What Traits Make Creatives so Creative – And Sometimes Challenging to Work With?

If you’ve worked with anyone on our team, or spent time connecting with creative minds on your own team, you’ve likely begun to realize that creatives are a complex breed. It’s one of the reasons working with creatives can be frustrating at times – it can be hard to figure out what makes them tick. It’s also why innovation is so easy to talk about and yet so hard to capture. Creativity requires a unique mix of tendencies that seem to be at friction.

We were first introduced to this natural friction in the book The Art of Impossible where psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s research on creativity and flow was unpacked.

Csikszentmihalyi unlocked something interesting about creative people – something he called the 10 Paradoxical Traits:

• Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.
• Creative people tend to be smart yet naïve at the same time.
• Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.
• Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.
• Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted.
• Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.
• Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.
• Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.
• Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.
• Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.

As Csikszentmihalyi shared, “I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it’s complexity. They 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.”

Why share this? Csikszentmihalyi’s research on the concept of flow and how to achieve it points to creativity as a key contributor to high performance and innovation. With that in mind, if you’re looking to bring high performance and innovation into your business or your life, you are going to need to tap into creativity – either your own OR the creativity of other people. If that’s true, (and it is) then we’re going to need to get comfortable with the fact that creative thinking and creative people come with some paradoxes.

Look at those ten traits again. They’re a list of traits that can feel like they are in opposition to one another, but the research tells us that instead of one or the other, creativity requires taking a “both/and” approach. What feels like opposition is actually the fuel needed for creativity to spark.

Call-to-Action

Want to surround yourself with creative people, and in turn, elevate your performance and innovation? Look for these ten traits in the creatives you surround yourself with, learn to appreciate them, and make room for some of the friction.