative work reliable?

All I have said above applies to work on a single project, like writing a book. But doing a single creative thing can make us into a one hit wonder. And chances are we don’t want that.

The not so secret secret to making creativity repeatable is in its social side. Reaching out to those at the edges of our social networks, people who we do not interact with often, will be helpful when we are looking to come up with new ideas. Because we don’t talk often, they are likely to have different experiences and perspectives, and these are helpful in the idea generation stage of work. But when we are looking to elaborate and develop ideas, working with people we are close to will be helpful because they tend to acknowledge our ideas and build on them.

When creativity happens in organizations, something else is important too — leadership and climate for creativity and innovation. Leaders signal with their actions what is accepted and expected. If they shut down ideas (even for seemingly reasonable reasons, like money) or if they have the attitude of “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions”, they are communicating in action that creativity is not welcome. And that colors what those working with them do.

If you found this intriguing and want more, The Creativity Choice is now available wherever you get your books!