“The only way to stay creative is to oppose the wear and tear of existence with techniques that organize time, space, and activity to your advantage. It means developing schedules to protect your time and avoid distraction, arranging your surroundings to heighten concentration, cutting out meaningless chores that soak up psychic energy, and devoting the energy thus saved to what you really care about.”

Like his previous book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi attempts here to get at what it means to spend your life in a meaningful way. This time, his focus is on creativity: what it is, how it works, and what we can do to live a more satisfying and creative life. A daunting and ambiguous task, to be sure.

To study creativity, Csikszentmihalyi starts by defining what ‘creativity’ is: to be sure, many people are brilliant and interesting, but leave no lasting impact on their culture or society. Many are personally creative in our everyday lives. Perhaps we build a custom headboard for our bedroom or think of a faster way to do the dishes. Both of these forms of creativity are important, but the type of creativity that this book is primarily concerned with is the type that pushes a person to advance a domain, whether it be science or the arts, and has a lasting impact on the culture.The Leonardos, Edisons, Picassos, or Einsteins of any given field.

With the help of a team of graduate research assistants, Csikszentmihalyi conducted extensive interviews with a wide range of creative people. The men and women he interviewed are from all types of different professions, from sculptors and businessmen to scientists and social reformers. Each participant was at least 60 years old coming to so coming to the end of their distinguished career. A few that were asked declined to participate, citing the ability to turn down frivolous research studies as the key to their continued success.

What follows is a nuanced study of what creativity is and how it feels to practice it. Some of the people who I felt had the most interesting quotations were Madeline L’Engel, Hilde Domin, and Jonas Salk. Each came from a less than optimal background and in the beginning showed no evidence of their later eminence but nonetheless eventually reached the pinnacle of their respective professions. In the end, there is no ‘secret’ formula to creativity, but the book ends with a few simple suggestions that mostly work to cultivate a sense of curiosity and critical thinking.

Further Links:
My review of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s previous book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
A summary of the Creative Personality, written by the author for Psychology Today.
A 15 page abstract of the author’s research: “In order to want to introduce novelty into a domain, a person should first of all be dissatisfied with the status quo. It has been said that Einstein explained why he spent so much time developing a new physics by saying that he could not understand the old physics. Greater sensitivity, naivety, arrogance, impatience, and higher intellectual standards have all been adduced as reasons why some people are unable to accept the conventional wisdom in a domain and feel the need to break out of it.”
Quotes and Anecdotes: The Process of Cultural Evolution ; A Definition of Creativity ; Anticipation and Commitment: The Story of Motorola ; Being a Good Ancestor ; and The Axemaker’s Gift.
Buy on Amazon: Creativity: The Psychology of Discovery and Invention

Stuff of Interest:
spectra
false consciousness
perpetual motion machine–a physical impossibilty “Oh ye seekers after perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the alchemists.”— Leonardo da Vinci, 1494
Lorenzo Ghiberti, Gates of Paradise
convergent and divergent thinking–Convergent thinking is measured by IQ tests, and it involves solving well-defined, rational problems that have one correct answer. Divergent thinking leads to no agreed-upon solution. It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas.
peripatetic method
the poetry of Anthony Hedcht and Hilde Domin
Vivaldi concerto
deficit motives–“Wilson has been a ceaseless worker all his life. A painful childhood instilled a certain amount of insecurity in him, which he decided to overcome with a relentless drive modeled on an idealized Southern heritage long on pride, sacrifice, and discipline. These were what the current psychological jargon calls deficit motives, based on efforts to compensate for undesirable early experiences.
Road to Damascus–An important point in someone’s life where a great change, or reversal, of ideas or beliefs occurs. Based on the conversion of St. Paul to Christianity.
centrifugal and centripetal forces–centrifugal forces move away from a center while centripetal forces move toward a center.

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“To a naturalist nothing is indifferent; the humble moss that creeps upon the stone is equally interesting as the lofty pine which so beautifully adorns the valley or the mountain: but to a naturalist who is reading in the face of rocks the annals of a former world, the mossy covering which obstructs his view, and renders indistinguishable the different species of stone, is no less than a serious subject of regret.”

-James Hutton

Basin and Range is the first book of John McPhee’s mighty five-book collection The Annals of the Former World. Each book, written between 1978 and 1998 and then later revised and updated, covers some facet of the geology of North America. Basin and Range is primarily concerned with the story of how the vast age of the earth has been measured (but scarcely comprehended), and the nature of plate tectonics–what it is, who figured it out, and how.

McPhee’s writing is a joy to read. From paragraph to paragraph, his subjects range from the minute to the cosmic in scale. He lingers on specific bits of knowledge and explains all that needs further elaborating with the exuberance of a passionate teacher. He somehow makes rocks interesting. Here he is describing the geological event that eventually made Nevada so hot and arid: “As the developing Sierra made its skyward climb–as it went on up past ten and twelve and fourteen thousand feet–it became so predominant that it cut off the incoming Pacific rain, cast a rain shadow (as the phenomenon is called) over lush, warm Floridian and verdant Nevada. Cut it off and kept it dry.”

In the conclusion, McPhee writes that “if by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.” The earth is ANCIENT and in a state of eternal recomposition. That’s all you need to know, but it’s fun to read everything he has to say.

Further Links:
Video of a playa lake advance in Black Rock Desert, Nevada
Quotes and Anecdotes: The Naked Ambition of Langford Hastings and The Blind Man and the Elephant.
Buy on Amazon: Annals of the Former World

Stuff of Interest:
playa lake –Playa lakes are round hollows in the ground in the Southern High Plains of the United States. They are ephemeral, meaning that they are only present at certain times of the year. The temporal nature of playa lakes led to confusion on the part of early European explorers, some of whom described the region as a desert and others a land of millions of small lakes. Most playas fill with water only after spring rainstorms when freshwater collects in the round depressions of the otherwise flat landscape of West Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. There are also a few saltwater-filled playas. These are fed by water from underlying aquifers, which brings salt with it as it percolates up through the soil. As the water evaporates, the salt is left behind in the increasingly salty playas. There are many theories as to the origin of playas, but the most widely accepted are that playas are either carved by wind or formed by land subsidence (they are sinkholes).
sill
proscenium arch
adsorb–(of a solid) hold (molecules of a gas or liquid or solute) as a thin film on the outside surface or on internal surfaces within the material.
Iapetus Ocean–an ocean that no longer exists! How crazy is that?
The Pikeville Cut-Through
James Hutton
Kit Carson
James Ussher
Lansford Hastings
Plate Tectonics

Major Lithospheric Plates and Some Minor Ones

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Commitment to a goal and to the rules it entails is much easier when the choices are few and clear.

This book examines the ways in which people derive meaning from their lives. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s conclusion is delightfully ambiguous: that it doesn’t matter what we do that makes a particular activity fulfilling, but rather how we do it. He calls this state of concentration flow–the sweet spot between anxiety and competence wherein a person confronts a challenge that tests the limits of their abilities. A similar intensity of focus can be seen among the most successful practitioners of a whole range of disciplines, from poets and scientists to rock climbers and surgeons.

In Mihaly’s estimation, A flow experience requires nine components in order to be rewarding: 1.) There are clear goals every step of the way. 2.) There is immediate feedback to one’s actions; 3.) There is a balance between challenges and skills; 4.) Action and awareness are merged; 5.) Distractions are excluded from consciousness; 6.) There is no worry of failure; 7.) Self-consciousness disappears; 8.) The sense of time becomes distorted; and 9.) The activity becomes autotelic  (Done for the joy of the experience they provide rather than for the final outcome.)

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has over 50 years experience as a professor and research psychologist. His writing is both well in formed and thoughtful–his insights flow breezily off the page and his wisdom is easily apparent. For example, here’s an extraordinarily insightful quote from him on his Wikipedia page: “Repression is not the way to virtue. When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. Only through freely chosen discipline can life be enjoyed and still kept within the bounds of reason.”

Further Links:
A good video introduction to the author and his life work.
The author’s TED talk on flow.
What the professionals are saying: The LA Times Review
Quotes and Anecdotes: The Autotelic Personality, The Effects of Family on the Autotelic Personality, How to Keep Love Fresh, The Difficulties of Solitude, and Wasting Time.
Buy on Amazon: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Stuff of Interest:
flow–“the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”
optimal experience–“Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen.”
Phenomenology–the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object.
epiphenomen—is a secondary phenomenon that occurs alongside or in parallel to a primary phenomenon. Closely related to ’cause and effect’.
dialectal–relating to the logical discussion of ideas and opinions.
invidious–likely to arouse or incur resentment or anger in others.
anomie–lack of the usual social or ethical standards in an individual or group.
Diogenes looking for an honest man with his lamp
Ignatius of Loyola
Ignaz Semmelweiz
Necker cube
Kubla Kahn, Samuel Coleridge
Antonio Gramsci
Altius, citius, fortius (higher, faster, stronger)
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” –Thomas Jefferson

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