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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: Harper Collins, 1996, 456 pages, $27.50.
I believe the value of a book is directly related to how much it makes the reader think. As a practitioner of creativity in a large corporation, I was fascinated to see how Csikszentmihalyi's thoughts brought perspective to that world. Csikszentmihalyi discusses creativity in three important ways: (a) illustrating how creative outcomes depend not just on the individual, but on a complex relationship involving the creative individual, the domain in question, and the field, (b) increasing our understanding of how personal creativity manifests itself through extensive research on over 90 creative individuals, and (c) discussing the making of culture and the enhancing of personal creativity. He also weaves in the relationship of his earlier concept of "flow"-the state individuals experience when their actions seem, in retrospect, effortless and timeless, even though much is accomplished.
For Csikszentmihalyi, creativity requires the following combination: a discrete domain with its own rules, sets of symbols that define it (e.g., music, physics), a recognized field (the set of people working in the domain-they determine which new ideas should be included in their domain), and the creative individual (someone who solves an existing problem within the domain, or has an idea that changes that particular domain). Therefore, for someone to be creative, they must learn how to operate in a specific domain, be paid attention to by those important in the domain's field, and have their ideas judged as "creative" by the field. A key thought here is that an individual's creative contribution to the field may vary according to time, even if the idea or action stays the same (e.g., Galileo's conclusion that the earth revolves around the sun, not vice versa). The church, as the field, would not allow this discovery to be recognized. The parallels...