Do Your Values Affect Your Creativity?
Adam Singer posted an excellent article on creativity and self-actualization. He includes some insightful advice from Abraham Maslow, the psychologist who coined the term Peak Experience and gave us the Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow wrote a lot about creativity, and Adam’s post got me thinking about how values fit into the picture.
In The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (available on Google Books here), Maslow proposes that people generally live according to one of two categories of values (or modes of cognition.) The first group aligns along external material values, or things that can be gained and lost such as wealth, power, or fame. He calls these Deficiency-Values, or D-Values. The second group aligns along internal values that reflect a state of being, such as truth, beauty, and justice. He calls these Being-Values, or B-Values.
The next leap he makes has always felt profound to me (and was hard to prove in 1971 when he first published it.) He proposes that people who think and live according to B-values are inherently more creative than those who live according to D-Values.
Here is Maslow’s complete list of Being-Values:
- Truth
- Goodness
- Beauty
- Wholeness
- Dichotomy-transcendence (acceptance or transcendence of polarities or opposites)
- Aliveness
- Uniqueness
- Perfection
- Necessity
- Completion (finality, closure)
- Justice (fairness, impartiality)
- Order
- Simplicity
- Richness (complexity, intricacy)
- Effortlessness (ease, gracefulness)
- Playfulness (joy, humor)
- Self-sufficiency (”not-needing-anything-other-than-itself-in-order-to-be-itself”)
Maslow found that it was not necessary for any individual to hold each of these values equally. One person might embrace simplicity, while another is moved by intricate complexity. What matters is that each of these values has an intrinsic value tied to the appreciation of being, and life itself.
More recently, the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi supports this idea. For his book Creativity, he interviewed and compiled research on nearly 100 unmistakably creative people, (for example Nobel Prize winners,) to determine the common thread that defines exceptional creativity. His findings consistently show that these people, from poets, to scientists, to diplomats, consistently lived their lives and found their happiness through Maslow’s B-Values.
What do you think? Is it possible to become more creative just by choosing what to care about?
