Ten pairs of opposing traits in creative individuals

When we attempt to define and categorize to make sense of things, we often end up imposing limits to make things fit. We like when there's one answer. It is easy for our brains to latch onto singular, concrete ideas, harder to consider multiple possibilities at once.

So when I started reading Creativity I loved this one chapter where the author describes characteristics of creative people. These are characteristics that we've come to think of as competing opposites, and as a result, we tend to think we can only embody one characteristic or its opposite, not both within the same person.

“Are there no traits that distinguish creative people? If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be 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’. These qualities are present in all of us, but usually we are trained to develop only one pole of the dialectic. We might grow up cultivating the aggressive, competitive side of our nature, and disdain or repress the nurturant, cooperative side. A creative individual is more likely to be both aggressive and cooperative, either at the same time or at different times, depending on the situation.

Having a complex personality means being able to express the full range of traits that are potentially present in the human repertoire.

1. Creative individuals have a great deal of physical energy, but they are also often quiet and at rest.

2. Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time.

3. A third paradoxical trait refers to the related combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.

4. Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other.

5. Creative people seem to harbor opposite tendencies on the continuum between extroversion and introversion.

6. Creative individuals are also remarkably humble and proud at the same time.

7. Creative individuals to a certain extent escape this rigid gender role stereotyping [of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’].

8. Creative people are both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic.

9. Creative persons are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.

10. The openness and sensitivity of creative individuals often exposes them to suffering and pain yet also a great deal of enjoyment.”

— Creativity - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

We can end up sabotaging ourselves with limits. It's comforting to say 'this is who I am,' but it's different from saying 'this is all I am.'

My friend's birthday

It was my friend's birthday yesterday. I haven't seen her in years but I remember June 15th is her birthday. I met my friend in Korea; she was a local university student and my co-teacher. Though we were limited in our language communication, she became someone I felt completely at ease with, and I consider her one of my closest friends.

Other foreigners had mentioned experiences of feeling left out of Korean culture, that they weren't a true part of their schools or communities.

I was lucky, my friend opened her entire world to me.

Being away from home during the holidays is a difficult time for most of us. The lunar new year is possibly the most celebrated day in Asia, and during this holiday, my friend invited me to her grandmother's, where their entire extended family was gathered. Nobody spoke English. But they welcomed me and though I barely said anything, I was enfolded into the family atmosphere. I was allowed to be part of those intimate moments that mark each family - eating meals, making kimchi, going for a seaside walk, sleeping on the floor with her cousins. There is something incredibly kind about opening up the private family life to an outsider.

We reached this comfort level not only through revealing conversations, of which we had many, but also by going through small life activities together - bus rides, ice creams, lunches, dinners, board games, language groups.

In recent years, it seems like we are perpetually catching up with friends, we see each other sporadically and infrequently. When we do meet up, we can feel compelled to fully fill the whole time, to squeeze the most out of the escaping time with this person. We forget what it's like to sometimes just be, to talk about mundane things, to spontaneously visit each other and lounge around, to have moments of nothing, with no aim, other than to be in each others' presence.

The unbearable difficulty of lightness

I recall a friend telling me how much she enjoyed young adult books because their themes are usually happy and good, whereas adult literature often turns to the heavy and the miserable.

Somewhere I heard a line that 'heavy is easy, light is difficult.'

It is easier to slip into dark emotions that it is to accept and overcome them, to grow from them and refuse to let them drag you down. Don't we know people who bring us down with their despair? At this point in my life, I can't read any more Dostoyevsky after Crime and Punishment.

Madeleine L'Engle says 'I don't like hopeless books. Books that make you think, 'Ah, life's not worth living.' I want to leave them [the readers] thinking yea, this endeavour is difficult, but it is worth it, and it is ultimately joyful.'

There are some authors I am drawn to for their lightness. In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl does not gloss over the worst parts of the Nazi concentration camp experience, but he shows us that even there, he was able to find remnants of love and beauty, while leaving aside much of his own suffering.

From some authors' words, you might never pick up on a dark side of their lives. It is only after a perusal through Wikipedia's clinical facts that you learn that Lucy Maud Montgomery did not write in the last few years of her life when she was living through depression. David Foster Wallace committed suicide at the age of 46. This is the writer who instilled in me a love for linguistics simply because there is a sense in his writing of how much he loved linguistics.

Those among us who appear to have light, bright lives inevitably have a corresponding dark side. Those who have the capacity to feel the most, feel on both ends of the extreme. There is true courage in walking into the heart of each moment and letting it cut into you.

I think it's a remarkably selfless human spirit that imbues those who keep their ugliest demons out of their words. They share the lightest and brightest with us while they shield us from the dark; so that we can be lifted up, to brilliant places we could not go by ourselves, while they take on the burden of living solitarily through the rest.

Memories of places lived

I've recently found myself the recipient of many suggestions for attractions to see while I'm in Paris for a few months.

It's been hard to succinctly articulate why I probably won't travel to other European cities, to other French towns, or even to the Palace of Versailles. It's not a constraint of time or money. It's more that I'm looking to let the life and essence of Paris seep into my being.

When I think back on the places I've lived, the memories that I remember most vividly are not the ones I expected to think about. The building blocks of a place's impression, at the time, were ordinary moments, some a singular instance, others repetitions of routine.

Hong Kong memories consisted of sitting cross legged on stone ledges, looking out at the Pacific. Washington D.C. was late afternoons at the National Gallery of Art, to pass a few moments with the Impressionists, in particular Monet and his Japanese Footbridge. Life in Toronto was not necessarily the downtown core and it certainly was not the CN Tower. It was late night crepes and tea on Church Street, it was Saturday morning walks down Palmerston Street in little Italy where the little houses had neat gardens and gates and the only other people out were middle aged pet owners with their dogs.

When I think of Korea I do not remember the temples or the festivals; I remember the thick honey bread and the large glass mugs of ginger peach tea from Cafe Bene, and my strongest memory is that of autumn winds carrying the fragrance of osmanthus blossoms. Smell is a powerful memory trigger; this particular sense is wired directly to our brain's memory centre and it evokes memories in a way that none of our other senses can. When I walk down city streets and into elevators, I can tell if Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle,  Chloe's Love, or Giorgio Armani's Acqua di Gio has made an appearance. I have never again come across the fresh fragrance of osmanthus blossoms since those days in Korea, but I do hope to one day.

There are places I have not yet been to, but of these places, my mind has created such strong slivers of what they seem to be, that they appear already as memories. California and its light beneath ancient redwoods, Arizona with its dry desert heat and its sunsets creeping over rocks and sand and cacti. Japan with its winter of Hokkaido's quiet, deep snows, and its spring of falling Japanese cherry blossoms. My friend told me she was overcome by the beauty and history of St. Petersburg the first time she went there, and watching her tell me this, I too wanted to go to St. Petersburg to see for myself. 

It is these ordinary moments that create an individual's relationship with a place. Home moves with me wherever I go, and it is these small moments, perhaps unnoticed by anyone but me, that become the memories of the places I lived, the places I called home.

Quality and quantity of time is not the same

I had coffee with a friend the other day, someone who also loves reading. We discussed how I now have the luxury of time to read a lot more and how he wishes he could also read more but does not have as much time.

It is common to hear this message, that time is the limiting factor these days, and we speak of it as an unchanging currency, but one thing that doesn't come up as often is the variance in the quality of time; experiencing an hour can differ greatly depending on the time of day and the activity at the time.

Though I have more time to read, it is the quality of my reading that has increased disproportionately. A couple of years ago, I had a long commute between D.C. and Fairfax. During these bus and subway rides, I tried reading some classics, such as The Scarlet Letter and Meditations. These were brutal to get through and I felt as though I was wasting time; I would catch myself mindlessly reading and forgetting what the previous pages were about. Now, I find I can focus better and for longer. I'll stop more frequently to think through ideas and to jot down notes, and after finishing a book I'm able to remember more content.

I use reading as an example, but this time quality variance applies to other activities in our lives. It requires applying some self-awareness to discover what activities at what time works for each person. I once heard of a suggestion for networking through 'breakfast meetings' and it horrified me; my mind instantly thought of the modified Sartre quote that 'hell is other people at breakfast'. But for some people, a breakfast meeting works well for their schedule and temperament.

I find that I really only have two windows of the day during which I can accomplish any writing. After I first wake up naturally at some point between 8 and 10, I have to go on auto-pilot to make coffee. While sipping on coffee and reading, my lagging brain starts to catch up, and by late morning it'll kick into active mode, at which point I'm able to write. In the afternoon, I'll get tired and will spend some time playing piano, or reading something light. I can do edits, but it's hard to write new content at this point. In the evening I'll do a long run, and then before bed I'll experience another window of mental alertness and focus where I can write or read something fairly intense.

This schedule is very different from when I was working in a 9-5 office environment, and I suspect I'm not the only one whose natural mental working rhythms do not necessarily reflect the structured workweek that evolved out of the days of industrial manual labour work.

So, how's Ottawa?

A few people have asked how Ottawa's been. Surprisingly, it's been good.

I love Toronto and the city life and I think of it nostalgically. Moving home to the suburbs of Ottawa has been a complete change. The rhythm of life is different. There's an abundance of time, it almost feels wrong to have large blocks of time that verge on boredom.

The last time I had this much free time was my year in Korea, defined by entire weekends spent indoors from Friday afternoon until Monday morning. These were haven time weekends. In Toronto, I kept waiting for these free weekends to come around, so I could read, run, and disappear into solitude. These weekends never presented themselves. Something always came up, and it was always a fun something. In my two years of city living, I only ended up with a mere handful of solitary weekends, and they only happened if I consciously wrote 'hermit weekend' into my planner. 

In the city, the choices seem endless, coming at you on a treadmill. See friends? Go to a museum event? Check out a restaurant? Meet for drinks? There are more options than time available so everything becomes a choice. And it's easy to pick whatever is most appealing at that moment, at the expense of something longer term that you may want more. I wanted to write, but writing as an activity remains silent, it's not a reward that is as immediate, compelling, or persuasive as going out for drinks.

The past two years melted away. It was the end of a phase - a glorious time of spontaneous fun, of novelty, of making new friends and strengthening old friendships - and it was time for change. We go through life in phases, and what we want from each changes as we evolve. I imagine for most of us there comes a time when we want more, to do more, to work more, to accomplish more. It's hard to recognize the end of a phase and its message that it's time to move on.

Circles of competence, circles of life experiences

We hear this idea of finding balance in our lives. I've come to think of this analogy as a precarious image. The balance is delicate; when too much is added to one side, that side tips and demands something to offset the imbalance and restore equilibrium. The image of a balance seems to be unstable, chaotic, negative in some way.

Recently I've thought of balance from a more dynamic growth perspective. In Charlie Munger's Poor Charlie's Almanack, he introduces this idea of 'circles of competence'. These are areas of knowledge in which Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have achieved a comfortable level of competence. They stay within their circles, but work on expanding the circle's boundaries.

This expanding circle image is stuck in my brain, leading to an idea of human lives as circles, in which we each have a centre point where we feel grounded. Within this circle is the cumulative sum of our life experiences. As we push and extend these boundaries, say in terms of work or relationships, we recognize when we approach a limit, so we return to the centre, to a comfortable grounded state, but our boundaries are now expanded, and the circle's total area - our experience - is at a greater capacity than it was before.

I finished reading Nassim Taleb's Antifragile. The last part of the book looked at how the consequences of the financial crisis were shifted from those in the least fragile position - those who had a lot of upside (highly paid, bailed out) and no downside (no repercussions for financial crisis) - to the general public (taxpayer money). I closed the book feeling not great. But then I thought about Viktor Frankl's Man Search for Meaning and how he wrote about his years in concentration camps without any bitterness, and I felt grounded again. There are things we are uncomfortable with, they make us question, they make us face injustices and the negative. It is these things that expand our tolerance for the world in which we live.

Getting comfortable with uncertainty

I'm about halfway through Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile and it's been an engaging read so far. There are tons of concepts in here and I originally wanted to explore a few, but it wasn't working so I think I'll just touch on one: uncertainty.

When we think of traditional fields of study, physics is the one with the most certainty. The term physics envy stems from attempts at introducing certainty into fields that do not lend themselves well to certainty, such as economics, philosophy, or even biology. There are variables, like human irrationality, that create near unpredictable second or third order effects. Rationally knowing something does not mean we always act on this knowledge; many actions are based on emotions, which are ever shifting and unpredictable at the individual level.

Physics envy has extended beyond academic study, into our regular lives. When we try to make smooth out uncertainties, we can stifle benefits of randomness. Take a look at the increase in kids in classrooms who are diagnosed with ADHD and put on medication. It's easier for a teacher to manage 25 kids who behave uniformly and predictably instead of 25 kids who have quirks and curiosities. By smoothing out the randomness in a classroom system, we risk extinguishing some of the brightest potential. Some of the most brilliant minds of the past showed many eccentricities and abnormalities that today would likely lead to a prescription of some pharmaceutical cocktail.

The very way Antifragile is written defies some elements of certainty. Many passages initially appear to be stand alone parts. I read The Black Swan earlier this year and found it tough; the headings didn't progress linearly.

Contemporary books follow a predictable format. There's an introduction of some problem and its relevancy, a historical story of how this problem came to be, further analysis of the problem, and then some suggested solutions. The general arc makes sense, but sometimes when books and their information are overly structured and packaged, they can seem more like a spoon feeding or a marketing persuasion than a chance for readers to think through ideas. I think of Hemingway's iceberg theory, how the omissions - the uncertainties - are what strengthens the story.

It's that reach that makes knowledge codified in our minds. So with The Black Swan, and now Antifragile, I have to think harder, but that was maybe the point.

Meaning in life, as a gradient

There's been a ton of psychology and happiness and meaning books that have emerged in bookstores in the past few years. However, it is in my humble opinion that one of the best books written on this topic is Flow, by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It was published in 1990 but 25 years later, I find its contents to be just as relevant to our lives now. I'm actually re-reading it; it's one of the only popular psychology books that I am reading for a second time. The quick summary of the book is as follows: 

“Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s famous investigations of ‘optimal experience’ have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. ”

The way this book is laid out, it's more about a coherent story and underlying principles rather than descriptions of experiments. Calling it a psychology book understates its conclusions - this book borders on the edges of life philosophy, though in a very readable and relatable way. I'll be thinking about this book a lot more in future writing (some long form essays are planned) but in the meantime, I wanted to share this passage with you, as I think it will resonate with most readers:

“There is a consensus among psychologists that people develop their concept of who they are, and of what they want to achieve in life, according to a sequence of steps.

Each man or woman starts with a need to preserve the self, to keep the body and its basic goals from disintegrating. At this point the meaning of life is simple; it is tantamount to survival, comfort, and pleasure.

When the safety of the physical self is no longer in doubt, the person may expand the horizon of his or meaning system to embrace the values of a community - the family, the neighborhood, a religious or ethnic group. This step leads to a greater complexity of the self, even though it usually implies conformity to conventional norms and standards.

The next step in development involves reflective individualism. The person again turns inward, finding new grounds for authority and value within the self. He or she is no longer blindly conforming, but develops an autonomous conscience. At this point the main goal in life becomes the desire for growth, improvement, the actualization of potential.

The fourth step, which builds on all the previous ones, is a final turning away from the self, back toward an integration with other people and with universal values. In this final stage the extremely individualized person willingly merges his interests with those of a larger whole.

In this scenario building a complex meaning system seems to involve focusing attention alternately on the self and on the Other.

First, psychic energy is invested in the needs of the organism, and psychic order is equivalent to pleasure. When this level is temporarily achieved, and the person can begin to invest attention in the goals of a community, what is meaningful corresponds to group values - religion, patriotism, and the acceptance and respect of other people provide the parameters of inner order.

The next movement of the dialectic brings attention back to the self: having achieved a sense of belonging to a larger human system, the person now feels the challenge of discerning the limits of personal potential. This leads to attempts at self-actualization, to experimentation with different skills, different ideas and disciplines. At this stage enjoyment, rather than pleasure, becomes the main source of rewards. But because this phase involves becoming a seeker, the person may also encounter a midlife crisis, a career change, and an increasingly desperate straining against the limitations of individual capability.

From this point on the person is ready for the last shift in the redirection of energy: having discovered what one can and, more important, cannot do alone, the ultimate goal merges with a system larger than the person - a cause, an idea, a transcendental entity.

Not everyone moves through the stages of this spiral of ascending complexity. A few never have the opportunity to go beyond the first step. When the survival demands are so insistent that a person cannot devote much attention to anything else, he or she will not have enough psychic energy left to invest in the goals of the family or of the wider community. Self-interest alone will give meaning to life.

The majority of people are probably ensconced comfortably in the second stage of development, where the welfare of the family, or the company, the community, or the nation are the sources of meaning.

Many fewer reach the third level of reflective individualism, and only a precious few emerge once again to forge a unity with university values.

So these stages do not necessarily reflect what does happen, or what will happen; they characterize what can happen if a person is lucky and succeeds in controlling consciousness. ”

— Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Dilettante

Over the past few years I've thought constantly about the word dilettante.

“A person whose interest in a subject is superficial rather than professional.

A person who loves the arts.

Word Origin and History
1733, borrowing of Italian dilettante “lover of music or painting,” from dilettare “to delight,” from Latin delectare.”

— http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dilettante

There's a sadness I experience when I think of the noble origins of this word, to delight in the arts, and how it's evolved into a derision of superficial, shallow interest.

I wouldn't dare call myself a 'writer'. For the past two years I've been writing words on loose papers, almost daily. But it's only recently that I've started to put in the real work, of taking unstructured ideas and trying to create some logic out of them, of selecting and editing words, and of cutting - so much cutting. Every day, the writing feels like work. There are moments where I don't want to do it. Sometimes I don't know if I will have ideas, or I think I'll write something stupid. There are times when I start off with one thing, work on it for an hour or two, and realize that it's flat and I throw it all out.

But I think this has been a definitive point in the process, the moment that separates superficial interest from commitment to an activity - when we do things that are hard, when what we are doing feels like work. This marks the difference between doing something for the sake of novelty, and doing something for the sake of learning. If it's something trendy, something we can take a photo of and put in on social media, something we're using to gain external validation rather than something that arises from a sincere interest in cultivating progress, then I can see why dilettante has earned its negative connotation.

We respect instances where someone has put in effort, has persevered. It's something that can't be falsely purchased - this time and effort investment. Spending money on the best piano and the best teacher cannot replace the practice. When I see massive ancient trees, or when I'm waiting for orchid buds to open, it's the time, the patience, the perseverance that I think of.

But is there need for such a strong distinction between those who are professional artists and those who are not? For those of us who have genuine interest in an activity, and are willing to dedicate time and effort to this activity - but who are not professionals in this activity - can we give ourselves this freedom to pursue it without being labelled a dilettante, an amateur?

This societal and psychological barrier makes it hard for ordinary people to think of themselves as artistic or creative individuals, simply because they went to school for a different course of study; I think it's a loss that we limit ourselves with these definitions.