Summary of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Creativity

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#1 Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. It is the process of creating something new and interesting, and it is often the result of many sources working together to create something new and interesting.

#2 The joy of research is that it takes a lot of courage. You invest a lot of yourself in your work, and nothing may come of it. You could spend five years working on a problem and it could be wrong before you are done.

#3 I had studied and measured hundreds of galaxies, and I had found that some of them had very interesting central properties. I decided to write a paper on fourteen of them, and one of them was especially interesting.

#4 The story of how scientists discovered the order in the universe is one of the greatest examples of how learning for its own sake can be rewarding.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Mar 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669369257

IRB Media

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Insights on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Creativity

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 13

Insights from Chapter 14

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. It is the process of creating something new and interesting, and it is often the result of many sources working together to create something new and interesting.

#2

The joy of research is that it takes a lot of courage. You invest a lot of yourself in your work, and nothing may come of it. You could spend five years working on a problem and it could be wrong before you are done.

#3

I had studied and measured hundreds of galaxies, and I had found that some of them had very interesting central properties. I decided to write a paper on fourteen of them, and one of them was especially interesting.

#4

The story of how scientists discovered the order in the universe is one of the greatest examples of how learning for its own sake can be rewarding.

#5

The human race has always been tied to creativity, as we have begun to understand the world around us and how it works. We have taken over the title of creator, as we can now create machines, energies, and change the face of the earth.

#6

The process of cultural evolution is similar to the process of genetic evolution. New ideas are not passed on to the next generation, but they are passed on to our children so that they will be remembered. It is these memes that a creative person changes, and if enough of the right people see the change as an improvement, it will become part of the culture.

#7

This book is not about the neat things children often say, or the creativity all of us share just because we have a mind and can think. It does not deal with great ideas for clinching business deals, new ways to bake stuffed artichokes, or original ways of decorating the living room for a party.

#8

Creativity is the process of changing a symbolic domain in the culture. It takes effort to change traditions, and it is difficult to learn more than one domain of knowledge at a time. In cultures that are uniform and rigid, it takes more effort to achieve new ways of thinking.

#9

The trend toward specialized knowledge is not necessarily a good thing. It can lead to a cultural fragmentation such as described in the biblical story of the building of the Tower of Babel.

#10

The lives of creative individuals and the contexts of their accomplishments are useful for two reasons. First, the results of creativity enrich the culture and so they indirectly improve the quality of all our lives. But we may also learn from this knowledge how to make our own lives more interesting and productive.

#11

The three Rs are the basic academic subjects: reading, writing, and arithmetic. However, they are typically taught in a way that does not encourage originality or creative thinking. Instead, students find them boring or threatening, and their chance of using their minds in creative ways comes from working on the student paper, the drama club, or the orchestra.

#12

I and my students at the University of Chicago videotaped interviews with ninety-one exceptional individuals. The in-depth analysis of these interviews illustrates what creative people are like, how the creative process works, and what conditions encourage or hinder the generation of original ideas.

#13

The rate of acceptance varied among the different disciplines. More than half of the natural scientists, no matter how old or busy they were, agreed to participate. Artists, writers, and musicians, on the other hand, tended to ignore our letters or decline.

#14

The strategy of disproof is sufficient to derive conclusions from the data. The information we collected could not prove that all creative individuals had a happy childhood, but