Creative Personalities

Well, this explains it all!!! :-)


Creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi includes descriptions of the multiple characteristics of creative people.

In a post of hers, Juliet Bruce, Ph.D. notes that Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude.”

“Like the color white that includes all colors, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves. Creativity allows for paradox, light, shadow, inconsistency, even chaos –and creative people experience both extremes with equal intensity.”

Here are a few qualities he lists, as Bruce summarizes:

• A great deal of physical energy alternating with a great need for quiet and rest.
• Highly sexual, yet often celibate, especially when working.
• Smart and naïve at the same time. A mix of wisdom and childishness. Emotional immaturity along with the deepest insights.
• Convergent (rational, left brain, sound judgment) and divergent (intuitive, right brain, visionary) thinking…
• Both extroverted and introverted, needing people and solitude equally.
• Humble and proud, both painfully self-doubting and wildly self-confident.
• May defy gender stereotypes, and are likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other as well. A kind of psychic androgyny.

For more, see her post Understanding Creative People – and Csikszentmihalyi’s classic book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.