Creativity

This book will capture your imagination and dazzle your senses with deep scholarship.

Deep exploration of creative outputs at their maximum states, the state of “flow”, condensing Csikszentmihalyi’s thirty years of research and nearly one hundred interviews with exceptionally creative people, spanning science, business, and art, in all of their dimensions. Creativity in art, technology, and science, perceived by many as being different types of creativity, revealed, at its core, to be the same.

Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi tackles a colossal question in Creativity: how do people come up with new ideas?

I love the scope of this book, which journeys from breakthroughs in science to experimentation in jazz. I love the myths the author debunks, including the out-of-nowhere “aha” moment: Ideas don’t just burst into consciousness, they emerge from a lifetime of knowledge and experience that comes before them.

And I love that Csikszentmihalyi concludes his book with a chapter about how we, his readers, can enhance our own creativity. Key takeaways: cultivate curiosity; look for surprises in the ordinary; allow yourself to… show more.

Written by my mentor for many years, Mihaly “Mike” Csikszentmihalyi, this is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what it means to be truly creative and what is required to be able to generate important insights and contributions in any field.

You will learn about the habits of creative people and their complex personalities as well as understand which professional fields that are easy or difficult to make creative contributions in.

I would urge you to read very carefully what Mike writes about the complex personality of creative people and try to rebuild yourself in that manner.