The Early Years
The accomplishments of a creative person are often sheer luck - in the sense that they find an opportunity to put their talents to use. Many individuals who develop the same talents and capabilities simply never happen to be at the right place and the right time.
Ultimately, a person can only prepare themselves for an opportunity that might arise - and while they have no control over the external factors that constitute an opportunity, they have control over their own preparation.
How they prepared themselves therefore is worth studying - even if a creative person is never presented with the right moment to achieve spectacular things, those who develop this potential have ample opportunity to make less celebrated contributions and control their own lives.
Childhood and Youth
A common theme of biographies, particularly in western culture, is discovering moments in very early life that serve as omens to the future success of an individual. Though many times these "discoveries" are made in hindsight, it is too common a theme to be dismissed as contrivance or coincidence.
Very often, these stories are the stuff of myth and legend. No-one pays much attention to a creative genius until he has accomplished something of significance and his past is then pieced together from fragments of memory and, in the process, is distorted, augmented, and in some instances entirely fabricated.
We wish to think that the markings of creative genius reveal themselves in the earliest years of a man's life, but this is seldom true. In more recent years, it's been found that few who knew legendary figures in childhood had any sense that they would accomplish great things later in life. They seemed quite ordinary and unremarkable.
It's mentioned that Picasso showed quite a talent for drawing in his youth, and Mozart demonstrated great musical aptitude. But so do many children who do not accomplish anything significant later in life. A precocious ability is not a guarantee of alter success - and many people showed no childhood propensity or even interest in the domains in which they would eventually become renowned.
Here, he stresses the difference between talent and creativity. It is not uncommon for young children to show talent, but this is mere mimicry and parlor tricks. Neither is it unusual for young children to seem to be creative because, knowing so little, they cannot follow the conventional methodologies.
The early years of legendary people are very often works of fiction - not born of any attempt to deceive, but merely to tell a coherent story. There is little entertainment value in the story of an artist who never picked up a paintbrush until two years before they executed a great work, and someone who comes by skill from study and practice seems less heroic than someone who was simply born with a supernatural talent.
Prodigious Curiosity
The author flatly declares that "children cannot be creative." While they can show precocious ability, there never was an instance of a child who contributed anything meaningful or substantial to a culture.
However, we do tend to show some interest in the activities in the lives of creative individuals during their childhood generally with an interest in discovering if creativity can be developed in other children by imitating or emulating these same activities.
And again, some people who later astonished the world are said to have been remarkable right out of their cradles, but others who accomplished great things were not unusual or remarkable until later in life. So it seems that being a child prodigy is not a requirement for later success in life.
However, a common element in both versions of the story is a sense of voracious curiosity - which may not have been related to the domain in which the individual would later excel. Practically every individual who has made a significant contribution later in life reports a childhood in which they had a feeling of awe about the "mysteries of life" and has many anecdotes about their efforts to solve them.
A number of anecdotes are then presented of brilliant individuals who showed great curiosity about the world as children, which involve fascination with the world around them and a devotion to activities similar to research and experimentation as they attempted to increase their understanding.
He does concede that memories of childhood are also subject to "retrospective distortion" and are aggrandized. Some of them are certainly post-hoc fabrications, but others he feels certain are not. There is often material evidence that supports these accounts.
The question remains: where does this curiosity come from? But there seems to be no definite answer. The common theme of these anecdotes is that a child seems to happened to notice something that sparked their curiosity. The very same things were certainly experienced by other individuals, and failed to inspire them to take interest.
So one can provide a child with exposure with things that might spark his interest, and provide him with resources and encouragement to pursue his interest - but the spark may never catch.
It's also noted that many children follow in the footsteps of a parent or elder sibling, though this is likely related to resources. If one's father is a physicists, there are many books on the topic of physics in the family library. If one's older brother played the piano, the instrument is there for the younger sibling to toy with and explore. This rather dilutes the notion of such proclivities having a genetic origin.
And again, there are plenty of stories that tell of the opposite: children who were deprived of resources, and even those who were discouraged from pursuing their interests, yet who later demonstrated creativity and aptitude in a given domain.
He then speaks of instances in which a person who because a figure in one domain had childhood interests in quite a different area, and who switched his attention later in life. This suggests that curiosity is valuable as a general quality of character, rather than having to be in a specific domain.
The Influence of Parents
In most instances, parents are responsible for stimulating the interests of their child - but very often their main contribution is giving the child the latitude to explore his own interests. It's also common to find that the parents of created persons treated them "like a fellow adult."
Interviewees describe their relationship with their parents as being supportive but not directive of their interests. It's common to find that parents taught children to read and write at home and provided financial support necessary for them to pursue their intellectual interests even from a young age.
There is also a mention of fostering "self-respect and self-discipline" among creative children - setting certain rules and boundaries, but rather few. An emphasis on knowledge is also a common factor - regardless of whether the parents are themselves very educated people.
Another common factor is a focus on character. While the parents of creative children do not provide constraints and direction for their intellectual development, their parenting very often focuses on developing positive character traits such as honesty, responsibility, and diligence.
The trait of honesty is very often quite pronounced, and this is likely significant because creativity must be authentic. A scientist cannot come to a valid conclusion if he is in denial of empirical facts, no can a businessman be successful unless he is honest in his dealings with other people. No act of creative product was ever based on ignorance or distortion of the facts.
It is noted that parental influence is not always positive, and is sometimes "fraught with tension and ambivalence." In some instances a child's creativity and unconventionality is generated from rebelling against a controlling and authoritarian parent. This is true "especially in the case of artists" whose interests are often dismissed as frivolous and impractical by at least one parent.
There are very few cases in which parental influence was "thoroughly negative." Creative children do not come from quarrelsome, materialistic, or domineering parents who constantly impede or discourage their children.
Absent Fathers
A notable contradiction to the importance of parental support is that many creative people lost their fathers early in life: about 30% of creative men and 20% of creative women had lost their fathers before their teens.
One interviewee suggests that the absence of a father is at once liberating (having no strong controlling authority figure) and burdensome (the need to be the man of the house even from an early age).
It's also suggested that a fatherless boy must define his own standard of manhood, and in that sense without a template to follow, he must "create" himself because he is not molded or guided and must find his own path. The father figure is "almost god-like" to a child, and without such a powerful influence, the child has nothing outside himself.
Other creatives describe a father that, while alive, is aloof and inaccessible - frequently away from home or absorbed in their own work and interests. So it is apparently not the tragedy of the loss, but the absence of paternal influence that causes creatives to become self-motivated and self-defined "seekers."
That is not to say that the death of a parent is not a significant event, as for an orphan the death is perhaps the most emotionally traumatic event of their childhood. But the author suggests that such a trauma is just as likely to destroy creativity as create it.
There's a brief mention of a few instances in which the loss of the father as a means of economic support required the child to enter the workforce from an early age, which stimulated interests.
In the end, the author stresses that while the loss of a father is significant, it is by no means a necessary component. The number of creatives who lost their fathers early in life is still a minority, and "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."
There's a brief mention of social class: creatives seem to come from the extremes. Many come from "quite poor" families, and many from the upper-middle and wealthy classes. Only about 10% come from the middle classes. This again may be because that both of these classes are less subject to social restrictions: the wealthy are not held to the standards of society and the poor are too hardscrabble to conform.
The Mirror of Retrospection
It's difficult to draw reliable conclusions about the factors in childhood that lead to creativity because we tend to reconstruct history to tell a meaningful and consistent story. Adults who are happy with their present generally recount the positive influences of their childhood.
He mentions interviewing several artists on a number of occasions. When their careers are going well, they recount positive events of childhood; when their careers was going poorly, they recounted negative events.
One particular interviewee vacillated between a negative and positive personal history during the course of his career: he started off struggling to succeed, achieved success, then lost his stride, then his career rebounded - and the theme that colored memories of his childhood followed.
This underlies the general misconception that people who succeed in life were somehow advantaged from an early age, and that those who fail to succeed in life were disadvantaged. It certainly is reflected in the stories they tell of their youth, but these accounts cannot be trusted. It's just the way people try to make sense of the present by fabricating a past that leads to their current situation.
School Years
The author finds it "strange" that school had very little effect on the lives of creatives. He does suggest that schools often "threatened to extinguish the interest and curiosity" or creative children by bringing them down to the level of their uncreative and even unintelligent peers. There are also accounts of brilliant people who had been labeled as problematic or deficient students.
Instances in which school is mentioned as an inspiration to a creative person are very rare - and in those cases it is often the extracurricular attention of a particular teacher who challenged them to go beyond the curriculum or merely tolerated their uniqueness and curiosity.
In fact, most creatives speak of their school years with frustration. There is in education a strong democratic imperative to treat all students as equal - to give extra attention not those who are struggling and to discourage those who exceed the capabilities of their peers.
The typical recollection of positive teachers seldom suggests that a teacher fostered creativity, but merely supported a talent that a child showed for a given subject. This encouragement is valuable to the creative child, but it is not the same as producing creativity.
Another negative effect of school is the demand for mediocre performance across a broad range of subjects. It is unacceptable for a child to excel in one area but be deficient in others, so the greater effort is placed on forcing a child to spend most of their time on subjects they enjoy the least.
Adolescence: The Awkward Years
The ages between twelve and twenty years is not easy for anyone, and for creatives it can be especially difficult. Peers generally encourage and reward the development of superficial skills, such as academic performance, as well as granting status to those whose behavior is deviant or destructive. To be good at the arts or any academic subject makes a student a pariah among most of his peers.
The creative teen spends a great deal of time alone - though it is debatable whether this is the result of being ostracized by peers or simply the devotion of time to solitary interests. They tend, on the whole, to seem less happy and cheerful in conventional ways, and are often most serious-minded, but their levels of happiness and satisfaction are not particularly less on self-assessments.
It's likewise debatable whether their lack of sexual activity, as compared with other teenagers, is a result of being shunned by others or merely because they are more interested in their other pursuits.
Parents often fret about children who do not seem socially well adjusted, as they do not have many friends and seem to be unsuccessful in dating. So the result is often the same as teachers who forced them as students to give more attention to subjects at which they had little talent. Creatives express frustration in being pressured to do things they didn't want to do, taking time away from the things they were interested in.
Threads of Continuity
There are some instances in which the history of a brilliant creator follows a single thread - they took interest in a given subject early in life, excelled at it throughout their education, and became leaders of the field in their adulthood. But this is not always the case.
Sometimes, creativity seems to light upon someone in their early, middle, or even late adulthood. It's also found that many of the discoveries made by creatives are the side effect of some other interest - while looking for the solution to one thing, they stumbled upon another, or created a device to help them achieve a goal that turned out to have value in other ways.
It is also true that creatives tend to settle into a groove. A brilliant painter generally cannot be expected to discover something important in the field of chemistry (though, again, he may accidentally stumble across some wondrous discovery in chemistry while attempting to mix pigments to paint with).
All things considered, what makes a creative person create is an interest in something - and interests can light upon a person at any time. Many people who are creative had different jobs for much of their lives until they came across something that took their interest enough for them to devote their attention.