Creativity Is Often Blind

If we define talent as simply the rate at which a person acquires expertise, then talent undeniably matters for creativity. Some people clearly get more bang for the buck out of a given training regimen. 

This may be an inconvenient truth, but it does counter the idea that creativi...

While expertise is characterized by consistency and reliability, creativity is characterized by many false starts and lots and lots of trial-and-error. 

If creativity was merely a function of deliberate practice, you would expect that with increasing deliberate practice would come increasin...

 Not only does the speed of expertise acquisition matter, but so do a whole host of other traits. People differ from one another in a multitude of ways. This includes general and specific cognitive abilities (IQ, spatial ability, verbal reasoning, etc.), personality dispositions,...

While the deliberate practice approach tends to focus on highly specialized training and purposeful techniques designed for improvement within a specific field, creative experts tend to have broader interests and greater versatility compared to their less creative expert colleagues. 

If creativity were all about deliberate practice, then outsiders who lack the requisite expertise shouldn't be very creative. But many highly innovative individuals were outsiders to the field in which they contributed.

These individuals didn't deliberately practice down an already existing...

While creativity often draws on a deep knowledge base, creative products, by definition, are much more than expert products. This is because creativity must be original, meaningful, and surprising. Original in the sense...

The deliberate practice approach is focused on using deliberate problem solving to learn an existing set of rules within a domain. Creative people are not just good at solving problems, however. They are also good at finding problems.

When creators put something novel out into the world, the reactions are typically either acclaim or rejection-- not nearly as useful feedback as making a foul shot to audience applause or checking your weight on a scale to see if you're making progress toward your weight goals.

The standard...

Creative products must be surprising in that the original and meaningful creative product must be surprising not only to oneself, but to everyone. This is exactly how the United States Patent Office evaluates n...

The deliberate practice approach assumes that performance is a linear function of practice. While this may be true for many well-defined domains of human achievement, this doesn't appear to be the case for creativity. The relationship between knowledge and creativity is best characterized by an “...

Modern behavioral genetics has discovered that virtually every single psychological trait-- including the inclination and willingness to practice-- is influenced by innate genetic endow...

Environmental experiences substantially affect creativity-- including socioeconomic origins, and the sociocultural, political, and economic context in which one is raised. These environmental factors are most likely larger compared to genetic factors.

Another hugely important envi...