Eminent and Everyday Creativity

Eminent Creativity

Eminently creative individuals have been studied for many years. This is not surprising given their contributions to society and progress. They are especially good targets for investigation because their creative talents are unambiguous and without question. The research suggests that many famous creators have shared certain tendencies. They seem to have each been concerned with originality, for example, and most have devoted virtually their entire lives to their work.

One critical part of eminent creativity is expertise. Expertise is usually defined in terms of a knowledge base. More concretely, eminent individuals develop a rich and detailed knowledge base. This allows them to understand what is important within the domain or field in which they work. It allows them to do routine things effortlessly and to consider a large number of ideas and options simultaneously. There is a potential drawback in that sometimes expertise leads to assumptions that should not be made. This is the so-called price of expertise.

Expertise is domain specific. Different domains have different amounts of available and required information. Interestingly, fields that do not have large knowledge bases allow mastery at earlier ages. Prodigies occasionally appear in these fields partly for this reason. Other fields require huge amounts of knowledge, and because this requires years to master, prodigies are not found in them. Music allows prodigies, just to name one example, but physics does not.

Expertise does not tell the whole story. A second important aspect of eminent creativity is sociological. Typically, experts within a field are the ones to recognize high-level performance and eminence. Their opinions may eventually be shared by the general public, but the initial attribution of eminence is given by the gatekeepers and experts within a field. One implication of this is that eminent creativity, unlike everyday creativity, must be understood as a social phenomenon. Audiences and social contexts must be considered, for example, as should social judgmental and attributional tendencies. Here again, there is a drawback, of sorts, for theories of eminent creativity sometimes define it primarily in social and attributional terms, and someone hoping to change a field may misunderstand this and invest more in social skills and impression management than in the knowledge that is required by the field itself. Another curious implication of eminence as a social attribution is that the designation may change. Indeed, there were people in Rembrandt's time who were much more famous, yet today only art historians recognize their names.

Eminent creativity is partly a result of hard work. Expertise is developed, and this can take years of concentrated effort. For this reason, intrinsic motivation is often included in profiles of highly creative persons. They must be motivated if they are to devote years to their chosen topic or field. Yet eminent creativity is also sometimes influenced by chance and luck. Sometimes the actual insight is fortuitous or serendipitous (e.g., X-rays) and sometimes creative persons just happen to have interests that fit with current Zeitgeist and are therefore appreciated. The Wright brothers were lucky that they had a bicycle shop and could support themselves in that fashion, just to name one example. They were able to use their tools and shop when working on the airplane. What if they had been born 50 years earlier and the bicycle was not so fashionable?

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