Time to Return

 

After six years, I have decided to return to regularly updating The Creativity Paradox. As before, it will cover an eclectic set of topics involving creativity in business management, photography, printing, print finishing, additive manufacturing and other arts.

I have been surprised that these posts have continued to have several hundred page views per month, even without any updates. Since there seems to be interest in the old posts, I have tried to repair or remove any broken links and fix anything else needed.

Originally, this blog began as a serialized version of a presentation on Creativity in Business Model Development for Graph Expo in 2011.  Most of the ideas presented are just as valid today as they were ten years ago.  You might find it interesting to return to the beginning.

I also want to acknowledge my debt to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who passed away on October 20th. His research on creativity and flow states contributed greatly to the understanding of creativity and have heavily influenced my writing on the subject.

At the end of this year, I will be retiring from my full time employment with Imaging Solutions which will give me more time to research and write.

What topics would you like to see covered?

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The Age of Creativity

Creating Happiness

No Regrets

What's Your Pinball

If I told what it takes
to reach the highest high,
You'd laugh and say "nothings that simple."

 Pete Townsend

In 1969, more than a decade before Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's experiments on Flow, Pete Townsend and the Who explained the phenomena quite accurate in their rock opera Tommy. Frightened and abused into a catatonic state, the apparently "deaf, dumb and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball." The enlightened state induced by the game sets Tommy free.

He stands like a statue,
Becomes part of the machine.
Feeling all the bumpers
Always playing clean.
He plays by intuition,
The digit counters fall.
That deaf dumb and blind kid,
Sure plays a mean pinball!

He ain't got no distractions
Can't hear those buzzers and bells.
Don't see no lights a flashing,
Plays by sense of smell.
Always gets a replay,
Never tilts at all.
That deaf dumb and blind kid
Sure plays a mean pinball!

Whether you call it "flow", "in the zone", or "in the groove", all of us have been so absorbed with an activity that nothing else seems to matter. This feeling of total involvement, when ego falls away and time flies, brings a sense of elation unlike any other.

For Tommy, that sense of elation came from playing pinball. For others it might be playing golf, skiing, building a website, writing a blog post, quilting, playing the guitar or questing in Worlds of Warcraft.

To reach the flow state, there must be a balance between the challenge of the task and the skill of the individual. The skill level and challenge level must be matched and high.

When do you feel the joy of total concentration?  What's your Pinball?


I'm free
I'm free
And freedom tastes of reality
I'm free
I'm free
And I'm waiting for you to follow me


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 Creating Happiness

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Creating Happiness

We can create many things.  Our own happiness is one of the most important.

Many people feel that happiness is something that just happens.  They believe that they are happy when good things happens and unhappy when bad things happen. This fatalistic belief is not consistent with the actual scientific evidence.

Philosophers throughout the centuries and scientific researchers over the last forty years declare that happiness is not the result of what happens to us. Happiness depends upon our interpretation of what happens to us. Each of us control our own happiness by the way we approach everyday experiences.

Groundbreaking research by Hungarian Psychology Professor Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi discovered that people report being most happy when they are engaged in an activity where their body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. For many people, this happens most often at work. Csiksentmihalyi calls this experience “Flow” and explores it in detail in his book Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Flow can be experienced in many activities; work, sports, music, art, cooking. Csiksentmihalyi found that every flow experience “provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting a person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex.”

Two things that can prevent flow are boredom and anxiety. It your activity is too easy, it won’t keep you engaged and happy.  If your activity is too difficult, anxiety will keep you from becoming engaged and happy. The key is to find an interesting activity that is moderately difficult and continue to increase the difficulty as your skills develop.

When you reach a state of flow, all other concerns melt away along with any sense of the passage of time. It really is the journey, not the destination that matters.

When are you happiest?

More Ideas!

At his sixtieth birthday celebration, Nobel prize winning chemist Linus Pauling was asked by a student, “Doctor Pauling, how does one go about having good ideas?”  He replied, “You have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.”

In his book Creativity, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly has these suggestions for generating ideas.  First, produce as many ideas as possible.  Focus on quantity, you can be critical later and edit for quality. Second, have as many different ideas as possible.  Quantity is important, but try to generate a  wide variety of options.  Finally, try to produce unlikely ideas. Go beyond the obvious and simple approaches.

One of my favorite techniques is to consider ideas that would be great if there were no constraints. What if money were no object?  What if you could break the laws of physics?  What if there were no processing or uploading delays?  What if you turned it upside down?  Or inside out?

What great ideas have you considered lately?