5Quoted in W. Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 7.
6“Why Study Creativity?” The International Center for Studies in Creativity, Buffalo State, State University of New York, 2005, http://www.buffalostate.edu/orgs/cbir/readingroom/html/Why_study.html.
7Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, rev. ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 150.
8P.D. Hart Research Associates, It Takes More Than a Major: An Online Survey among Employers Conducted by the Association of American College and Universities, (April 10, 2013), retrieved from www.aacu..org/leap/index.cfm, 1, 2, 8. This important report is also summarized in Rick Reis’ Tomorrow’s Professor listserv, post # 832. Tomorrow’s Professor, housed at Stanford, is free to anyone who wishes to subscribe: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/tomorrows-professor.
9Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age (New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin, 2005), 2-3.
10Isaacson, Einstein, 6-7.
11Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, in conjunction with the American Psychological Association, 2004), 110.
12These statistics are quoted in Gregory J. Feist and Mark A. Runco, “Trends in Creativity Literature: An Analysis of Research in the Journal of Creative Behavior (1967-1989),” Creativity Research Journal 6 (1993): 272, as cited in Robert S. Albert and Mark A. Runco, “A History of Research on Creativity,” in Handbook of Creativity, ed. Robert J. Sternberg, (Cambridge, MA: University Press, 1999), 17.
13Pink, A Whole New Mind, 34.
14Ibid., 69.
15D. Michael Abrashoff, It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy (New York: Time Warner, 2002), 34.
16Pink, A Whole New Mind, 367.
17Pink, A Whole New Mind, 1.
THEORY: BASIC ASSUMPTIONS AND CONCEPTS
Synergistic Interlude
“The Golden Key,” Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, #200
“Once in the wintertime when the snow was very deep, a poor boy had to go out and fetch wood on a sled. After he had gathered it together and loaded it, he did not want to go straight home, because he was so frozen, but instead to make a little fire and warm himself first. So he scraped the snow away, and while he was thus cleaning the ground he found a small golden key. Now he believed that where there was a key, there must also be a lock, so he dug in the ground and found a little iron chest. ‘If only the key fits!’ he thought. ‘Certainly there are valuable things in the chest.’ He looked, but there was no keyhole. Finally he found one, but so small that it could scarcely be seen. He tried the key and fortunately it fitted. Then he turned it once, and now we must wait until he has finished unlocking it and has opened the lid. Then we shall find out what kind of wonderful things there were in the little chest.”18
Questions to Ponder
1.What do you think the key is?
2.What are the combinations of opposites in this fairy tale?
3.What does this fairy tale have to say about spirituality and/or creativity?
4.What metaphor would you use instead of a key?
5.Of what other stories or fairy tales does this tale remind you?
18D.L. Ashliman, ed., Folklore and Mythology: Electronic Texts, accessed on April 3, 2014, http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folkexts.html.
1
What is Creativity?
A Trick Quiz
Circle all the statements that are true about creativity.
Creativity can be studied as a process.
Creativity is dependent on the individual will.
There is such a thing as the creative personality.
Creativity is the same in all domains.
Creativity results from inspiration.
Creativity is mysterious.
Creativity can be evaluated in a product.
Creativity is dependent on the environment.
Everyone is creative.
Creativity is different in different fields.
Creativity results from hard work.
Creativity has been studied and defined.
CALVIN AND HOBBES © 1995 Watterson. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All rights reserved.
If you circled all of the answers, you are correct.
The Process of Creativity
Like using the key, creativity is a process. You may have seen it listed as four, five, or six steps.19