Summary of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Creativity

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. It is the process of creating something new and interesting, and it is often the result of many sources working together to create something new and interesting.
#2 The joy of research is that it takes a lot of courage. You invest a lot of yourself in your work, and nothing may come of it. You could spend five years working on a problem and it could be wrong before you are done.
#3 I had studied and measured hundreds of galaxies, and I had found that some of them had very interesting central properties. I decided to write a paper on fourteen of them, and one of them was especially interesting.
#4 The story of how scientists discovered the order in the universe is one of the greatest examples of how learning for its own sake can be rewarding.

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 28 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669369257
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Creativity
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13 Insights from Chapter 14
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. It is the process of creating something new and interesting, and it is often the result of many sources working together to create something new and interesting.

#2

The joy of research is that it takes a lot of courage. You invest a lot of yourself in your work, and nothing may come of it. You could spend five years working on a problem and it could be wrong before you are done.

#3

I had studied and measured hundreds of galaxies, and I had found that some of them had very interesting central properties. I decided to write a paper on fourteen of them, and one of them was especially interesting.

#4

The story of how scientists discovered the order in the universe is one of the greatest examples of how learning for its own sake can be rewarding.

#5

The human race has always been tied to creativity, as we have begun to understand the world around us and how it works. We have taken over the title of creator, as we can now create machines, energies, and change the face of the earth.

#6

The process of cultural evolution is similar to the process of genetic evolution. New ideas are not passed on to the next generation, but they are passed on to our children so that they will be remembered. It is these memes that a creative person changes, and if enough of the right people see the change as an improvement, it will become part of the culture.

#7

This book is not about the neat things children often say, or the creativity all of us share just because we have a mind and can think. It does not deal with great ideas for clinching business deals, new ways to bake stuffed artichokes, or original ways of decorating the living room for a party.

#8

Creativity is the process of changing a symbolic domain in the culture. It takes effort to change traditions, and it is difficult to learn more than one domain of knowledge at a time. In cultures that are uniform and rigid, it takes more effort to achieve new ways of thinking.

#9

The trend toward specialized knowledge is not necessarily a good thing. It can lead to a cultural fragmentation such as described in the biblical story of the building of the Tower of Babel.

#10

The lives of creative individuals and the contexts of their accomplishments are useful for two reasons. First, the results of creativity enrich the culture and so they indirectly improve the quality of all our lives. But we may also learn from this knowledge how to make our own lives more interesting and productive.

#11

The three Rs are the basic academic subjects: reading, writing, and arithmetic. However, they are typically taught in a way that does not encourage originality or creative thinking. Instead, students find them boring or threatening, and their chance of using their minds in creative ways comes from working on the student paper, the drama club, or the orchestra.

#12

I and my students at the University of Chicago videotaped interviews with ninety-one exceptional individuals. The in-depth analysis of these interviews illustrates what creative people are like, how the creative process works, and what conditions encourage or hinder the generation of original ideas.

#13

The rate of acceptance varied among the different disciplines. More than half of the natural scientists, no matter how old or busy they were, agreed to participate. Artists, writers, and musicians, on the other hand, tended to ignore our letters or decline.

#14

The strategy of disproof is sufficient to derive conclusions from the data. The information we collected could not prove that all creative individuals had a happy childhood, but one unhappy child can disprove that hypothesis.

#15

I was able to interview hundreds of people, but I had to select which quotes to use and which not to use. I was not able to include all of the quotes, but I hope that other scholars will eventually tap into the rich material that I was forced to shortchange.

#16

The interviews reveal a positive picture of creativity and creative individuals. They show that instead of suspecting these stories of being self-serving fabrications, I accept them at face value.

#17

The prevailing stereotype of the tortured genius is largely a myth created by Romantic ideology and supported by evidence from isolated and atypical historical periods. In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their creative work than to the personal sufferings caused by the unhealthful conditions of a Russian society nearing collapse.

#18

The human tendency to embellish reality and conceal problems is what makes it difficult to approach these interviews with an open skepticism. Yet at the same time, it is important to remember that positive scenarios should be accepted when they appear to be warranted.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

Creativity is a mental activity that occurs inside the heads of some special people. But creativity does not happen inside people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a sociocultural context. It is a systemic rather than an individual phenomenon.

#2

There are three different phenomena that can be called creativity: persons who are interesting and stimulating, people who experience the world in novel and original ways, and individuals who have changed our culture in some significant way.

#3

The third type of creativity is not a more developed form of the first two. It is unrelated to the others, and it can occur in individuals who are brimming with brilliance. The accomplishments of a Michelangelo, a Beethoven, a Picasso, or an Einstein are awesome in their respective fields, but their private lives would seldom warrant another thought.

#4

Creativity can be observed only in the interrelations of a system made up of three parts: the domain, the field, and the individual person. The domain is the set of symbolic rules and procedures. The field is made up of all the individuals who act as gatekeepers to the domain.

#5

The systems model allows for the often mysterious fluctuations in the attribution of creativity over time. For example, the reputation of Raphael as a painter has waxed and waned several times since his heyday at the court of Pope Julius II.

#6

The systems model of creativity states that creativity is a result of the community being moved by a person’s work, and discovering new possibilities in it. But when art historical knowledge, art critical theories, and the aesthetic sensitivity of the age change, so does creativity.

#7

The level of creativity in a given place and time does not depend only on the amount of individual creativity. It depends on how well suited the respective domains and fields are to the recognition and diffusion of novel ideas.

#8

The Renaissance, which was a period of great artistic and cultural creativity, was made possible by the rediscovery of ancient Roman methods of building and sculpting. The Opera del Duomo, which supervised the building of the cathedral, did not find any plans persuasive until humanist scholars became interested in the Pantheon of Rome.

#9

The city of Florence was one of the richest in Europe, and it was in this environment of wealth and uncertainty that the city decided to invest in making Florence the most beautiful city in Christendom.

#10

The leaders of Florence’s banks, churchmen, and guilds were intensely involved in the process of encouraging, evaluating, and selecting the works they wanted to see completed. This led to the artists being pushed to perform beyond their limits.

#11

The Renaissance was the result of the rediscovery of classical art, and the creation of great works of art would never have been made without individual artists. However, it was the competition and focused attention that the works attracted that made them beautiful.

#12

The fact that we can experience patterns of order that were not programmed into our genes by biological evolution is proof of human creativity. We can expand our limitations of individuality by learning the rules of different domains, and enlarge our sensitivity and ability to relate to the world.

#13

There are many reasons why people pursue different domains. The three most important are the clarity of structure, the centrality within the culture, and accessibility. The domain in which knowledge is better structured, more central, and more accessible is likely to be the one where creative innovations happen.

#14

The structure of a domain is important when it comes to creativity. The symbolic system of mathematics is organized relatively tightly, and it is easy for a young person to assimilate the rules and jump to the cutting edge of the domain in a few years. By contrast, it takes decades for social scientists or philosophers to master their domains.

#15

The fact that something can be measured is taken more seriously than something that cannot. People take intelligence very seriously, because it can be measured by tests, while few bother about how sensitive, altruistic, or helpful someone is, because there is no good way to measure these qualities yet.

#16

A culture is made up of members who all participate in the same culture, and they must all pay attention to the same things. Because of the scarcity of attention, we must be selective: we remember and recognize only a few of the works