Creativity by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi Page A

career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying.
    Divergent thinking is not much use without the ability to tell agood idea from a bad one—and this selectivity involves convergent thinking. Manfred Eigen is one of several scientists who claim that the only difference between them and their less creative colleagues is that they can tell whether a problem is soluble or not, and this saves enormous amounts of time and many false starts. George Stigler stresses the importance of fluidity, that is, divergent thinking on the one hand, and good judgment in recognizing a viable problem on the other:
    I consider that I have good intuition and good judgment on what problems are worth pursuing and what lines of work are worth doing. I used to say (and I think this was bragging) that whereas most scholars have ideas which do not pan out more than, say, 4 percent of the time, mine come through maybe 80 percent of the time.
    3. A third paradoxical trait refers to the related combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. John Wheeler says that the most important thing in a young physicist is “this bounce, which I always associate with fun in science, kicking things around. It’s not quite joking, but it has some of the lightness of joking. It’s exploring ideas.” David Riesman, in describing the attitude of “detached attachment” that makes him an astute observer of the social scene, stresses thefact that he always “wanted at the same time to be irresponsible and responsible.”
    But this playfulness doesn’t go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance. Much hard work is necessary to bring a novel idea to completion and to surmount the obstacles a creative person inevitably encounters. When asked what enabled him to solve the physics problems that made him famous, Hans Bethe answered with a smile: “Two things are required. One is a brain. And second is the willingness to spend long times in thinking, with a definite possibility that you come out with nothing.”
    Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work:
    Tell anybody you’re are a sculptor and they’ll say, “Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.” And I tend to say, “What’s so wonderful?” I mean, it’s like being a mason, or being a carpenter, half the time. But they don’t wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn’t fry pancakes, you see. That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage, of course, is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture? Or will it be a wild thing which only seemed exciting while you were sitting in the studio alone? Will it look like something? Can you actually do it physically? Can you, personally, do it physically? What do you have by way of materials? So the second part is a lot of hard work. And sculpture is that, you see. It is the combination of wonderful wild ideas and then a lot of hard work.
    Jacob Rabinow uses an interesting mental technique to slow himself down when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition:
    Yeah, there’s a trick I pull for this. When I have a job to do like that, where you have to do something that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I’m in jail. Don’t laugh. And if I’m in jail, time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it’ll take a week. What else have I got to do? I’m going to be here for twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. Because otherwise you say, “My God, it’s not working,” and then you make mistakes. But the other way, you