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The complexities and contradictions of creative people
Published on August 25, 2010
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by Scott Barry Kaufman
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“Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” – Walt Whitman
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 “I think that when you’re talking about Michael Jackson and you try to analyze him, it’s like analyzing electricity, you know? It exists, but you don’t have a clue as to how it works”.
Creativity researchers aren’t so confused. They have long-ago accepted the fact that creative people are complex. Almost by definition, creativity is complex. Creative thinking is influenced by many traits, behaviors, and sociocultural factors that come together in one person (see “Could Michael Jackson Have Created Twitter?”). It would be surprising if all of these factors didn’t sometimes, or even most of the time, appear to contradict one another.
As creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi notes in his 1996 article for Psychology Today titled “The Creative Personality“, creative people
“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.”
To me, some of the most fascinating contrasts are those found in creative performers– those who are constantly on stage and in the public eye. Out of Csikszentmihaly’s list of 10 complex personality traits of creative people, which were based on interviews with a wide variety of creative people, I think these three are the most relevant to creative performers:
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