are his, and the bold type and explanations are mine.)
1.“Convergent thinking”—“the ability to scan many relevant facts, then zero in on those facts most likely to result in the correct solution to a particular problem.”
For instance, cross out six letters below to leave a common English word.
BSAINXLEATNTEARS
(The answer is at the end of this chapter.)
I personally loathe this sort of test, but early studies of creativity in the 1950s and 1960s used it. The idea is that most people get stuck in one mode of thought and creative people consider unusual and original alternatives. I prefer the more recent studies of creativity that do experiments or case studies of people actually creating in their fields.
Amabile, one of the most respected psychologists in the field today, might say that problems like the above are not true creativity: they are “algorithmic,” dependent on coming up with the one correct formula, rather than “heuristic,” defining original procedures. She adds that many views of creativity mention defining the problem as an important part of the process.44 This would certainly be true in math, science, and engineering. (See Chapter 10.)
2.“Divergent thinking”—“the ability to fan out in all directions from an idea.”
John Guildford and other earlier theorists about creativity liked to use this method.
An example was, “List the uses of a brick.” The idea was that the creative person could concoct a longer list with more unusual examples.
3.“Independent Judgment”—the ability to have faith in one’s ideas, no matter what others say.
A classic example is Emily Dickinson, who wrote quixotic poetry. She used startling word choices, capitalized all important words, and punctuated with dashes. She sought advice from an editor, Thomas Higginson, who warned her that she would have to regularize her verse in order to be published. So instead she put her verse in a drawer. Now her original choices are praised as highly creative, and the first editions of her poetry, which regularized punctuation and diction, are considered inferior.
4.“Intellectual curiosity”—the penchant to wonder “What?” Why?” and “How?”
The supreme example is Leonardo da Vinci, who wondered about almost everything he saw. He filled his notebooks with drawings of possible inventions and anatomical observations. (See Chapter 10 for examples.) Gelb, who calls “Curiositá” one of the main principles to follow in order to think like Leonardo da Vinci,45 quotes this example from Leonardo’s notebooks:
I roamed the countryside searching for things I did not understand. Why shells existed on the tops of mountains along with the imprints of coral and plants and sea weed usually found in the sea. Why the thunder lasts a longer time than that which causes it, and why immediately on its creation the lightning becomes visible to the eye while thunder requires time to travel. How the various circles of water form around the spot which has been struck by a stone, and why a bird sustains itself in the air. These questions and other strange phenomena engage my thought throughout my life.46
5.Playfulness—the possession of “a strong sense of humor and rich fantasy life.”
Richard Feynman, who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965, characterizes himself as “a bit of a clown.”47 While he was working on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, he amused himself by figuring out ways to crack the locks on safes and filing cabinets in offices at the Los Alamos compound. He narrates his adventures in a delightfully humorous tone: “I had just opened two safes cold. I was getting good. Now I was professional.” After he’d cracked a drawer or safe, he often left a note like: “‘This one was no harder to open than the other one—Wise Guy.’” His colleagues were alarmed, suspecting an outside job, until they realized it was just Feynman goofing around again. The goofing could be productive, though. Once as he watched someone in the Cornell cafeteria throwing a plate into the air, he began to calculate the parameters of motion involved. Eventually he derived a complicated equation. He showed it to a colleague, who proclaimed it “‘interesting’” but asked, “‘What’s the importance of it? Why are you doing it?’” “‘Ha!’” said Feynman. “‘There’s no importance whatsoever; I’m just doing it for the fun of it.’” The calculations were to win him the Nobel Prize.48
6.Avoidance of “early self-criticism of their ideas”—the ability to play with an idea instead of rejecting it outright as flawed.
The example of Edison and the light bulb is listed above. He is said to have remarked that all his earlier trials were useful because they showed him ways in which the filament would not work! (See Chapter 10 for this process of reworking ideas in engineering.)
Albert Rothenberg defines creative thinking another way: the ability to hold tensions of opposites together as true.49 Einstein had this “ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity.”50 This sort of thinking, common in the East, is expressed in the famous saying, “Truth is one; many are the names.” There is a truth of literary representation, a truth of scientific experimentation, and a truth of spiritual experience; we need not say either-or because we can say both-and. This sort of thinking creates powerful literary effects like irony and complexity: Luke Skywalker in Star Wars is both disciple of Yoda and son of Darth Vader; Frodo in Lord of the Rings sets out to destroy the ring but also succumbs at times to its seductions. In their use of arresting metaphors, poets draw upon this sort of thinking: the moon or the rose can convey many meanings, all simultaneously true. Arieti termed this kind of metaphorical thinking the ability to find “the similar in the dissimilar.”51 (For more examples, see Chapters 9 and 11.)
Amabile’s Componential Model identifies a set of “dispositional, cognitive, and social factors” interacting to produce various degrees of creativity: “Domain-Relevant Skills,” “Creativity-Relevant Skills,” and “Task Motivation.”52 A “dispositional” factor would have to do with your temperament, as defined above: for example, your degree of flexibility, persistence, curiosity, playfulness, and perspicacity. A “cognitive” factor has to do with your thinking (such as unorthodox, convergent, divergent, synthetic, or integrative). A “social” factor might connote how well you are supported by a network or system (See Chapters 12 and 13, also “Creativity is dependent on the environment,” above.) If you are in a band, you may well be able to play better than artists who are famous, but the social environment controls, to some extent, whether you get the breaks. (See the Conclusion to read how getting around gatekeepers may be easier now than it was a few decades ago.)
You must also be knowledgeable in your domain. A “domain,” as defined by Csikszentmihalyi, is “a set of symbolic rules and procedures” such as “number theory”53
