Free Creativity by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi Page B

as good as he is—yet they are unknown and their work is unappreciated. The one difference between him and the rest, he said, was that years back he met at a party a man with whom he had a few drinks. They hit it off and became friends. The man eventually became a successful art dealer who did his best to push his friend’s work. One thing led to another: A rich collector began to buy the artist’s work, critics started paying attention, a large museum added one of his works to its permanent collection. And once the artist became successful, the field discovered his creativity.
    It is important to point out the tenuousness of the individual contribution to creativity, because it is usually so often overrated. Yet one can also fall in the opposite error and deny the individual anycredit. Certain sociologists and social psychologists claim that creativity is all a matter of attribution. The creative person is like a blank screen on which social consensus projects exceptional qualities. Because we need to believe that creative people exist, we endow some individuals with this illusory quality. This, too, is an oversimplification. For while the individual is not as important as it is commonly supposed, neither is it true that novelty could come about without the contribution of individuals, and that all individuals have the same likelihood of producing novelty.
    Luck, although a favorite explanation of creative individuals, is also easy to overstate. Many young scientists in Linus Pauling’s generation were exposed to the arrival of quantum theory from Europe. Why didn’t they see what this theory implied for chemistry, the way he saw it? Many women would have liked to become scientists in the 1940s. Why did so few take the opportunity when the doors to graduate training were opened to them? Being in the right place at the right time is clearly important. But many people never realize that they are standing in a propitious space/time convergence, andeven fewer know what to do when the realization hits them.
    I NTERNALIZING THE S YSTEM
    A person who wants to make a creative contribution not only must work within a creative system but must also reproduce that system within his or her mind. In other words, the person must learn the rules and the content of the domain, as well as the criteria of selection, the preferences of the field. In science, it is practically impossible to make a creative contribution without internalizing the fundamental knowledge of the domain. All scientists would agree with the words of Frank Offner, a scientist and inventor: “The important thing is that you must have a good, a very solidgrounding in the physical sciences, before you can make any progress in understanding.” The same conclusions are voiced in every other discipline. Artists agree that a painter cannot make a creative contribution without looking, and looking, and looking at previous art, and without knowing what other artists and critics consider good and bad art. Writers say that you have to read, read, and read some more, and know what the critics’ criteria for good writing are, before you can write creatively yourself.
    An extremely lucid example of how the internalization of the system works is given by the inventor Jacob Rabinow. At first, he talks about the importance of what I have called the domain :
    So you need three things to be an original thinker. First, you have to have a tremendous amount of information—a big database if you like to be fancy. If you’re a musician, you should know a lot about music, that is, you’ve heard music, you remember music, you could repeat a song if you have to. In other words, if you were born on a desert island and never heard music, you’re not likely to be a Beethoven. You might, but it’s not likely. You may imitate birds but you’re not going to write the Fifth Symphony. So you’re brought up in an atmosphere where you store a lot of information.
    So you have to have the kind