[MUSIC] Another study that I really like that helps us understand the nature of creativity are the famous IPAR studies from the 50s and 60s, conducted by Frank X Barron at UC Berkley. So, he took some of the most creative people of his generation, and he brought them to a renovated fraternity house at UC Berkley and spent, and had them stay over a couple days, and he gave them batteries of tests, personality tests. He gave them, he talked them, he had lots of interviews. He gave them the Rorschach test, I don't know if anyone's heard of them where the people have to like project what do you see in this picture? So, he brought a lot of these really creative people of a generation to do these sort of things. And he found something quite surprising. So, first of all he found that IQ wasn't the special sauce of these creative geniuses. I'm sure most of them had a higher than average IQ. But it wasn't the that differentiated the creative geniuses from the non creative geniuses. He also found that they scored very, they tended to score very high in ego strength. Ego strength is something that allows us to overcome obstacles. It's very important, very good for resiliency in life, having a really strong sense of identity. These were strong, these people had strong sense of their self and were able to overcome resiliency. But he also found that they scored extremely high on almost every measure of mental illness that he could possibly throw at them. [LAUGH] So, Frank Barron was like, what do I do with this information? They score almost very high on all these measures of psychological health. The kinds of things that we study in positive psychology, resiliency, and ego strength and healthy self acceptance. But at the same time they also scored very high on a lot of marked metrics of non-mental health. But they had all these things in one body. So, they also tended to be very highly emotionally volatile, for instance, and reported lots of mood changes. They tend to report being very anxious, these kinds of things. So, it's very interesting when you look at creative people, you tend to see these paradoxes. You tend to see these contradictions within a single person. So, this is a quote of Frank Baron, describing the conclusion of his studies. Thus the creative genius may be at once naive and knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and to rigorous logic. He is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person. So, what do you do with that information, right? As a young creativity researcher going into the field, and looking at what we've known about creativity, it's like, well how could we ever possibly study this phenomenon? Well, we can, and I think a big way of reconciling these contradictions, the fact that openness to experience is a big part of it. When you're really open to new experiences, you're open to your own contradictions, you find that the creative process itself is a really nice way of reconciling these contradictions. It's through the creative process that you harmonize yourself. For me, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a creativity researcher, as also in his ground breaking research of over 100 creative people says, if I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes, instead of being an individual, each of them is a multitude. So, he found almost the same thing in an independent sample of creative people. And then recently from my own research, we found, working throughout history, you tend to find that creative people have, what I call, refer to as messy minds. I think it's the best way to describe creativity, creative people. And I don't say that in a pejorative way at all, I think it's something we should embrace in society. We spend so much time in school on standardized testing, and having students do everything just right, by the book. Show up to class, be self-controlled, listen to other people's goals, don't daydream, etc. But you find that creative people, that's not what really characterizes them. What characterizes them is variability, not efficiency. What characterizes them is embracing the messiness, the inherent messiness of the creative process. And you see that all throughout history. So, here is Michael Scott quoting Wayne Gretzky saying, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Thomas Edison said, I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work. And it's true, Thomas Edison, in a statistical analysis by Dean Keith Simonton, found that Thomas Edison had more failures of his generation than anyone else in his generation. But he just happened to have a couple things that tended to be the most revolutionary things of his generation. This is a Picasso painting, Guernica. And if you do a systematic analysis of Guernica, it almost looks like he's painting it blind. Like he had no foresight of where he was going before he got there. If we expected creativity to be a very efficient process, like you study, you do everything right on the standardized test. You would expect this kind of curve, right? You would expect to the extent to which each sketch that he produces is greater progress towards his ultimate goal. What you actually see when you look at Picasso's creative process is this. It's much more like this. He would put the mother holding the baby and then take that back and then he'd put another painting, and it's almost like he was operating blind with a lot of trial and error. And again, you do find that it's trial and error that seems to characterize creative people. Again, it's that messiness that we must embrace. And it's those contradictions that tend to play themselves out throughout the creative process. Shakespeare, many of you have heard of Shakespeare. And of heard of some of his glorious works, such as Hamlet. Well, there was an interesting analysis that was done that looked at the popularity ratings of various Shakespeare's plays and the year in which they're produced. And we see Hamlet, for instance, had a popularity reading of 100%. Most people consider that his greatest work. And yet he was able to follow that up with Pericles, which most of you probably never heard of, which had a popularity reading of 8%. So, how could this, if expertise was all there is to creativity, doing everything right, being efficient, you would see an upward progress. But what you see is he has some amazingly popular works, then he has some really big, if I may say, clunkers. [LAUGH] How many of you have heard of Pericles? [LAUGH] Some historical scholars may disagree with me, but literature scholars, but I think most of us agree Pericles wasn't his best work. So you do tend to find, and Dean Simonton has done these kind of analysis showing that trial and error. And we also don't always know whether or not how something's going to be received by the general public. So, there's always going to be that element of blindness to the creative process. Dean Simonton has created something called the equal-odds rule showing this really pertains to almost any field and he first started studying this when he looked at scientists. This is a quote from his 1977 book, the average publication of any particular scientist does not have any statistically different chance of having more of an impact than any other scientist's average publication. What this means is if you want to be creative, you need to get through all the poor work, the average work, you need to be average in order to be great. Yet, the key, producing. S,o I want to give you, I'll leave you with what I think is the secret of creative genius. Everybody likes the secret, so I'm going to give you the secret of creative genius. It's create, create, create. Create, create. Create. Create, create, create. Create. Create, create. Create, create, create, create, create, got it?
