Creativity

[Animae]

As I was reading a book on lucid dreaming one section about creativity caught my attention:

Carl Rogers also looked at the relationship between creativity and psychological states. In On Becoming a Person, he proposed that three psychological traits are especially conducive to creativity. The first trait, openness to experience, is the opposite of psychological defensiveness, or rigidity about concepts, beliefs, perceptions, and hypotheses. […] The second trait is possessing an internal source of evaluation. This means that the value of the creative person's product is established not by the praise or the criticism of others, but by the individual. […] The final trait postulated to be conducive to creativity by Rogers is the ability to toy with elements and concepts, to play spontaneously with ideas, colors, words, relationships—to juggle with elements into impossible juxtapositions, propose wild theories, explore the illogical.

Bold mine

Now I find the second trait to be especially interesting and it brought my mind to The Fountainhead. It’s easy to see how those traits fit on Roark and how Keating got nowhere by measuring everything by other peoples standards. It also seems fit well my experiences so far, when I know to have achieved something really good, the praises seem insignificant in comparison to my own satisfaction. Seems like it is only when we have done something that does not reach our potential that we need others to tell us how “great” it is.

[4reason]

This is quite true and is certainly something that I believe should be strived for in education. In Montessori, at least at the primary level, we bend over backwards to instill what psychology now calls "intrinsic motivation" in the children, be it for education, moral behavior, good hygiend, or what have you. We don't use grades; we don't even tell a child when they have performed a work incorrectly unless they specifically ask (and they don't ask, surprisingly; only some of the 5 and six year olds who have very controlling parents are concerned with whether or not someone else thinks they're "right"). For creativity to really thrive I do think the motivation has to be intrinsic, but that's not to say that extrinsic motivation doesn't have an impact. But one's own thoughts and motives have to take precedence; they have be what REALLY compels one to act. Its hard to act and not compare one's self to others, but one can't--- as Peter KEating did--- let that comparison be what drives us in our decisions. Maybe it helps us evaluate the effectiveness of our decisions, but needing to quelch the differences that exist between one's self and another cannot be our motive. We need to strive to establish ourselves as a unique individual; isn't that what being creative is really all about? It's about being different; straying from the preestablished norm. You can't make yourself different from others if your major concern is making yourself comparable to them. You just have to ignore the comparison in the first place. You can still make the comparison-- just don't do it first.