p.10 Einstein was making technical contributions to physics, that most advanced of sciences. Yet Einstein
was able to effect a breakthrough precisely because he did not simply accept as given the paradigms and agendas of
the physics of his time. Instead, he insisted on going back to first principles: in setting for himself the most
fundamental problems and in looking for the most comprehensive yet simplifying explanatory axioms.
In doing so, Einstein was, in a way, returning to the conceptual world of childhood: the search for
basic understandings unhampered by conventional delineations of a question.
p.20 The key area in the psychologist's conception of creativity has been divergent thinking...
when given a stimulus or a puzzle, creative people tend to come up with many different associations, at least
some of which are idiosyncratic [idiosyncratic: Peculiar to a specific individual] and possibly unique.
p.22 Cognitive researchers... have described the ways in which creative individuals identify problem and
solution "spaces" that appear promising; search within these spaces for approaches appropriate to the problem at hand and
for leads that may pay off; evaluate alternative solutions to problems; deploy resources of energy and time to advance their program
of investigation in an efficient manner; and determine when to probe further and when to cut losses and move on, and more
generally, reflect on their own creating processes.
p.24 Freud was impressed by the parallels between the child at play, the adult daydreamer, and the
creative artist. As he once phrased it:
Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world
of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way that pleases him? ... The creative writer
does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously - that is, which he invests
with large amounts of emotion - while separating it sharply from reality.
p.31 all normal children undergo a lengthy period of exploration of their environment, a period
during which they have the opportunity to discover the principles that govern the physical world, the social world,
and their own personal world. Not only does this discovery of universals become the background against which
further learnings and discoveries necessarily take place, but the very process of discovering themselves
become models for later exploratory behaviors, including efforts to probe phenomena never before conceptualized.
p.32 What may distinguish creative individuals is their ways of productively using the insights,
feelings, and experiences of childhood... I contend that the creator is an individual who manages a most
formidable challenge: to wed the most advanced understandings achieved in a domain with the kinds of problems, questions,
issues, and sensibilities that most characterized his or her life as a wonder-filled child. It is in this sense that
the adult creator draws repeatedly on the capital of childhood... at least ten years of steady work at a discipline or craft
seem required before that metier [metier: vocation, trade] has been mastered... Individuals who ultimately
make creative breakthroughs tend from their earliest days to be explorers, innovators, tinkerers. Never satisfied simply to
follow the pack, they can usually be found experimenting in their chosen metier, and elsewhere as well.
p.33-34 At first accepting the common language or symbol system of the domain, each creator finds
soon enough that it proves inadequate in one or more respects. He or she will probably try minor changes at first,
because no one finds it that inviting or facile to alter the entire legacy of a domain, one that may have been built up painstakingly
over decades or even centuries.
Yet, characteristically, the creator finds further change necessary - whether because the
creative individual is dissatisfied with an ad hoc solution or because the particular problem can be solved only by a fundamental
reorientation or because of some other factor(s) depends on the particular circumstances. But in any event, a
seemingly local solution needs to be abandoned in favor of a far more extensive reorientation or reconceptualization.
p.38 [Csikszentmihalyi] identifies three elements or nodes that are central in any consideration of creativity:
(1) the individual person or talent, (2) the domain or discipline in which that individual is working; and (3) the surrounding
field that renders judgments about the quality of individuals and products... In Csikszentmihalyi's persuasive account, creativity
does not inhere in any single node, nor, indeed, in any pair of nodes. Rather, creativity is best viewed as a dialectical
or interactive process, in which all three of these elements participate
p.89 To posit deep similarities between the mind of the child and the mind of the creative adult
is a relatively recent, if not distinctly modern, phenomenon.
p.126 Can one do first-rate work in the natural sciences after the age of forty? Of course,
very few scientists of any age conceive of powerful new theories, but the few that manage the feat seem to do so when they
are very young... in my own view, it is a particular combination of youth and maturity that allows the most revolutionary
work to take place in the sciences, and such an amalgam can only occur during a relatively small window of the life
span.
p.127 Perhaps the amalgam of youth and maturity is an identifiable feature of creative scientific
genius. But it may well be only a necessary, and not a sufficient, feature. Einstein was fortunate, first, in that
the questions he pondered during his youth turned out to be relevant to the physics of his day and, second, in that his gifts
of spatial and visual imagination could advance his scientific work.
p.132 Having considered the concepts and phenomena in a domain, and having found current views to
be inadequate, scientists in a sense go back to the drawing board.
