Creativity (24 page)
Authors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Another reason for the lack of popularity is that the intense
curiosity and focused interest seem odd to their peers. Original ways of thinking and expression also make them somewhat suspect. Unfortunately, one cannot be exceptional and normal at the same time. Parents often fret and plot to make their talented children more popular without realizing the inherent contradiction. Popularity, or even the strong ties to friends so common in adolescence, tends to make a young person conform to the peer culture. If the peer group itself is intellectual, as in the case of George Klein and a few others, then the conformity supports the development of
talent. But in most cases it is not. Then loneliness, however painful, helps protect the interests of the adolescent from being diluted by the typical concerns of that stage of life.
None of the creative people we interviewed remembers being popular in adolescence. Some of them seem to have had a reasonably untroubled time, and others think back on those years with barely disguised horror; however, nostalgia for the teenage years is almost entirely absent. Marginality—the feeling of being on the outside, of being different, of observing with detachment the strange rituals of one’s peers—was a common theme. Of course, a feeling of marginality is typical in adolescence, but in the case of creative people there are concrete reasons for it.
Some, like the sociologist David Riesman, recognize the necessity—in fact, the positive contribution—of this outsider role: “I had the advantage of my marginality—marginal to the upper class, marginal to my school friends, and so on, but also marginal because of my views, and at times, insulated.” Others experienced long periods of illness, which required separation from school and peers. The physicist Heinz Maier-Leibnitz spent three months in bed and the rest of one school year recovering from a lung ailment in the Swiss mountains. Brenda Milner and Donald Campbell complained of poor coordin
ation in youth, which made playing sports or dancing rather difficult. These people did not persevere in their creative careers
because
they were more lonely than other children. However, when they found themselves on the outside, they were able to profit from it instead of lamenting their loneliness.
Those who were somewhat precocious intellectually—such as John Bardeen, Manfred Eigen, Enrico Randone, and Rosalyn Yalow—experienced another sort of marginality. They were promoted into higher grades and therefore grew up surrounded by older
teenagers with whom they did not form close friendships. John Gardner remembers: “I moved very rapidly through school. This was a period when you were allowed to move as fast as you wanted to—provided you were able. So I finished the first eight grades in five years, and the result was I was with children older and bigger than myself.”
Performance in school matters more in some domains than in others. In mathematics and the sciences, the exposure one gets in high school is necessary for further advancement. Doing well in advanced courses is not sufficient, but it is a necessary condition for being accepted to a good college and then to a good graduate department, which in turn is a necessary step to a later career. But performance in high school is a poor indicator of future creativity in the arts and the humanities.
Young artists, especially visual artists, are notoriously uninterested in academic subjects, and their scholastic records usually reflect this. It is probably for this reason that the French—who reckon mental ability in rather rigid rational terms—say
bête comme un artiste
(dumb as an artist) when they want to put down someone’s intellect. Certainly Eva Zeisel, an accomplished artist whose ceramic creations are exhibited in many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, felt that she was “not considered the bright child in the family” (it is true that she was being compared t
o uncles Michael and Karl Polanyi and cousin Leo Szilard). She tells how when she was seventeen she overheard a couple talking about her a few rows back at a concert: “Her grandmother is such a clever, bright, intellectual person. Her mother is such a beauty. And now look at her…”
Michael Snow, the versatile Canadian artist-musician-filmmaker, admits that he wasn’t a very good student in high school and was surprised to be awarded the art prize in his senior year. Ravi Shankar started touring with a musical troupe at age ten, and after that his education was conducted by his guru, an elder musician.
T
HREADS OF
C
ONTINUITY
In some cases, the continuity of interest from childhood to later life is direct; in others it is strangely convoluted. Linus Pauling’s interest in the material composition of the universe started when he worked in his father’s drugstore. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s interest in her countrymen’s opinions and values can be traced to her games with
the imaginary inhabitants of the toy villages she built. Frank Offner remembers an important early event in his life:
I know that I always wanted to play and make things like mechanical sets…. When I was six or seven years old, we were in New York and I remember at the Museum of Natural History there was a seismograph which had a stylus working across the smoked drum, and there were a couple of heavy weights, and I asked my father how it worked and he said, “I don’t know.” And that was the first time…you know, like all kids do, I thought my father knew everything. But so I was interested in how that worked, and I figured it out.
What makes this memory so interesting is that all through his life, some of Offner’s most important inventions involved a stylus moving across a drum. For instance, he invented a crystal-operated pen recorder, “which made the cardiograph a hundred times better than anything anyone had done before,” and he perfected the first EEG machines. Yet Offner saw nothing especially meaningful in this continuity, and when it was pointed out to him, he shrugged it off.
There are also cases in which the individual’s adult theme harks back to the interests of an earlier generation. C. Vann Woodward, who revolutionized the way we understand the history of the American South, traces his interest in his vocation far back:
That interest was born out of a personal experience of growing up there and feeling very strongly about it, one way or the other. I have always told my students: “If you are not really interested in this subject and do not feel strongly about it, don’t go into it.” And of course much of my writing was concerned with those controversies and struggles that were going on at the time, and what their background and their origins and their history were.
The place I grew up was important. The environment and the time following the Civil War and Reconstruction. There was talk about that from my earliest recollections. It is the defeated who really talk and think about a war, not the victors. And I grew up in a family that came of slave-owning stock and were planters, and then in the small towns where we lived my father was a superintendent of the public schools.
The artist Ellen Lanyon’s maternal grandfather came to the United States from Yorkshire, England, to paint murals for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Because she was his oldest grandchild, Ellen had the feeling that she was destined to inherit her grandfather’s calling and his creative spirit.
And when I was about twelve years old, my grandfather died. My father and mother put together his equipment that was left plus new tubes of paint, et cetera, and it was presented to me on my twelfth birthday as a sort of, you know, a gesture. Passing the torch or something. And so I started painting, and I painted a self-portrait, the first thing I tried. I can absolutely remember the place, the room, you know, and everything. I don’t know what happened to the painting. It’s somewhere. I think that my mother has it. But in any case, I think that’s the kind of beginning that sets a pattern fo
r a person.
Nowhere was intergenerational continuity more clearly evident than in the case of the physicist Heinz Maier-Leibnitz. He is a descendant of Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz (1646-1716). At a distance of more than two and a half centuries, the parallels in their lives are quite astonishing. G. W. Leibniz is identified in the
Encyclopædia Britannica
as “philosopher, mathematician, political advisor.” Maier-Leibnitz is an experimental nuclear physicist and has been a scientific adviser to the German government. The elder one was one of the founders of the German Academy of Sciences in 1
700; the younger was one of its recent presidents. G. W. Leibniz was elected a foreign member of the French Academy of Sciences because of his attempts to renew German and French intellectual cooperation after a war between the two countries; about 250 years later Maier-Leibnitz received the same honor for the same reasons. G. W. Leibniz developed an “algebra of thought” according to which all reasoning was supposed to be reducible to an ordered combination of basic elements. His descendant has been working on a procedure by which the truth value of television and newspaper stories could be evalua
ted by breaking them down into basic propositions.
It should be added, however, that for each creative person whose life seems like a seamless unfolding from childhood into old age, or whose interests seem preordained even before birth, there is another
whose later career seems to be the product of chance or of an interest that appears seemingly out of nowhere long after the early years are past.
W
HAT
S
HAPES
C
REATIVE
L
IVES
?
We are used to thinking about the way a life unfolds in a deterministic fashion. Even before modern psychoanalysis, it was believed that adulthood is molded by the events experienced in infancy and childhood: “As the twig is bent, so the tree grows.”“The child is father to the man.” Certainly after Freud it has become even more of a commonplace to assume that whatever ails us psychically is the result of some unresolved childhood complex. And by extension, we seek the causes of the present in the past. To a large extent, of course, such assumptions are true.
But reflecting on the lives of these creative individuals highlights a different set of possibilities. If the future is indeed determined by the past, we should be able to see clearer patterns in these accounts. Yet what is astonishing is the great variety of paths that led to eminence. Some of our respondents were precocious—almost prodigious—and others had a normal childhood. Some had difficult early years, lost a parent, or experienced various forms of hardship; others had happy family lives. A few even had normal childhoods. Some encountered supportive teachers; others were ignored and h
ad bad experiences with mentors. There were some who knew early in life what career they would pursue, while others changed their direction as they matured. Recognition came early to some and late to others.
This kind of pattern—or rather, the lack of it—suggests an explanation of development that is different from the usual deterministic one. It seems that the men and women we studied were not shaped, once and for all, either by their genes or by the events of early life. Rather, as they moved along in time, being bombarded by external events, encountering good people and bad, good breaks and bad, they had to make do with whatever came to hand. Instead of being shaped by events, they shaped events to suit their purposes.
Presumably many children who started out with talents equal or superior to those of the ones we met in this group fell by the wayside either because they lacked resolve or because the conditions they encountered were too harsh. They never had an understanding
teacher, a lucky break that led them to a scholarship, a mentor, a job that would keep them on track. So the Paulings and the Salks are the survivors, the gifted few who also were fortunate enough to make use of the opportunities that came their way.
According to this view, a creative life is still determined, but what determines it is a will moving across time—the fierce determination to succeed, to make sense of the world, to use whatever means to unravel some of the mysteries of the universe. If the parents are loving and stimulating, great, that is just what a son or daughter needs to build the future. If the parents die, this is terrible, but what can a young child do? Lick the wounds and make the best of it.
Of course, this still leaves the question, So where does this fierce determination, this unquenchable curiosity come from? Perhaps that question is too reductionistic to be useful. Many causes could be at the root of curiosity: genetically programmed sensitivity, stimulating early experiences, and, if Freud was right, a repressed sexual interest. It may not be so important to know precisely where the seeds come from. What
is
important is to recognize the interest when it shows itself, nurture it, and provide the opportunities for it to grow into a creative life.
U
ntil very recently, creative persons tended to learn their craft by apprenticing to a master, or by teaching themselves the elements of a domain through trial and error. Higher education was open to very few, and until two centuries or so ago, it was mostly reserved for scholars and clergymen. Copernicus was a church canon who taught himself mathematics and astronomy, Gregor Mendel was a monk, and Galileo was trained as a physician. But nowadays it is almost unthinkable for a person to change a domain without first having learned it in college. Even poets and painters are expected
to get advanced degrees.
C
OLLEGE AND
P
ROFESSION
For many of our respondents, the years in college and graduate school were a high point—if not
the
high point—of life. This is the period when they found their voice, when the vocation became clear. Often they had come from small provincial settings where they felt odd and disoriented. College provided soulmates and teachers who were able to appreciate their uniqueness.
For some individuals it was also in college that they could first assert their independence: David Riesman chose the law instead of the medical career favored by his father; others, like Jonas Salk, switched in the opposite direction. Isabella Karle, like most other women who went into science, had to convince her parents that this was a better choice than becoming a teacher. John Gardner, who wanted to become a writer, decided to go into psychology instead. Anthony Hecht, who loved music and mathematics as a teenager, was seduced by literature into becoming a poet.
But these were not necessarily easy years either. Linus Pauling, despite his brilliance, had to work through college at a schedule that few undergraduates would now consider possible. After enrolling at the Oregon Agricultural College on the advice of a friend’s parents:
I made a little money by odd jobs, working for the college, killing dandelions on the lawn by dipping a stick in a bucket containing sodium arsenate solution and then stabbing the stick into the dandelion plant. Every day I chopped wood, a quarter of a cord perhaps, into lengths—they were already sawed—into a size that would go into the wood-burning stoves in the girls’ dormitory. Twice a week I cut up a quarter of a beef into steaks or roasts, and every day I mopped the big kitchen, the very large kitchen area. Then at the end of my sophomore year, I got a job as a paving engineer, la
ying blacktop pavement in the mountains of southern Oregon.
Even in college, the performance of the future creator is rarely off the scale. When Brenda Milner was taking her college exams in Cambridge with twelve other students in her cohort, she was overwhelmed by the brilliance of a fellow student whose theoretical ideas, she felt, were way beyond hers. She was sure that he would set the standard on the exam and she would not get a “first,” thereby forfeiting her chances for a fellowship. “But in the end it was so funny—he never took the exams. He was brilliant, but not focused. I think he was found in a little backroom in London with
some rats in a bath, or something. But I did very well on the exams because I had this man to pace me.” In a similar vein, Rosalyn Yalow remembers:
There was another girl in college with me and we took a number of courses together. When we took physical chemistry, she got ninety, I got sixty, and everybody else got thirty. She actually took a master’s degree with Hans Bethe at Cornell but then dropped out for a number of years when her husband came back from the army. She eventually finished her Ph.D. but never really made anything with it. Inherently, she was probably smarter than I was, but she didn’t have the same drive.
Milner calls it
focus
, Yalow calls it
drive
—this advantage they had over more brilliant fellow students. After curiosity, this quality of concentrated attention is what creative individuals mention most often as having set them apart in college from their peers. Without this quality, they could not have sustained the hard work, the “perspiration.” Curiosity and drive are in many ways the yin and the yang that need to be combined in order to achieve something new. The first requires openness to outside stimuli, the second inner focus. The first is playful, the second serious; the first
deals with objects and ideas for their own sake, the second is competitive and achievement oriented. Both are required for creativity to become actualized.
If teachers help or hinder the development of creative individuals in high school, they do so even more in college. College teachers are important in two ways. First, they can ignite a person’s dormant interest in a subject and provide the right intellectual challenge that leads to a lifelong vocation. Second, they often exert themselves in various ways to make sure that the student is noticed by other important members of the field. A college graduate in the sciences is unlikely to be admitted to a good laboratory without her college teacher writing enthusiastic letters to t
he lab director; a student in literature or the arts is helped enormously in placing his first poems or paintings if his teacher is willing to put in extra effort and pull a few strings. A B.A. degree (or even a Ph.D., for that matter) is just not worth much in terms of a career without the active support of one’s teachers, a support that is needed to attract the attention of the gatekeepers at the next higher levels.
Isabella Karle met one such teacher early in her college career:
The man who was my first professor at Wayne State University took a personal interest in me. He said: “Well, you’re going on to
graduate school, of course?” And I said: “What’s that?” And he told me about it, and I said it sounded like a good idea, so he and I kept up a correspondence after I went to the University of Michigan for a number of years. He advised me on the courses to take, the kind of things that may interest me, so that was very nice of him.
Anthony Hecht heard about John Crowe Ransom while he was in the army, and as soon as he was demobilized he enrolled at Kenyon College to study with the older poet. Not only did Ransom publish Hecht’s first verse in the
Kenyon Review
, which he had been editing (“that was the beginning of my publishing career”), but when a member of the English Department became ill he hired Hecht to teach a freshman English course (“that was the beginning of my teaching career”).
Entering a career requires a great deal of determination and a good dose of luck. In fact, the majority of the people we interviewed mentioned luck most frequently as the reason they had been successful. Being in the right place at the right time and meeting the right people are almost necessary to take off within a field. And unless one becomes visible in a field, it is very difficult to make a creative contribution to it. This is true even of those individuals who seem most isolated, most alienated from their culture. It is difficult to imagine Martin Luther’s ideas spreading ver
y far if they had not been voiced in what was then the center of German intellectual life, or of Kafka’s work making a great impact if he had written in Urdu, or if he had not been noticed by critics in nearby Vienna, which at the time was the center of modernist experimentation.
Almost all the women scientists of the generation we interviewed mentioned that without World War II it would probably have been impossible for them to get graduate training, fellowships, postdoctoral positions, and faculty appointments. But because so many men were fighting in the war, and professors needed graduate student assistants, these women were grudgingly admitted into higher education. When Rosalyn Yalow was accepted to Illinois as a graduate student in physics in 1941, she was the second female—the previous woman having matriculated in 1917. “They had to make a war so that I could go
into graduate school,” she said. This is almost exactly the story told by Brenda Milner, Isabella Karle, and Margaret Butler.
It is very possible that if these women had been born just a decade earlier, they would have been prevented from making a creative contribution to their respective domains.
S
UPPORTIVE
P
ARTNERS
The individuals in our sample had, as a rule, stable and satisfying marital relationships. Some of those in the arts started out having a vigorous and varied sex life, but most of them married early and stayed married to their spouses for thirty, forty, or more than fifty years.
One of the exceptions was octogenarian Bradley Smith, the photographer who answered our question about what accomplishment in his life he was most proud of with the terse words: “Making love, probably.” He claims that he became sexually active at age six and never looked back. To the question about what fuels the inspired mental associations that lead to his art, he said: “Well, I think probably sex and songs. If I was asked to reduce it to what keeps me going, I think that the creative instinct is fed by sex and music. Without them I think that you would wither, pretty much.” The s
culptor and cinematographer Michael Snow concurs: “Well…an important aspect of creativity is sex or sexual desire…if I can put it in the colloquial, I’m still horny, but I was much more horny then [referring to thirty years earlier].” A musician’s wife, after the interview, turned to us and said, in front of her husband: “What he didn’t tell you is that all through life what inspired him was girls.” The writers described fiery romantic lives in their youth, but they all eventually settled down to domestic bliss.
But the majority conformed to a more sedate sexual pattern. Recent studies suggest that the amount of dalliance, marital infidelity, and sexual experimentation is much less than earlier estimates had suggested. When asked which of their accomplishments they were most proud of, a great many of our respondents—and almost as many men as women—mentioned their family and children. When explaining what enabled them to accomplish what they had achieved, several pointed to the indispensable help of their spouses. And these answers did not ring perfunctory.
Hans Bethe, one of the leading physicists earlier this century and teacher of many of the later ones, volunteered: “My wife has very
much influenced my life and made me happy. Before I was married, I was never very happy. I had happy times, moments, weeks, but since I am married I am more or less continually happy. We talk a lot over meals, we are very fond of walking in the mountains.” Not a bad endorsment, after fifty-four years of marriage. Anthony Hecht expresses himself in almost identical terms:
I felt somehow as though I were floundering as a human being in many ways, making many errors and wasting my time and not being happy. Not that I was not happy before, but those periods of happiness were brief. But since my marriage to Helen and the birth of our son there has been an almost beatific tranquillity and serenity that has made everything seem worthwhile.
Robertson Davies has also been married for fifty-four years, having met his wife when they were both trying for a stage career at the Old Vic. She was a prompter and knew every word of the classic repertoire from start to finish.
And Shakespeare has played an extraordinary role in our marriage as a source of quotations and jokes and references, which are fathomless. I feel that I am uncommonly lucky because we’ve had such a terribly good time together. It’s always been an adventure and we haven’t come to the end yet. We haven’t finished talking, and I swear that conversation is more important to marriage than sex. It has been enormously helpful in my work because my wife sort of clears the way so that I can get down to business and work without interruptions.
Hecht agrees: “The only thing you need for poetry that seems to me essential is quiet—and time. And if you have a spouse who is understanding, he or she will see to it that you are not interfered with and that time and quiet are available to you.” This theme of the spouse as a protective buffer against the intrusions of the world was repeated again and again by practically all the stably married individuals. Linus Pauling, who had been married to his college sweetheart for fifty-eight years before being widowed, gave this very politically incorrect advice to a hypothetical young scholar:
You ought to go up to Corvallis, Oregon [where the University of Oregon is located], and look around for some young woman who’s majoring in home economics. This is of course what happened to me. I was fortunate, I believe, that my wife felt her duty in life and her pleasure in life would come from her family, her husband and her children. And that the way that she could best contribute would be to see to it that I was not bothered by the problems that are involved in the household; that she would settle all of these problems in such a way that I could devote all of my time to my wo
rk. So I was really fortunate in that way.
John Gardner, whose political career involved a great deal of stress, believes that he was able to maintain his sanity primarily because of a harmonious family life:
We’ve been married fifty-seven years now, fifty-seven years yesterday, and I have a very, very strong family orientation. My two daughters, who are now in midlife, and their children—four grandchildren. We’re a very close unit and that’s very important to me. I think it’s an important counterbalance, particularly to an active life, particularly to a life that’s very abrasive—fighting, leading in the public arena, and so forth.
Inevitably there were also badly strained marriages. Achieving a creative result in any field is stressful enough for one person to bear; it is much harder on one’s partner. In fact, it is surprising what a strong sense of responsibility these individuals generally felt for keeping their relationships stable. John Reed divorced after twenty-seven years of marriage; during a period of one year when his wife was hospitalized, he took time off from his rapidly ascending career to take care of their four children, aged two through twelve. “I spent the year playing Daddy with them, which turned o
ut in retrospect to be the best investment decision I ever made. Raising kids is a far more rewarding thing than earning money for a company, in terms of a sense of satisfaction.” Jacob Rabinow’s wife, who has been married to the inventor for almost sixty years, summarizes the situation philosophically: “Living with an inventor is like being a golf widow, but it’s not for Sundays only!”
