In Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire observe, “Creative people are hubs of diverse interests, influences, behaviors, qualities, and ideas — and through their work, they find a way to bring these many disparate elements together.” However, that said, the Berkeley study indicates that “the ingredients of creativity are too complex and multifaceted to be reduced to a single factor” and this new way of thinking about creative genius “gave rise to some fascinating — and perplexing — contradictions” that are best revealed within the narrative, in context. It can be noted now that the creative process draws on the whole brain” and many different neutral networks can be involved, including the default network” of the brain that Kaufman and Gregoire characterize as “the imagination network.”

Here is what they think differentiates highly creative people from everyone else and I have added relevant quotations from among my favorites:

Imaginative Play
George Bernard Shaw: “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”

Passion
Helen Keller: “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

Daydreaming
Carl Jung: “Daydreams create bridges to the subconscious.”

Solitude
D.W. Winnicott: “The capacity to be alone is one of the most important signs of maturity in emotional development.”

Intuition
Albert Einstein: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We haver created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Openness to Experience
Alan Watts: “By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility.”

Mindfulness
Yogi Berra: “You can observe a lot by just watching.”

Sensitivity
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. Those persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

Turning Adversity into Advantage
Paul Klee: “I create — in order not to cry.”

Thinking Differently
Apple advertisement, 1997: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.

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With all due respect to “the mysteries of the creative mind,” however, I wholly agree with Kaufman and Gregoire that almost anyone can live and work much more creatively than they do now. “Creativity isn’t just about innovating of making art – its’ about living creatively. We can approach any situation in life with a creative spirit. We all have the capacity to dream, explore, discover, build, ask questions, and seek answers – in other words, to be creators.”