PNTV: Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (#291)

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we have another great book, Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Creativity, subtitled the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is one of the world's leading psychologists ever. He wrote the great book Flow, which we covered. Check that out. All about the science of optimal experience. This book is obviously on creativity with a capital. Csikszentmihalyi interviewed hundreds of leading creative individuals across a range of fields from art and science and athletics, etc. And it's packed with big ideas on how we can go about becoming creative in our own lives. Philosopher's Note, bunch of big ideas. Handful of my favorites here. Let's start with what is creativity? Because we're talking about creativity with a capital C here. And Csikszentmihalyi is a very rigorous academic who defines things precisely. The rough overview or definition of creativity as he uses it is this. First of all, you have an individual, a person who changes a domain. They have an actual thing that they created. Again, whether it's a scientific distinction or an artistic one or whatever, that changes the domain. Not kind of sort of cool, but actually changes the domain, effectively changes the world and how people do things. And the field, right, who kind of interacts with that domain, decides that that in fact is worthy of assimilating and we go from there. So that's the basic idea. A person, a domain and a field saying, yep, that was definitely life changing. For our purposes, we want to make the really stark distinction between someone who has interesting ideas, right. And someone who actually does stuff. So whether you change something on a domain level and literally change the world or not is less relevant in our conversation now than that you move from being a creative person who has interesting ideas to. To a creative producer. This is how Mary Elaine Jacobs puts it in the Gifted Adult, right? It's not about being a smart, creative thinking person who never does anything. It's taking that and doing something about it being truly creative with a capital C. And again, if you do that on a high enough level, and these are the people that Csikszentmihalyi profiles. You change the world. That's a quick look at what it is. Second one is, well, how do we go about being like that? How do we tap into our creativity? The number one rule is our attention. You need to be willing to put your attention on your domain that you want to master. He says, look, there's no possible way these people could have affected their domains and literally changed them as creatively as they did unless they put a ton of energy into it and the primary source of energy is their attention. He said when they discovered that this is what they wanted to do, they protected themselves from distractions and they went all in, right? And they put their mind where they wanted, when they wanted, for how long they wanted on the domain that they were passionate about for an extended period of time. Attention, attention, attention. If you're paper cutting yourself with all the little distractions, there's no possible way you're going to create at your highest potential. Not possible. In my Creativity 101 class, I joked about, imagine Shakespeare or Picasso or whoever having their smartphone blowing up all the time. Oh, another notification, got another text. You can't create in that shallow level. You got to be willing to go deep and put your attention on something over an extended period of time if you want to master it and then change it. He also makes the important point a number of times throughout the book that when you do that, you're going to be viewed as a bit or very odd to people who don't do that sort of thing. And you may be seen as ruthless or selfish or whatever. He says, it's not that these people are ruthless or selfish. They're just so all in on their craft that they can appear to be that because they're so focused and so attuned to what they're up to. He uses some examples of like a Leonardo da Vinci, you know, the ultimate creative guy. He says, look, if you ran into Leonardo da Vinci at a party, he wouldn't be the most fun guy to talk to. Apparently he was a bit of a recluse. He was near compulsive, and he'd be the kind of guy you'd kind of want to leave in the corner. And I joked in the note of maybe he wouldn't even show up at that party. He would have been so focused on what he wanted to do, right? Einstein is another example. He said, look, Einstein wore the same clothes every single day. He didn't do that to be weird. He did that because he was thinking about other more important things. And then Csikszentmihalyi does the math on it and he says, look, if you actually add it up, those two minutes that Einstein, for example, didn't have to spend wondering what he was going to wear that day, that's 700 and whatever minutes a year, right? Two minutes, 365 days a year. That's a significant number of hours. That's over 10 hours a year that Einstein put into his craft. And then he did that again and again and again and again on a number of different things, right? Focused his attention. That's our second big idea. The third one is related to that. Reducing the distractions, Right? No, thanks. So one of the guys that Csikszentmihalyi reached out to that he wanted to interview was Peter Drucker, one of the most creative individuals in the business sphere in the 20th century, right? So he invited all these different people. Peter Drucker said, sorry, can't do it. And Csikszentmihalyi actually included the letter that Peter Drucker wrote to him in the book. The short story is, Peter Drucker said, look, I hate to disappoint you. I love your work. I'm a fan of flow, and I'm familiar with it, and I've learned a lot from it, but I just. I have to say no. And he said, first of all, I don't even believe in creativity. I believe this is Peter Drucker in productivity. I just plod along. I show up, and I do things day in and day out. You may call that creative. I call that productive, right? So a whole other conversation there. But then he says, look, one of the reasons why I've been so productive that I have a very large wastebasket for requests like these. This is a request from Csikszentmihalyi, one of the preeminent scientists of his era, who Drucker respected. And he said, no, can't do it. If I did that and said yes to all these requests, I'd never do my work. He knew how to focus his attention. And again, he said his number one thing was to have a very large wastepaper basket. For requests like that, being willing to say no, you've got to have a deep yes, which makes those nos much, much easier. So think about what's most important to you. Are you willing to put your attention into it and then say no to the most obvious distractions that you know are a waste of time? And then you need to get really good at saying no to the good ideas that compete with your really clear number one thing. And, of course, I'm not saying ignore your family. I often get this question. Prioritize what's important to you. I want to be a great creator, and I want to be a great father. That's, in fact, arguably my greatest creative project. Our son now we hope to have more kids, but our son right now, it's inspiring for me, right? So I say no, basically, to everything but this creative work and my family. You need to make the decision on what's important and say no thanks to everything else. And remember Peter Drucker. Our fourth big idea here is flow. So creative people live in flow quite a bit, obviously, right? It's the state of optimal experience. We've talked about it a number of times in our recent note and overview on Peak the Science of Expert Performance. We talked about some of the facets of purposeful practice. And Csikszentmihalyi walks us through nine different elements of flow. What's interesting is they're very similar to the elements of purposeful practice. Let's go through the four elements of purposeful practice right now, which is kind of like an abridged version of the nine elements of flow. Not quite, but close. So the first thing that you need to have to get into flow and to do purposeful practice is a goal. You have to have a clear target, otherwise you can't focus your attention in a meaningful manner. If you're just kind of sort of engaged, not really doing a lot, you're not going to have the focused attention required to be in flow or to do purposeful practice. And another little aside on that, he says all these creative people have goals. Not just what they're doing today, but big goals. They do something amazing and they're like, oh, whatever, that was interesting. And, but I'm going there, right? As Emerson says, genius appeals to the future. These eminent creators aren't sitting back and going, yeah, I pretty much crushed it with the last project. They're too excited about what they're going to do next. Right? Goals. And they bring that into a daily basis, which allows them to have a deep level of focus. You cannot get into flow if you're in shallow ville, right? If you're not focused, if you're kind of sort of engaged, that's not the level of focus required to do truly great work in flow. That leads to high levels of creativity. The third element is you need feedback. You need to know whether you're doing what's going to get you closer to your goal or not. Instant feedback is what you need. Then you need to get out of your comfort zone. So we talked about in Peak, the fact that you literally cannot improve your skills if you don't exit your comfort zone. Csikszentmihalyi says the same thing. You can't get into flow unless your Skills match the challenge, right? He has something called a flow channel. So if you have your skills here and your challenge here and your skills are really high and your challenge is really low, which would put us here, you're bored. But if your challenge is really high and your skills are really low, you're gonna be anxious. So you need to adjust it and get to a point where the skills and challenge meet. That's your flow channel. That's where you want to play. Now, as I said, Csikszentmihalyi has nine total elements, but a lot of them are related to this focus, where you're totally attuned, you're not distracted, you don't have self consciousness, etc. So there's a quick overview. Get into flow more consistently. What do you want to achieve on a big high level? What are you going to do today to move your toward that? Then what are you going to do right now? Focus on that, see how you're doing and match your skills to your challenges. If you're feeling bored, make it a little more challenging. Feeling anxious? Bring it down a little bit. We've talked about that in a lot of different contexts. The fifth big idea is your number one creative project. Tsikszentmihalyi makes the point that the expression of creativity in all these individuals was distinct. Obviously an artist does this, a scientist does that, and even artists and scientists do different things. By definition. That's how they affected their domains distinctly, right? But what they all have in common, he says, is they created their lives. They created their lives in such a manner that they could actually express what they wanted to do. And they can create what they wanted to create. They can put their attention where they wanted to. And he says that's, and I like to say that's in fact the most creative thing that they did to architect your ideal life. In itself a highly creative act. It's hard to do as anything worth doing is. And it takes a lot of creativity, a lot of iteration to get to the point where you've figured out what you want to do and then how to do it best. He talks about the fact that these creative people have figured out their rhythms that Scott Adams talked about. Right, Scott Adams, Dilbert. He says I'm best between 5am and 9am I don't let anyone distract me between 5am and 9am he says at 3pm I'm a copier. I don't come up with anything unique. But five to nine, that's my precious area. And he creatively identified that. And then protects that time so he can do his best work consistently creating systems where he can show up and rock it consistently. I talk about this a lot in creativity 101 as well. It was actually my first big idea and the 11th big idea. Your life is your ultimate creative project. Make your life a masterpiece. Big idea number one and 11 in creativity 101. So think about that. Think about how you can architect your ideal life so your gifts can come forward and you can give them in greatest service to the world. As you get into flow more consistently, having clear goals, focusing, getting feedback, stretching yourself out of your comfort zone, be willing to say no thanks. As you hone your attention on what matters the most, be willing to be a little weird. Then remember we're not talking about being a interesting thinker and you come up with a lot of ideas. We're talking about being a producer, being someone who's creative with a capital C. It makes a difference in their family's lives, their communities lives and in the world at large. That is a quick look at creativity. Hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more soon. Have another awesome day. See you.

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