or the process used by Einstein or Feynman to generate ideas, you will have a bag of tools that you can apply to your own life. (Chapter 1 includes a 5-stage process; Chapter 3, a 10-stage process; and the chapter exercises include many other ideas.) In addition, you will enrich your mind by being exposed to some great art and thinking.
7.Part of Being Human
You may think that you are not creative, but you are. Most psychologists believe that like any other skill, creativity operates on a continuum, from the “Creativity with a capital C” that denotes the thinkers listed above to the “everyday creativity” you can apply to cooking or amateur art. By studying some processes and procedures, you can learn how to enhance the creativity you have.
8.Augmentation of your “Mental Health”
If we are prevented from exercising our full potential, we can feel depressed or even ill. Seligman and Peterson, who call creativity one of the basic human virtues, narrate this moving example (italics theirs):
At age 68, Elizabeth Layton was a retired homemaker and aging grandmother, living out her final years in a small prairie town in Kansas . . . There was really nothing outstanding about her except for one fact: she frequently suffered profound depression. Indeed, for more than three decades she had undergone all kinds of therapy, including drugs and electroshock. Nothing really helped, but she managed to persevere. And then disaster struck. Her youngest son died after a prolonged illness, plunging her into the darkest despair ever. On several occasions she contemplated suicide as the only exit from her seemingly insurmountable depression. Yet following up her sister’s wise suggestion, she enrolled in a drawing class. Elizabeth’s art teacher recognized her elderly student’s talent even before the course was completed. Elizabeth just loved to draw and draw and draw, creating one sketch after another with great facility and expressiveness. Besides allowing her to release pent-up feelings and beliefs—about death, sadness, AIDS, racism, nuclear war, American commercialism, and other personal and social issues—painting gave Elizabeth something to look forward to each day. She found her mission in life. Her works began to be displayed in art museums and galleries, first locally and then in a traveling exhibit that toured the nation. By the time she died in 1993, she had produced nearly a thousand drawings that made a deep impression on admirers all over the United States. To be sure, Elizabeth will not go down in history as a Michelangelo or a Picasso. But that was never her intention . . . The significant fact is that creativity allowed her to live out her final 15 years with a joy and a sense of purpose that she had been denied all the previous decades of her life. Moreover, while pursuing her vision, she managed to bring happiness and meaning to others.11
Creativity, however we practice it, is part of our higher need for self-actualization. Industrial engineers have come to realize that the old assembly line jobs, with their mind-numbing monotony, have an adverse effect on workers.
9.“Growing Body of Interest”
Since John Guilford addressed the American Psychological Association in 1950 to recommend a study of creativity, there has been a growing interest in the area. Psychologists now study both the process and the product. They conduct experiments, review case studies, and are defining what creativity is and how it functions.
A rich diversity of materials is now available on creativity, from the popular to the academic or the pragmatic to the theoretical. Specialized approaches also abound. Biographies of scientists like Barbara McClintock and artists like Michelangelo illuminate their creative processes. The business community regularly comments on what it calls “innovation,” and in 2006 the academic liberal arts association AAC&U released an entire issue on creativity as one of its Peer Review magazines. Between 1920 and 1950, “out of the 121,000 titles listed in Psychological Abstracts . . . only 186 dealt with creativity . . . From the late 1960’s until 1991, almost 9,000 references have been added to the creativity literature.”12 See the bibliography at the end of this book for many examples.
10. Application to “All Disciplines”
One of my colleagues, upon being told of creativity in science, engineering, math, business, and maritime transportation, exclaimed, “And I thought creativity was just an artsy-fartsy thing!”
Not at all! Creativity is all around us, even in the everyday objects we use. For instance, Daniel Pink alludes to an aesthetically remarkable toilet brush, to be had at Target for $5.99 and “designed by Michael Graves, a Princeton University architecture professor and one of the most renowned architects and product designers in the world.”13 Pink says, “We may not all be Dali or Degas. But today we must all be designers.”14
11. Contribution to “Effective Leadership”
A leader today must know how to be creative and to inspire creativity in others. A good example is US Captain Michael D. Abrashoff, who commanded what he called “The Best Damn Ship in the Navy.” He states his philosophy as follows: “I worked hard to create a climate that encouraged quixotic pursuits and celebrated the freedom to fail. I never once reprimanded a sailor for attempting to solve a problem or reach a goal. I wanted my people to feel empowered, so they could think autonomously.”15 In the modern maritime world, the empowerment that supports both creativity and leadership occurs in the system of Bridge Resource Management. (See the discussion by Professors Messer-Bookman, Hayes, and Buckley, interviewed for Chapter 12 of this book.)
12. Enhancement of the “Learning” “Process”
Thomas L. Friedman says that in our fast-changing global economy, “Average Joe has to become special, specialized, synthesizing, or adaptable Joe.”16 The world of the future belongs to the lifelong learner—someone willing to explore new ideas.
In US colleges the learning process can seem fragmented. You take one course, do a final and paper; take another course, do a final and project. It can seem that all you’re doing is accumulating credits, checking off the boxes on a list. But when you think creatively, you transfer ideas from one course to another, synthesizing knowledge and creating new knowledge from it. This sort of skill that will make you happy, productive, and successful all your life. Daniel Pink says,
The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind—computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind—creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people—artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers—will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.17
So here are “12 solid reasons” to study creativity. Can you think of any others?
Exercises
1.Which of the reasons in this introduction appeals most to you? Why?
2.What can you add to this list, or how would you react to it in general?
3.What has been your experience with creativity so far? Do you feel you are a creative person? In what fields and in what ways?
4.How can you exercise your creativity now or in the future?
5.What creative people