Many people have the notion that creative people are naive, because they are often quite outside the box thinkers and can be quite intuitive. In reality, creative people are actually highly intelligent individuals with the ability to solve problems and find unique solutions. Creative people have a lot of energy that is channeled into their work, and they are often very good at multitasking. However, their energy can be a bit chaotic at times.
Creativity requires openness and sensitivity. As such, creative people are often quite sensitive to criticism and to what others have to say. They are often able to see the positives in negative comments, and they are not afraid to challenge the status quo or take risks when necessary. Creative people also tend to have a very low threshold for pain. Badly designed machines can cause pain to an inventive engineer, and a poorly written piece of poetry will hurt a creative writer. They are often unable to switch off, and it’s not uncommon for them to stay up late working on a project.
Creative people often have a great deal of curiosity about the world around them, and they can be very inquisitive when they are not busy with their own work. They are constantly asking questions, and they may even have broad interests in a variety of unrelated subjects. For example, they might develop a collection of items related to their favorite hobby or sport. Creative people also have a gift for making connections between seemingly unrelated concepts. This can be a powerful tool for generating new ideas. For example, a researcher found that creative people who were asked to think about two unrelated concepts in a different way than they usually did were able to come up with more ideas than a control group who thought about the concepts in a similar way.
Researchers have also found that creative people can multitask. They can hold multiple streams of thoughts in their mind at the same time, and they can move quickly from one thought to another. This can be beneficial when they are working on a creative project, and it’s why many of them are able to create so much in a short amount of time.
According to Csikszentmihalyi, creative people resist the rigid gender stereotypes and roles that society imposes on them. They are able to be both nurturing and sensitive (often labeled as feminine), as well as dominant and assertive (often labeled as masculine). This is how they can juggle seemingly contradictory modes of thought such as being cognitive and emotional, deliberate and spontaneous. They are also able to use flexible brain networks that activate and deactivate at will. This allows them to combine seemingly contradictory features of creativity, such as being both traditional and iconoclastic. For example, a painter may be inspired by the work of a past master but still seek to improve upon it. Similarly, a scientist may look at an existing solution and find ways to make it better.