introduction

• indeed, it could be said that the most obvious achievement of these people is that they created their own lives. and how they achieved this is comething worth knowing, because it can be applied to all our lives, whether or not we are going to make a creative contribution

childhood and youth

• if fact, it is impossible to tell whether a child will be creative or not by basing one's judgement on his or her early talent
• children can show tremendous talent, but they cannot be creative because creativity involves changing a way of doing things, or a way of thinking, and that in turn requires having mastered the old ways of doing or thinking

prodigious curiosity

• if being a prodigy is not a requirement for later creativity, a more than usually keen curiosity about one's surroudings appears to be
• whereas later in life creative individuals learn to love what tey do for its own sake, at first this interest is often motivated by competitive advantage

the influence of parents

• in most cases it is the parents who are responsible for stimulating and directing the child's interest. sometimes they only contribution of the parents to their child's intellectual development is treating him or her like a fellow adult
• in other cases the entire family is mobilized to help shape the child's interest
• strong parental influence is especially necessary for children who have to struggle hard against a poor or socially marginal background. lacking other advantages, such as good schools and access to mentors, it is almost impossible to succeed without parental support and guidance
• parental influence is not always positive. sometimes it is perceived as having been fraught with tension and ambivelence
• in none of these fields could you be ultimately successful if you were not truthful. if you distorted the evidence, either consciously or unconsciously, for your own advantage. most of the respondents felt fortunate to have acquired this quality from the example of parents
• only in a few cases does parental influence appear as a thoroughly negative force, an example of what the child wants to avoid in the future

missing fathers

• the mere fact of not having a father is not what affects the later life of such children; what counts is the meaning they extract from the event
• there are just too many examples of a warm and stimulating family context to conclude that hardship or conflict is necessary to unleash the creative urge. in fact, creative individuals seem to have had either exceptionally supportive childhoods or very deprived and challenging ones
• many creative individuals came from quite poor origins and many from professional or upper-class ones; very few hailed from the great middle class
• clearly it helps to be born in a family where intellectual behavior is practiced, or in a family that values education as an avenue of mobility - but not in a family that is comfortably middle-class

the mirror of retrospection

• so it is possible that the reason successful creative adults remember their childhoods as basically warm is that they are successful. In order to be consistent with the present, their memory privileges positive past events
• what matters more is what the children make of these facts, how they interpret them, what meaning and strength they extract from them - and how they make sense of their memories in terms of the events they encounter later in life

on to school

• it is quite strange how little effect school - even high school - seems to have had on the lives of creative people. often one senses that, if anything, school threatened to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls
• what made these teachers influential? two main factors stand out
  • first, the teachers noticed the student, believed in his or her abilities, and cared
  • secondly, the teacher showed care by giving the child extra work to do greater challenges than the rest of the class received
• to keep up interest in a subject, a teenager has to enjoy working in it. the teacher has the difficult task of finding the right balance between the challenges he or she gives and the students' skills, so that enjoyment and the desire to learn more result
• some of these exceptional students remember extracurricular activities more favorably than school subjects

the awkward years

• talented teenagers not only are not immune but have some special obstacles to surmount. for instance, they must devote time to the development of their interests and talents, which usually means that they are alone more often than other teens. they are on the whole less happy and cheerful as a result (though when alone they are significantly less miserable than their peers are)
• youths with special talents also tend to be less sexually aware and less independent from their families than the norm. this is an important factor in their development, because it means that they spend relatively more time in the preotected, playful stages of life in which experimentation and learning is easier to achieve. sexually active adolescents meld quickly into the program of the genes, and if they achieve autonomy too early they become burdened by social responsibilities like getting a job, keeping house, and rearing children. thus they have less freedom to try out the new ideas and behaviors that are essential to the development of creativity. at the same time, a youth who is not too interested in sex depends on his parents is likely to be unpopular, a typical nerd
• another reason for the lack of popularity is that the intense curiosity and focused interest seem odd to their peers. original ways of thinking and expression also make them somewhat suspect
• if the peer group itself is intellectual, then the conformity supports the development of talent. but in most cases it is not. then loneliness however painful, helps protect the interests of the adolescent from being diluted by the typial concerns of that stage of life
• marginality - the feeling of being on the outside, of being different, of observing with detachment the strange rituals of one's peers - was a common theme of course, a feeling of marginality is typical in adolescences, but in the case of creative peopel there are concrete reasons for it
• those who were somewhat precocious intellectually experience another sort of marginality. they were promoted into higher grades and therefore grew up surrounded by older teenagers with whom they did not form close friendhips

threads of continuity

• it should be added, however, that for each creative person whose life seems like a seamless unfolding from childhood into old age, or whose interests seem preordained, even before birth, there is another whose later career seems to be the product of chance or of an interest that appears seemingly out of nowhere long after the early years are past

what shapes creative lives

• it may not be so important to know precisely where the seeds come from. what is important is to recognize the interest when it shows itself, nurture it, and provide the opportunities for it to grow into a creative life.