25.4 Thinking Creatively

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.”

Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty Images

1. Expertise—well-developed knowledge—furnishes the ideas, images, and phrases we use as mental building blocks. “Chance favors only the prepared mind,” observed Louis Pasteur. The more blocks we have, the more chances we have to combine them in novel ways. Wiles’ well-developed knowledge put the needed theorems and methods at his disposal.

2. Imaginative thinking skills provide the ability to see things in novel ways, to recognize patterns, and to make connections. Having mastered a problem’s basic elements, we redefine or explore it in a new way. Wiles’ imaginative solution combined two partial solutions.

3. A venturesome personality seeks new experiences, tolerates ambiguity and risk, and perseveres in overcoming obstacles. Wiles said he labored in near-isolation from the mathematics community partly to stay focused and avoid distraction. Such determination is an enduring trait.

4. Intrinsic motivation is the quality of being driven more by interest, satisfaction, and challenge than by external pressures (Amabile & Hennessey, 1992). Creative people focus less on extrinsic motivators—meeting deadlines, impressing people, or making money—than on the pleasure and stimulation of the work itself. As Wiles noted, “I was so obsessed by this problem that . . . I was thinking about it all the time—[from] when I woke up in the morning to when I went to sleep at night” (Singh & Riber, 1997).

5. A creative environment sparks, supports, and refines creative ideas. Wiles stood on the shoulders of others and collaborated with a former student. After studying the careers of 2026 prominent scientists and inventors, Dean Keith Simonton (1992) noted that the most eminent were mentored, challenged, and supported by their colleagues. Creativity-fostering environments support innovation, team building, and communication (Hülsheger et al., 2009). They also minimize anxiety and foster contemplation (Byron & Khazanchi, 2011). After Jonas Salk solved a problem that led to the polio vaccine while visiting a monastery, he designed the Salk Institute to provide contemplative spaces where scientists could work without interruption (Sternberg, 2006).

A creative environment

The New Yorker Collection, 2010, Mick Stevens, from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.

• Develop your expertise. Ask yourself what you care about and most enjoy. Follow your passion and become an expert at something.

• Allow time for incubation. With enough available knowledge—the mental building blocks we need to create novel connections—a period of inattention to a problem (“sleeping on it”) allows for automatic processing to form associations (Zhong et al., 2008). So think hard on a problem, then set it aside and come back to it later.

• Set aside time for the mind to roam freely. Take time away from attention-absorbing distractions. Creativity springs from “defocused attention” (Simonton, 2012a,b). So jog, go for a long walk, or meditate. Serenity seeds spontaneity.

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• Experience other cultures and ways of thinking. Living abroad sets the creative juices flowing. Even after controlling for other variables, students who have spent time abroad and embraced their host culture are more adept at working out creative solutions to problems (Lee et al., 2012; Tadmor et al., 2012). Multicultural experiences expose us to multiple perspectives and facilitate flexible thinking, and may also trigger another stimulus for creativity—a sense of difference from others (Kim et al., 2013; Ritter et al., 2012).

Imaginative thinking Cartoonists often display creativity as they see things in new ways or make unusual connections.

The New Yorker Collection, 2006, Christopher Weyant, from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.