Are you creative?

According to this article I must be!



http://www.fastcompany.com/3016689/leadership-now/10-paradoxical-traits-of-c
reative-people?goback=.gde_103871_member_274067768#!




10 Paradoxical Traits Of Creative People


Creative people are humble and proud. Creative people tend to be both
extroverted and introverted. Creative people are rebellious and
conservative. How creative are you?

By: Faisal Hoque <http://www.fastcompany.com/user/faisal-hoque>



_____

I frequently find myself thinking about whether I am an artist or an
entrepreneur <http://www.faisalhoque.com> .

It is safe to say that more and more entrepreneurs are artists, and artists
of all kinds are entrepreneurs. And the trend is only on the rise as all
things (art, science, technology, business, culture, spirituality) are
increasingly converging.

Creativity is the common theme that drives both entrepreneurs and artists
alike. But creative people are often also paradoxical.

In the words of distinguished professor of psychology and management Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi:

"I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work,
to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up
with new ideas and new things. If I had to express in one word what makes
their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show
tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They
contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an individual, each of them
is a multitude."

Mihaly describes ten traits often contradictory in nature
<http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199607/the-creative-personality> ,
that are frequently present in creative people. In Creativity, Mihaly
outlines these:


1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they're also
often quiet and at rest.


They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of
freshness and enthusiasm.


2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.


"It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas;
flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and
originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the
dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure and that most
workshops try to enhance."


3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and
irresponsibility.


But this playfulness doesn't go very far without its antithesis, a quality
of doggedness, endurance, and perseverance.

"Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them
work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not.
Vasari wrote in 1550 that when Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello was working
out the laws of visual perspective, he would walk back and forth all night,
muttering to himself: "What a beautiful thing is this perspective!" while
his wife called him back to bed with no success."


4.Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted
sense of reality.


Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that
is different from the present.


5. Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted.


We're usually one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of
crowds or sitting on the sidelines and observing the passing show. Creative
individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.


6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.


It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or
supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead.


7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.


When tests of masculinity and femininity are given to young people, over and
over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough
than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive
than their male peers.


8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.


It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of
culture. So it's difficult to see how a person can be creative without being
both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and
iconoclastic.


9.Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be
extremely objective about it as well.


Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without
being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility.
Here is how the historian Natalie Davis puts it:

"I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you
write, so that you can't be so identified with your work that you can't
accept criticism and response, and that is the danger of having as much
affect as I do. But I am aware of that and of when I think it is
particularly important to detach oneself from the work, and that is
something where age really does help."


10. Creative people's openness and sensitivity often exposes them to
suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.


"Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently
present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of
creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving
for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for
banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at
universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join
industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations
more predictable."

Paradoxical or not, what I have learned most is that there is no formula for
individual creation. As Mihay says, "creative individuals are remarkable for
their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever
is at hand to reach their goals." So, more than anything else, what it takes
to be creative is resourcefulness and the courage not to give up.