I recently finished reading the book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi titled as read blog post title. I happened to buy this book at a Book Exhibition held in our park campus. I wish I had read Flow, Mihaly’s most famous work, first!
Mihaly uses his famous Flow theory as he attempts to explain Creativity as a process and how it can enrich our lives, by drawing on interviews with nearly one hundred interviews with creative people in every field and his research in similar fields for over thirty years. From the perspective of History, Indian texts such as Ashtavakra Gita and Bhagavad Gita(read: Yoga of Knowledge) refer to this similar state(Flow is “action of inaction” or “doing without doing”). He tries to achieve his objective in three parts viz., The Creative Process, The Lives(interviews with Creative People) and Domains of Creativity.
In part I, Mihaly defines Creativity using Systems model, talks about traits exhibited by the Creative Personality, the Flow of Creativity, the Work of Creativity and Creative Surroundings.
To Mihaly, what makes most sense is that creative process can be observed only in the interrelations of a system made up of three main parts viz., Domain, Field and Person. Domain is the set of symbolic rules and procedures; Mathematics, Music etc are domains. Domains are in turn nested. Field is all the individuals who act as gatekeepers to the domain. Person is the individual. He explains that Creativity occurs when a person using the symbols of a domain such as engineering, music, business, or mathematics has a new idea or a new pattern, and when that novelty is selected by the appropriate field for inclusion into the relevant domain. Occasionally, creativity involves the establishment of a new domain.
The Creative personality tends to exhibit primarily these ten traits:
1. Have a great deal of physical energy, but they are also often quiet and at rest.
2. Tend to be smart and also naive at the same time.
3. Exhibit trait of detached attachment and being both responsible and irresponsible at the same time.
4. Alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and rooted sense of reality at the other.
5. Seem to harbor opposite tendencies on the same continuum between extroversion and introversion.
6. Are remarkably humble and proud at the same time.
7. Creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, while creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.
8. Are generally thought to be rebellious and independent.
9. Passionate about their work and can be extremely objective about it as well.
10. Are exposed to suffering and pain yet also a great deal of enjoyment because of their openness and sensitivity.
In Part II, Mihaly presents compilation of experiences (in the very words of the creative people themselves) of some of the creative people including Pt. Ravi Shankar, Einstein, Heinz Leibnitz at various stages in their lives. To highlight the importance of being in the right place at the right time, he presents an example of Sir C V Raman‘s nephew Subrahmanyan Chandrasekar, an astrophysicist and a Nobel laureate, who took boat from India to study physics at Cambridge. This part is really interesting especially if one wants to draw insights from the different phases in lives of some of the creative people in different domains, and how they overcame or used those situations to their advantage. The manner in which Mihaly explains as to how the factors like parental influence, curiosity arisen out of their being prodigious, youth and childhood, role of education, supportive partners, the question of succession, the impact on the physical and cognitive abilities with aging, relationship with field/domain, in the lives of creative individuals, shaped their lives (perhaps with the words of creative people being introduced between the text) is truly inspirational. Reflecting on the lives of those creative persons, per se, highlights a set of different possibilities.
In the last part, Mihaly applies the theory and concepts presented in Part I and Part II to categorize the domains into: domain of the word, of the life, of the future, and of making of the culture. Fragile thoughts and feelings are transformed by words into concrete thoughts and emotions. Words are powerful because they enrich life by expanding the range of individual experience. The domain of the word is a joyful responsibility on the shoulders of writers/poets whose writing is needed to ensure survival of the human spirit; whose writing is needed for the conversion of the negative into the positive; whose writing is needed to experience something beyond knowledge acquired by meeting people and by what has happened to us. Creativity can be used to making of the culture. Creative individuals can step in to take on global responsibility and also impact the cultural evolution.
I really liked reading the chapter on Enhancing Personal Creativity. How can one cultivate flow in everyday life? Before that, Mihaly states that the reason for missing link in flow is that when we get into a situation when there’s nothing specific to do, our thoughts soon return to the most predictable state which is randomness or confusion(remember Second Law of Thermodynamics? ;-)). When there is no external force demanding that we concentrate, the mind begins to lose focus. It falls to the lowest energetic state, where the least amount of work is required. When this happens a sort of mental chaos takes over. Unpleasant thoughts flash into awareness, forgotten regrets resurface, and we become depressed. Then we turn on the TV set, read listlessly the ad supplement of the newspaper, have pointless conversations to avoid becoming frightened by what is happening in the mind. Taking refuge in passive entertainment keeps chaos temporarily at bay, but the attention it absorbs gets wasted. On the other hand, we can learn to enjoy using our latent creative energy so that it generates its own internal force to keep concentration focused, we not only avoid depression but also increase the complexity of our capacities to relate to the world.
How can we do this? Mihaly’s prescription derived from the objective description in Parts I & II:
-Waking up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to
-If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable
-To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity (Example from IT: All these guys, Google, Yahoo, IBM, Oracle etc introduce complexity in the world of technology to bring in new business opportunities and customers, but they reduce algorithmic complexity in their code to solve the problems of complexity ;-)…
-Take Charge of your schedule
-Make time for reflections and relaxation
-Shape your space
-Find out what you like and what you hate about life
-Start doing more of what you love, less of what you hate
-Develop what you lack
-Shift often from openness to closure
-Aim for Complexity
-Find a way to express what moves you
-Look at problems from as many viewpoints as possible
-Figure out the implications of the problem
-Implement the solution
-Produce as many ideas as possible;Have as many ideas as possible;Try to produce unlikely ideas
I hope that my fragile thoughts and feelings expressed above will be turned into concrete ones (read: Edit).
Edit: I’m not sure how much of it has been assimilated inside, but I really enjoyed reading this book. I hope that I start internalizing the prescription much more than I used to.