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The Creative Personality.

(6 minute read.)

'That explains a few things...'

5 Creatives 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. Creatives seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.

6 Creatives are humble and proud at the same time.

• They're aware of the role luck plays in their achievements. And they're usually so focused on current challenges and future projects that past accomplishments, no matter how outstanding, are no longer very interesting to them.
• At the same time, they know that in comparison with others, they've accomplished a great deal. And this knowledge provides a sense of security, even pride.

7 Creatives escape rigid gender role stereotyping.

• Creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls.
• Creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.
• At the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive… regardless of gender, creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.

8 Creatives are both rebellious and conservative.

• 'To be different means 'not like this' and 'not like that'…. a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse'.
• But the willingness to take risks, to break with the safety of tradition, is also necessary: 'One of the most common failures of able people is lack of nerve. They'll play safe games. In innovation, you have to play a less safe game, if it's going to be interesting. It's not predictable that it'll go well.'

9 Most Creatives are very passionate about their work, yet can also be extremely objective about it.

• 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.
• 'It is very important to be detached from your work, so that you can accept criticism and response.'

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

• 'Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them'. A badly designed machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when reading bad prose.
• Deep interest and involvement in obscure subjects often goes unrewarded, or even brings ridicule. Divergent thinking is often perceived as deviant by the majority, and so the creative person may feel isolated and misunderstood.
• Perhaps the most difficult thing for creatives to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.
• Yet when a person is working in the area of his of her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss.

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 instead write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn more than 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.

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