Industrious creativity Researcher Sally Reis (2001) found that notably creative women were typically “intelligent, hard working, imaginative, and strong willed” as girls, noting examples such as Nobel Prize–winning geneticist Barbara McClintock. In her acceptance speech for the 2013 Nobel Prize for Literature, author Alice Munro, shown here, also spoke about creativity as hard work. “Stories are so important in the world. . . . [The part that’s hardest is] when you go over the story and realize how bad it is. You know, the first part, excitement, the second, pretty good, but then you pick it up one morning and you think, ‘what nonsense,’ and that is when you really have to get to work on it. And for me, it always seemed the right thing to do.”

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