Creatives & Thought

The psychology of creativity has been beaten to death, examined from every conceivable angle, and dissected so thoroughly that it resembles an intellectual corpse that academics and self-help gurus continue to prod for signs of life.

Yet, here I am (part observer, part participant), in the metaphorical basement of the creative discourse, watching two opposing factions debate one another on the sixteen-inch TV of contemporary thought. As if I am going to come to the conclusion saying, "Buck! You are the winner!"

On one side are those who, on some level or another, are religiously spiritual about creativity being bestowed by divine gods to imaginative visionaries, and on the other, are those who are no less zealously convinced that creativity is a skill set like any other skill set, honed through practice and technique. The requirement in this case (and every case about creativity, from what I can deduce) is that we need to pick a side and stick with it. This strikes me as oddly confident, especially for a subject so fundamentally elusive.

Modern psychology, of course, has long moved beyond this binary (thinkers like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Teresa Amabile describe creativity as both a mindset and a system), but the cultural narrative still craves a clear hero.

But what if the whole thing is rigged not because the ideas are wrong, but because the very lens itself is cracked? That is what I want to understand.

As I type this, I am becoming increasingly suspicious that both camps are simultaneously 100% right or catastrophically wrong, which leads me to believe that our understanding of creativity will completely collapse within the next twenty-five years (I admit that’s more a provocation than prediction, but let’s call it a thought experiment).

Divergent Thinking vs. Convergent Thinking: The False Dichotomy We Can't Seem to Escape

The purported fight between divergent and convergent thinking has been framed in a way that suggests these two cognitive processes are adversaries in a psychological cage match, as if these two cognitive processes are mortal enemies rather than roommates who occasionally bicker over whose turn it is to do the dishes.

Divergent thinking (that uncontrolled and boundary-less idea explosion) gets support and encouragement from the artistic upper crust, as it is extolled as the "real" creativity, while convergent thinking (the methodical whittling down of generated ideas into an actually useful product) is quietly celebrated by those who eventually have to make something that functions in the real world. It's all amazing!

But here’s the first hurdle: we created our own false dichotomy while thinking about it, as if the human mind operates in such cleanly defined categories.

Psychologists like J. P. Guilford and later researchers have shown that both processes interact in iterative cycles; Einstein daydreamed first, then calculated obsessively.

In actuality, the most interesting creative work occurs in the messy and ambiguous zones where the two processes crudely overlap; spaces that are uncomfortable for academics to discuss because it doesn't fit neatly into PowerPoint presentations at a creativity conference that no one outside academia actually attends.

That gray zone is where most of us live, and it’s where creativity happens.

Creativity and the Unconscious Mind: The Delusion of Control

We serve up the link of creativity with the unconscious, and that summation reads like watching two people who are clearly in love, but for whatever reason, will not acknowledge it, not even to themselves.

Creatives love to glorify what may be referred to as the "Eureka!" moment that appears from nowhere, as if it comes from some unknown creative force. All a convenient narrative, as it provides them the vanity of accepting a level of brilliance, yet relieving themselves of any accountability for the level of mediocrity. "The idea just came to me," citing as if creativity is some temperamental figment that possesses one at completely random intervals.

Here’s what I’ve started to wrestle with: it runs counter to everything I hear from neuroscientists, who insist that these "spontaneous" insights are actually the result of complex neural processes that have been quietly working in the background. For instance, Kounios and Beeman’s research shows that neural activity in the seconds before solving certain problems can predict whether a person will later report an “Aha!” moment, evidence that unconscious or pre-attentive processes are active even before conscious thought begins.

It feels like our society is having a debate over what is true and what is false, but the real tension lies in the discomfort of admitting we don’t fully understand how our own minds work from both sides.

Constraints and Creativity: The Paradox We Pretend to Understand

It is such a built-in truism that constraints can invoke creativity. It has reached the point where it seems like it is etched on the wall of every design studio. "Limitations Breed Innovation!" the wall proclaims, while a creative director stares blankly at a brief, given essentially three days to overhaul a brand identity with a budget that would barely cover a decent lunch in Manhattan. The constraints mantra is the obstacle in brutal clarity, not a paradox; it’s exploitation masquerading as inspiration.

The myth comes from rare success stories (some madman coding a 280-character limit into a cultural juggernaut for yet another system), but for every one of those, a thousand creatives are working through sleepless nights for clients who think “tight constraints” means “free labor.” Platforms are littered with rants from designers and writers burned out by this hustle porn, where “innovation” just means meeting a deadline that should’ve been a week longer.

What is my so-called truth?

Some people are inspired or catalyzed by limitations, but the reality is that limitation is a prison to most and not a patron. And, I’m not going to tell you how to “break free,” because the real question isn’t how we “break free,” it’s why you and I continue to accept this narrative. And, with AI now spitting out “love” in seconds, why do we still think human creatives have to suffer to “ignite the genius”? Maybe this is why our entire perspective of creativity is on a collision course. Filmmakers like Lars von Trier have shown how self-imposed Dogme 95 restrictions can spark innovation, but that’s a choice, not a client mandate.

Now, the solution is not about rejecting constraints, nor blindly adhering to them. I think the reality is much more messy, complicated, and unclear. The relationship between constraints and creativity is not about rule or regulation; it exists on a spectrum. The limitations of that spectrum can change drastically depending on the person, the task, and a million other factors that we conveniently forget when we write inspirational posts about "inviting limitation and algorithms."

Some limitations are brutal choke-holds; others are sacred scaffolds. But until we can start learning to tell the difference between the two, we will continue to confuse crises with creativity.

The Creative Personality: A Myth We Can't Seem to Abandon

Let’s entertain the idea that the “creative personality” might be the most useful and the most dubious fiction we’ve inherited from the psychology of creativity. It is an easy shorthand for splitting the world into "creative types" and "everyone else" as if creativity were a kind of gold card checking personality traits at the door.

The characteristics associated with this virtual creature—openness to experience, comfort with ambiguity, and tolerance for risk—seem to refer more to the qualities we have chosen to value in so-called individualistic cultures than to anything that has to be present universally in creative thought.

And so again we return to the "want", to determine if it is an identity or an action, or whether it is something that we are or something we do.

Society (well, some of us) is engaged in discussions over what constitutes a creative person, when the more interesting discussion and question is why we are so desperate to categorize and constrain creativity at all. What if creativity is not a personality trait, but a behavior that anyone can engage in, if only the conditions were appropriate?

Flow: The State of Mind We've Elevated to Godhood

Next, there's the indomitable, world-famous flow state's take on it. Flow has become the secular religion of all creative professionals, the utopia of another world, wherein we lose all sense of time and space, our focus is narrow, and our productivity supposedly amplifies tenfold.

People speak of it in reverent tones usually reserved for spiritual epiphanies, as if entering "flow" were the goal itself, rather than truly creating something meaningful, whether it's a campaign or in a coworker's life.

What I am seeing is crazy: how we've developed an entire industry focused on helping people achieve flow: apps, groups, workshops, coaching, getaways, and retreats.

The problem is that flow has assumed the role of the commercial carrot dangled in front of burned-out creative professionals like salvation. Yet again, plenty of remarkable creative work happens in states of distraction, frustration, or even boredom. Even Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term, warned that flow doesn’t guarantee originality; surgeons and gamers enter flow too, often without producing anything new.

It doesn’t matter which strategies I employ or how I configure my surroundings; there will always be a small selection of short-sighted productivity opinions that are disgruntled until my creative process abides by their pattern of optimal functioning.

The solution might just be this: honoring that grey, chaotic, imperfect, nonlinear reality of the creative process, even when it doesn’t look like flow.

Emotional Intelligence and Creativity: The Relationship We Pretend to Understand

Numerous creatives are mindful of a relationship between emotional intelligence and creativity, but it will typically be accepted as understood, without any debate. It’s as if the relationship is so understood that it wouldn’t warrant discussion. “Of course, emotional intelligence enhances creativity,” individuals will say, while they swirl their drinks as if they have all read one popular psychology book on the subject (generally not one of the scholarly literature on the subject).

Again, the presumed truth, which is always more complicated and a little messier than could be put into a meme, is that the relationship between EQ and creativity must be understood in more depth and even more conflictually. Many of the most innovative creatives we have in our history were emotional disasters (in all honesty, I wanted to say fuck-ups, beautiful catastrophes who couldn't hold a conversation without starting a feud, but still managed to change the course of art history); while plenty of emotionally intelligent people create work that's technically proficient but utterly forgettable.

The barrier, yes, again: we’ve mistaken correlation for causation; narrative for nuance.

For the most part, I have felt comfortable suspecting that everyone was wrong about the direct correlation between emotional intelligence and creative output. However, I am beginning to play a bit with the idea that perhaps that’s no longer the case. Maybe the shift, the actual solution, is that emotional awareness doesn’t equate to creative genius, but it may allow us to perhaps survive the process with a bit more poise.

So, where does that leave us, hunched over our creative endeavors in the semi-furnished basement of human achievement?

That’s the final thought; the summation of the want, the struggle, and the glimpse of clarity.

Maybe we should accept that creativity, like most interesting human phenomena, resists our attempts to contain it within clean theoretical frameworks. It is contradictory and wildly inconsistent, which is part of what makes it interesting to think about in the first place. I suppose it is meant to be that way. We’re all just feeling around in the dark, occasionally bumping into insights that feel profound until we actually try to articulate them to someone else. Opening up cans of worms is what happens when we question the comfortable narratives we have created regarding creativity (and basically everything else in our lives).

We have to understand that the worms were always there, writhing beneath the surface, but we just prefer to keep the lid on because it's neater that way.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe creativity is not a tidy conclusion; it’s the willingness to open the can.