As I wrote last week, James Webb Young once described the creative process as using the “production line of the mind” to generate ideas. This metaphor for the creative process is useful because it specifies a mental technique that can be learned. The technique is not esoteric, mysterious, or romantic, but rather consists of a few simple principles and methods that you can train yourself to use in your daily life. Young’s enduring insight is that the “production line of the mind” is the source of all ideas.
Read moreModeling the creative process, part 1: Source Material
As I wrote about at the beginning of the month, one of the books I first went for to begin playing the Feelings Collector in 2021 was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Creativity. Among the books greatest strengths is its empirical depth, much as is the case with Flow. The lives of the creative people surveyed to produce the data on which the book’s argument is based are rich and insightful. There’s a lot of collected and collective wisdom in this book.
Read moreCsikszentmihalyi on Creativity, part 1 of n
I’m putting up an abbreviated post this week, as I will be helping facilitate a Jubilee School for the Debt Collective on Thursday evening when I normally would be writing. Fortunately, I have a lot of drafted and semi-drafted material banked up from playing the Feelings Collector last year to work with when there is less time.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—author of “Flow” and one of my early guides in this adventure—wrote a book about creativity, which I also read last year. “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention” had a powerful effect in drawing me toward creativity as my chosen feeling for 2021, but I didn’t annotate it as extensively as “Flow” for a couple of reasons that seem somewhat unimportant now. At any rate, I will likely come back to this text, because there are some very useful chapters based on an extraordinarily rich set of interview data. Many of the conclusions in the book—and indeed the quotes below—are based on the collective insights provided into the creative process by the hundreds of individuals who were interviewed for this study.
Read moreIntellectual Work as Spiritual Work: or, Liturgies for Living
Last week, I wrote about finding flow at work in 2020. Really, I spent a lot of last year thinking about work and my career trajectory. A lot happened—between finishing my dissertation, “going on the market” without an affiliation, and beginning to explore a career outside of academia—and it all gave me plenty to reflect on.
One of the reasons I had sought more flow in work was because I felt like was somehow necessary to developing expertise, something I felt lacking in my life. On the one hand, I recognized the importance of being an expert on something that matters to career advancement in academia; on the other, I was frustrated with my first attempt to really become an expert in something. It didn’t really go how I was expecting it to and has not led me to the kind of place that I wanted to be. So, naturally, I sought solace and guidance to address this conundrum where I often do: in essays and books.
Read moreFinding Flow at Work
Last week, I wrote about the autotelic self. I found the idea of the autotelic self compelling because Csikszentmihalyi suggests by engaging in flow activities—i.e., getting “in the zone” in the course of some hobby, game, or practice—for no other reason than because they are enjoyable, that we can increase control of our consciousness. His specific argument is that by pursuing flow, we are better able to direct our attention at will, tune out distractions, and focus for as long as it takes to achieve some kind of goal.
One of the reasons I was struck by this was because I had long been interested in improving my performance at work. What I discovered in 2020—and am now refining in 2021—is that I had all the tools I needed, already at my disposal. I had already begun to develop an autotelic personality at work, but I had stalled out hard during the final stages of writing my dissertation. So It was good to be reminded of all the little mental tricks that I had used in the past—but I was still in deep trouble.
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