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Creativity Is Solitary Work

Creativity is essentially a solitary enterprise. Most landmark discoveries in science and all major musical compositions are the work of one person.

New ideas are often tentative, half-baked, and difficult to communicate in a persuasive way. On the receiving side, most scientists and engineers generally react to someone else's new idea by discouraging it: "It won't work.", "It's a waste of your time.", etc. Colleagues tend to reject unorthodox views, at least until those views are convincingly presented, in a complete form. But such a completed form occurs at the end of a research project, not at the beginning or middle. So, as a defensive measure, it is best to keep new ideas to one's self, until one reaches an unresolvable problem that requires someone else's assistance.

Further, creative work is inherently personal. Involvement of other people diverts the creator's unique vision of the final product and how to create it. When multiple people are involved, there are inevitably compromises and the final product is mostly a consensus view. As an aside, French law recognizes that the creator of a work expresses his/her personality in the work, so – while the creator may sell the copyright or object – the creator always retains the "droit moral" in his/her work. See my separate essay at my professional web site on moral rights of authors, which are not recognized in law in the USA.

Still further, the personality trait of stubborn and uncompromising makes it difficult for many creative people to work in groups, where compromises are routine practice.

There are certainly large projects that require too many man-hours and too many different technical skills for one person to do all the work. Examples of such projects are particle accelerators used by nuclear physicists, optical and radio telescopes, design of aircraft, etc. However, in practice, these large projects are broken down into many small tasks, with a few people (perhaps only one person) having the responsibility for each task. If multiple people work together on one task, or different people supervise and approve the work on one task, the approach will tend away from innovation and tend toward a consensus view that uses proven ideas. While this approach may increase reliability, it also thwarts creativity. Sometimes a scientist working on a problem is frustrated and discusses the problem with a colleague, who suggests a way of solving the difficulty. In this way, the final work may be published as a multiple-author paper, but each part of the solution was the responsibility of one person.

The colleague may contribute a mathematical or experimental technique, or knowledge of some fact, that was not known to the first scientist. Another way to get multiple-author papers on innovative topics is for a professor to have more good ideas than the professor can personally develop. So the professor gives good idea(s) to a graduate student, and the student does the work to develop the idea into a publishable paper. It is traditional for both the student's and professor's name to appear on the final paper: the student did nearly all of the work, the professor contributed the initial idea, equipment and resources, and helped the student with difficulties along the way. This process is more than merely preparing the student's doctoral dissertation: it is teaching in a Master-Apprentice style.

Besides benefits to the student, it also increases the productivity of the professor and, by increasing the professor's reputation, makes it easier for the professor to obtain future financial support. Carried to an extreme, the professor will become a manager who writes proposals for financial support, generates new ideas, and allocates resources, but is no longer personally involved in scientific research. In the long-run, removing the professor from personal involvement in doing experimental or theoretical work could decrease the rate at which the professor generates significant new ideas, and make the professor less familiar with techniques for solving problems.

How Creativity Occurs

Conception of a new idea often occurs in an intuitive flash of insight, in which the more or less complete idea is revealed. Equations and logical analysis come later. Someone who is reading scholarly publications in a library sees the final result in a format that is quite different from its initial conception. The fact that the public presentation is different from the way the idea initially occurred can lead to misunderstandings about how science is actually accomplished.

One of the principal ways to be creative is to look for alternative ways to view a phenomena or for alternative ways to ask a question. It is easy to ask questions that are trivial to solve. It is easy to ask questions that require extraordinary effort (e.g., 50 man-years of effort and millions of dollars in expenses) to solve. It is surprisingly difficult to find questions that lie in between these two extremes, and also have a result that is worth knowing.

One often-cited example of creativity is George de Mestral's observation of how cockleburs attach to clothing, which led him to invent the hook-and-loop fastener known as Velcro®. He transformed a common nuisance to a useful product. When one looks backward in time to analyze how a creative act was made, one often finds that creators made a novel interpretation of a well-known fact or occurrence. Often the interpretation converted a disadvantage into an advantage.

Another commonly cited example of creativity is Art Fry's development of Post-It® removable notes at 3M Corporation in 1974. Dr. Spencer Silver, another 3M scientist, had developed a polymer adhesive that formed microscopic spheres instead of a uniform coating, and thus was a poor adhesive that took years to set. Fry wanted a better bookmark for his church hymnal, so he used Silver's adhesive. The conventional wisdom is that every adhesive must be strong. By ignoring the conventional wisdom, Fry developed a highly successful office product. However, not only did he need to develop the idea, but he also had to sell the idea to his management and marketing departments, which were resistant to his new idea. A creative manager, if there be such a person, would have redefined the problem to find a use for a weak adhesive, but the conventional wisdom that all adhesives must be strong is apparently overpowering. There is a second exception to the "all adhesives must be strong" rule: thread locking compounds that prevent machine screws and bolts from loosening during vibration must be weak enough to allow removal of the screw or bolt during repair.

Prof. David Swenson has posted a web page with a rich collection of examples of innovation.

Personality Traits Associated With Creativity

• Diligence

Many people who are famous for their creative output are highly diligent, often bordering on the obsessive. It is common to see creative professors working 60 to 80 hours/week for the sheer joy of the effort. Creative people have an inner need to express their creativity. They can not keep their new idea inside their head forever, the idea needs to be born. In fact, many creative people would be creative, even if they were not paid for their effort or output, a situation that has lead society and managers to a frankly shameful exploitation of many of the greatest innovators in the history of mankind. Not all creative people work long hours. I get the impression that mathematicians and theoretical physicists are often exhausted after 20 to 40 hours/week of intense thought. In discussing the amount of time a creative person spends on work, it is important to reward productivity, not number of hours worked. Many times, a creative person will work a few hours and encounter an obstacle. Continuing to stare at the work is unlikely to produce a breakthrough. Experience shows that novel insights often come at unexpected times (e.g., while doing some mundane task, such as walking or in the shower). In industry, it is common to see creative engineers working in their spare time, or working during evenings and weekends, on their "secret" project. If they asked their manager for authorization, the manager would likely say "No!", so the creative people keep their project secret until it is completed or it becomes clear that their concept will not work. Nights, weekends, and holidays are good times to accomplish creative work, because there are fewer interruptions (e.g., from telephone calls, unexpected visitors) to break one's concentration. I can not emphasize too strongly that a diagnostic sign of a creative person is that he/she finds their own work to do, rather than sit idly until someone else gives them an assignment. Creative people need to express themselves through creative projects. However, one should distinguish between a workaholic who puts in 80 hours/week doing routine work and a creative person who works long hours doing new things, often things that no one else thought could be accomplished. Many people with unusually great creativity are ambitious, concerned with their reputation, and apparently need to prove themselves worthy. I suspect that these characteristics formed the motivation for their diligence, which is necessary for success. Their need to prove themselves worthy may come from experiences early in life in which other children, other students, etc. ridiculed or taunted them. Reading biographies of famous scientists and inventors shows that many of these men had an intense focus on their work. One could describe this intensity with pejorative terms: obsession, monomania, idée fixe. Or one could recognize that the intense concentration was necessary to take them beyond the reach of ordinary men.

• Stubborn

1. My colleagues tell me it is "impossible", "you are crazy to try this", "it will never work", "it has been tried before", etc. Of course, when I accomplish my goal, they forget their earlier prediction.
2. There is nearly always inadequate funding and inadequate laboratory resources, which makes the experiment take longer than it would with appropriate equipment.
3. There is always inadequate time, because the project is in addition to one's regular activities (e.g., sponsored research, teaching, earning money, family and personal life)

Being creative is extraordinarily difficult work that is essential to progress! And society seems to delight in making it more difficult by denying resources to creative people who need them. The way to succeed in spite of these artificially created burdens is to have some combination of the following character traits:

• Persistent
• Tenacious
• Uncompromising
• Stubborn
• Arrogant

Most people would characterize these traits as negative or undesirable qualities, yet I believe they are essential to innovation. By arrogant, I mean trusting one's own judgment and ignoring other people's adverse opinion (e.g., "you're crazy to try that", etc.). It is ok to be arrogant in selecting projects and goals for one's self and allocating one's personal time.

• Gender

It is well known that, as a general rule, men are more aggressive than women, owing to testosterone. For example, nearly all violent criminals are male. It may be that testosterone gives men an advantage over women in persisting, despite the disappointments and frustrations that are inherent in research. (Having said something that might be provocative, please do not misunderstand me! I believe in equal opportunity and removing gender barriers in life, including professions. I simply observe that there are differences in genders beyond sexual anatomy. For these reasons, providing equality of opportunity does not assure equal outcomes.) The subject of gender differences is complex. For example, one can observe that an appreciable fraction of undergraduate students majoring in biology or chemistry are women, while only a few percent of undergraduate students majoring in mathematics or physics are women. When I have discussed the issue with women, they have often told me that guidance counselors in high school and college told them that "women are not able to do physics or mathematics", advice that is surely not correct.

Surprisingly, women seem to accept such bad advice in a passive way. In contrast, telling a man that he is not able to do something often serves as a challenge to prove the advisor wrong. This trait of perversity in men could be valuable in persisting in the face of inevitable disappointments and frustrations in creative work. I am intrigued by the observation that women are much more common in the police and military, occupations that involve violence and physical courage (i.e., traditional male attributes), than in physics or mathematics, which are safe, clean, indoor occupations. Similarly, many attorneys who successfully litigate cases are female, more proof that women can succeed in a profession that requires aggression and stamina. So I am baffled by the absence of women from science and mathematics, particularly when one considers the success of women in police, military, and litigation. I have the impression, from my experience teaching electrical engineering for ten years, that women tend to approach problems in a formal mathematical way. This earns them good grades in school on textbook exercises, but is not necessarily the best way to approach practical problems.

Many of my male colleagues are intuitive when approaching problems, the mathematical analysis comes later as one works out the details. My guess is that men develop this intuition by building things during childhood and tinkering with automobiles and computers during adolescence. In contrast, conventional culture denies these experiences to women, by insisting that girls play with dolls, sew, cook, etc. In the USA, there is a toy called an "Erector Set" that consists of a collection of metal beams, brackets, machine screws and nuts, etc. for children to build their own toys. During the late 1950's, the Erector Set was a common Christmas gift for boys, but was conventionally considered not suitable for girls. I wonder if this gender stereotyping during childhood translates ten or fifteen years later into a denial of opportunity for women to compete with men in physics, mechanical engineering, etc.

• Eccentric

From reading biographies of famous scientists and musical composers, one common personality trait becomes clear: many of them are eccentric. Being eccentric does not imply that one is creative. Conversely, not all creative people are eccentric: some creative people have normal family lives and conventional values.

(Normally, I write about people in a gender neutral way, but most famous scientists, and all major composers of music, are male. While there are a few examples of famous women scientists, there are not enough to make any generalizations about their character traits. So the following paragraphs are limited to men.)

• .. Reclusive

Many creative men were a hermit, recluse, or loner. Only a few sought publicity (extroversion), which is contrary to what one would expect from ambitious men.

The percentage of men who never married, or never had children, is greater among creative scientists than in the general population. I see three reasons for this result:

• These men rarely met women, since women are rare in physics, mathematics, and engineering.
• Many creative scientists are reclusive. They have difficulty relating to people, either male or female. This difficulty might be expressed as shyness.
• It may also be that romance, erotic play, etc. were seen as ephemeral activities and a distraction from their real work.

It is not clear to me if the creative trait of being a recluse is either:

• something essential to creativity, because creativity is inherently solitary work, or

something creative people learn, in order to avoid criticism, taunting, ridicule, and other abuse. During childhood, such abuse comes from teachers and school children. These early experiences are reinforced later in life by abuse from managers and "normal" (i.e., noncreative) colleagues. Alternatively, it may be less painful to be lonely, than to be among "normal" people who do not understand what it is like to be creative

• ... Non Neligious

Returning to the discussion of eccentric traits in creative scientists, a larger percentage of scientists were either atheists or agnostics, compared to the general population. I suspect that these men simply applied the same objective standards of science to religion, and refused to believe dogma on faith alone. Further, a person who accepts dogma has the security of knowing that millions of other people believe the same dogma, which is something that gives comfort and assurance to many people. In contrast to the majority of the population, creative scientists are often skeptics, for whom belief is always tentative and subject to continuing inquiry and testing. Note that I did not say that religious beliefs are incompatible with being a good scientist. I only note that religious beliefs are less common among scientists than in many other groups of people

• ....Monotonous Routine Life

Highly creative men often had a monotonous diet or wore the same kind of clothes every day. I suspect that these men saw routine details of life, such as eating and clothing, as unimportant and not worthy of thought. It may be that these men were unconsciously rebelling against conventional values and concerns that impeded them in their creative pursuits. In some extreme cases, creative men lived in cluttered, messy environments, because they did not take the time to clean house.

• .....Bipolar Disorder

There seems to be a higher incidence of bipolar disorder (i.e., manic-depressive disease) in highly creative people than in the entire population. This disorder causes neither creativity nor intelligence, but it seems to enhance creativity, perhaps by removing inhibitions and barriers to radical or complex thoughts.

• ......Enjoy thier Work

Another reason that creative people are sometimes seen as eccentric is that creative people genuinely enjoy their work, instead of working only because they need an income. But creative people should enjoy their work, because it is significant and original.

................Conclusion

On reflection, one would expect innovative people to be unusual, even eccentric, when viewed by normal society. If innovative people were ordinary, they would work like ordinary people and achieve little of historical significance, because they are only executing routine assignments. Creative intellectuals are normal when compared to the population in which they belong.

Conventional people often put pejorative labels on creative people, to characterize their nonconventional (hence, different) personality traits. In addition to the "eccentric" label, which was discussed above, there are labels like "geek" and "nerd". Ordinary people often apply pejorative labels to intellectuals, who often do creative research, for example: "pointy headed intellectuals who can't park their bicycles straight" or "eggheads". Such pejorative labels may serve to identify individuals with unusually high intelligence or unusually great creativity, in effect making them an anomalous person, so that ordinary people have an excuse for not being able to compete with these anomalies. Further, this use of pejorative labels is a marginalization of creative people, by alleging that creative people are either defective or have a personality disorder.

One of the principal ways to be creative is to look for alternative ways to view a phenomena or for alternative ways to ask a question. Conventional society heaps pejorative terms on creative people (e.g., obsessive, monomania, stubborn, uncompromising, eccentric). It would be better to see the behavior that is identified by these pejorative labels in a positive light: these characteristics are common among creative people, and may be essential to creative success.

During the 1980's, Senator Proxmire in the USA held regular press conferences and identified a specific scientific research project as an example of government waste (i.e., his "Golden Fleece" award). Of course, the senator, the journalists, and most of the people reading the journalist's report would be unable to understand and fairly evaluate an esoteric research project. The Senator simply denigrated scientific research as a way of boosting his own public esteem. A rational society should encourage creativity, not denigrate it with pejorative labels, because creativity is valuable to society

Theory of Creativity

Readers who have not previously considered the psychology of creativity might first wish to read my summary of Sternberg's theory of creativity at the end of this document. In short, the ability to be creative is the amalgamation of several different kinds of intelligence and personality traits. Creativity is an amazingly complex subject. There are many books about the psychology of creativity in artists, but relatively little about creativity in scientists and engineers. However, there are (1) a number of biographies of scientists, which give some light on creativity in scientists, and (2) some books on creativity in mathematicians. The following are my own conclusions and comments about creativity, based on:

• my observations of colleagues and students, some of whom were highly creative, but others were not creative, and asking myself why the differences in creative output,



• my personal experiences,



• my reading biographies of scientists, mathematicians, and composers of music



• my reading psychology books on creativity
  

It is obvious that before one can do creative science and engineering, one must have some technical knowledge of facts, laws, and methods (e.g., study of physics, chemistry, calculus, differential equations, statistics, computer programming, etc.). If one compares highly creative scientists and engineers with their plodding, ordinary colleagues, one finds essentially the same kinds of intelligence and knowledge in both groups. Therefore, I conclude that it must be the personality traits that distinguish creative from noncreative people

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First, consider a definition of creativity. A creative person does things that have never been done before. Particularly important instances of creativity include discoveries of new knowledge in science and medicine, invention of new technology, composing beautiful music, or analyzing a situation (e.g., in law, philosophy, or history) in a new way. It is important to distinguish among three different characteristics: intelligence, creativity, and academic degrees. Intelligence is the ability to learn and the ability to think. Creativity was defined in the previous paragraph, as the ability to produce new things or new knowledge. Academic degrees are what one gets after one has sat through years of classes, passed the examinations, and completed all of the other requirements (e.g., senior thesis, doctoral dissertation, etc.). In comparing and contrasting these three traits, I note that: Most people who create significant things are intelligent.

There are many people with an earned doctoral degree who do not have a single creative idea in their head. They are intelligent and highly skilled problem solvers, but someone else must formulate the problem for them (e.g., give them an equation to solve). Thus intelligence and academic degrees are not evidence of creativity.

Students who are both intelligent and highly creative often make mediocre grades in school. Genius is a vague term: sometimes it indicates a person with an unusually high score on an IQ test, other times it indicates an extraordinarily creative person (e.g., Mozart or Einstein). I don't like the word genius, not only because of this vagueness, but also because it often has the connotation in colloquial American language of indicating a freak, weird, or abnormal person. I am interested in understanding and encouraging creativity, not pasting pejorative labels on creative people. Further, someone who is not a genius can still make a valuable contribution to progress.

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What Creativity Is ..

The creative spirit is one of the most powerful driving forces in human history. Creativity in the arts can inspire new insights and understanding for generations. Inventive creativity has helped transform our society time and time again, helping to make life better for countless lives. Creativity helps bring meaning to one's life through unique self-expression. When focused on uplifting humanity, creativity can help to create a more peaceful, just and sustainable world. How will you use your creativity to help create a better world?

C.r.e.a.t.i.v.i.t.y -- Seeing the world differently

The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.