For Genius, Do Lots of Lots

I’ve been reading Dean Keith Simonton lately. (Kudos to the state of Indiana for making the Insight databases of webfeat available to residents.) He has an extensive publications list, but what I’m interested in here is a point he probably makes best in a book: acknowledged geniuses are people who produced a lot.

If you want a creative organization, inaction is the worst kind of failure—and the only kind that deserves to be punished. Researcher Dean Keith Simonton provides strong evidence from multiple studies that creativity results from action. Renowned geniuses like Picasso, da Vinci, and physicist Richard Feynman didn’t succeed at a higher rate than their peers. They simply produced more, which meant that they had far more successes and failures than their unheralded colleagues. In every occupation Simonton studied, from composers, artists, and poets to inventors and scientists, the story is the same: Creativity is a function of the quantity of work produced. These findings mean that measuring whether people are doing something—or nothing—is one of the ways to assess the performance of people who do creative work. Companies should demote, transfer, and even fire those who spend day after day talking about and planning what they are going to do but never do anything. [101-102]

Sutton, Robert I. 2001. “The Weird Rules of Creativity”. Harvard Business Review, 79(8):95-103 (Sept. 2001). Excerpt available online.

But you also can’t just do a lot of one thing. You need to do a lot of lots of things. Crossing disciplines or subdisciplines is required to get your mind thinking truly creatively.

One last point about expertise: As Sternberg pointed out, accumulated knowledge and skill can actually interfere with creativity. I have shown how this can happen in a recent study of the careers of 59 opera composers (Simonton, in press). One might think that the more operas a composer writes in a particular genre, the better his or her operas get, but that turns out not to be the case. The composer is actually better served writing operas in several different genres. Better yet is to create a lot of compositions that are not operatic at all, such as symphonies, quartets, and sonatas. It is as if a track coach told his or her athletes that the best way to prepare for the Olympics is to practice gymnastics. In creative domains, the negative effects of “over-training” are as conspicuous as the positive effects of “cross-training.” Only the latter encourages creators to look at problems in new and often totally unanticipated ways…. [pp 363]

Simonton, Dean Keith. 1999. “The Continued Evolution of Creative Darwinism”. Psychological Inquiry, 10(4): 362–367.

Moreso, you have to do it within a social context, not only of society and etc., but of your colleagues within your discipline. He summarizes Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) argument that

creativity requires the dynamic interaction between three subsystems, only one of which entails the individual creator. The second subsystem is the domain, which consists of the set of rules, the repertoire of techniques, and any other abstract attributes that define a particular mode of creativity (e.g., the paradigm that guides normal science, according to Kuhn, 1970). The third subsystem is the field, which consists of those persons who work within the same domain, and thus have their creativity governed by the same domain-specific guidelines. These colleagues are essential to the realization of individual creativity, according to the systems view, because creativity does not exist until those making up the field decide to recognize that a given creative product represents an original contribution to the domain. [154-155]

Simonton, Dean Keith. 2000. “Creativity: Cognitive, Personal, Developmental, and Social Aspects”. American Psychologist, 55(1):151-158.

His review of George W. Bush’s intelligence is interesting, especially in light of Kathryn Cason and Allison Brause’s work with CIP ratings of him. (They found that he’s no idiot and is capable of doing work at the same level that Bill Clinton was.) In fact, it’s interesting to note how lowly people think of another president’s brilliance: George Washington. For whatever reason, people think him a rather dullard even though he invents several agricultural techniques and ran a profitable and experimental farm, when Jefferson was just pontificating and never turned a profit. See Simonton, 2006, “Presidential IQ, Openness, Intellectual Brilliance, and Leadership: Estimates and Correlations for 42 U.S. Chief Executives”, Political Psychology, 27(4): 511-526.