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Going with the Flow
For many people, happiness comes from creating new things and making discoveries. Enhancing one's creativity may therefore also enhance well-being.
Creative persons differ from one another in a variety of ways, but in one respect they are unanimous: They all love what they do. It is not the hope of achieving fame or making money that drives them; rather, it is the opportunity to do the work that they enjoy doing.
Interviews with engineers and chemists, writers and musicians, historians and architects, sociologists and physicists confirm that they all do what they do primarily because it's fun. Yet many others in the same occupations don't enjoy what they do. So we have to assume that it is not what these people do that counts, but how they do it.
Being an engineer or a carpenter is not in itself enjoyable, but if one does these things a certain way, then they become intrinsically rewarding. What is the secret of transforming activities so that they are rewarding in and of themselves?
Programmed for Creativity
When people are given a list and asked to choose the best description of what they enjoy about doing what they enjoy most-reading, climbing mountains, playing chess-the answer most frequently chosen is "designing or discovering something new." At first, it seems strange that dancers, rock climbers, and composers all agree that their most enjoyable experiences resemble a process of discovery. But the evidence suggests that at least some people should enjoy discovering and creating above all else.
To see the logic of this, consider a simple scenario. Suppose that you want to build an artificial life-form that will have the best chance of surviving in a complex and unpredictable environment, such as that on Earth. You want to install some mechanism that will prepare your creation to confront as many of the sudden dangers and to take advantage of as many of the opportunities that arise as possible. Certainly you would want to design an organism that is basically conservative, that learns the best solutions from the past and keeps repeating them, trying to save energy, to be cautious, and to go with the tried-and-true patterns of behavior.
But the best solution would also include a relay...