Creativity 101 (The Psych 101 Series) Paperback – February 5, 2009

This book by James Kaufman is essentially a literature review on academic research into creativity during the past half-century. As a result, the book isn't really an engaging read, and wading through the many studies gets tedious after a while, though Kaufman does ease the burden by writing clearly and throwing in nice dashes of humor.My main issue with the book is that, while Kaufman is fairly thorough in reviewing the literature and is clearly well-versed in this area, he doesn't really offer much in terms of summaries and general conclusions. So here's my attempt to summarize the key points:(1) Creativity is hard to precisely define and measure, which makes it hard to do creativity research and contributes to contradictory findings. But we can generally say that creativity is about coming up with something which is both (a) original and (b) useful in some way.(2) Creativity is at least partly domain-specific.(3) People who are reasonably experienced in a domain tend to agree on what counts as a creative contribution. So we can say that people often "know creativity when they see it," even if they can't define it. The exception is cases when a creative contribution is too far ahead of its time.(4) Creators often have little understanding of their own creative process.(5) The age at which one's creativity peaks tends to vary with the domain in which one is working.(6) People with more raw output are more likely to produce something which is considered creative.(7) There are different levels of creativity, and different people progress to different levels in different domains.(8) Achieving greatness in a domain tends to take about a decade.(9) Some environments (home, work, etc.) foster creativity more than others.(10) Creative people tend to be more open to experience (less conservative), intrinsically motivated (which means they become more involved in tasks), intelligent, reflective, and introspective.(11) Creativity isn't consistently or significantly correlated with mental illness, Western versus Eastern culture, or gender.As far as whether I recommend this book, I would say it depends. For the general reader (like me), I think this book is short on practical insights, and my list of key points covers most of what can be extracted from the book, so you may want to skip actually reading the book. The book might work better as a text for an introductory university course on creativity, but it seems too short for that purpose. So perhaps the best audience is academics who are looking for a quick gateway into the creativity literature, but don't intend to specialize in creativity.

This slim volume is an excellent guidebook to the vast research literature on creativity. The research summaries provide just enough information to give you an idea of what is available, providing invaluable context for a number of important studies. By using the references to the original papers on the creativity models summarized in chapter 2, I stumbled onto research describing why people and organizations are resistant to creativity and innovation. The findings of this research has provided much needed insight into my experience at work with creativity. I anticipate that I will continue to turn to this volume when I need more information on some aspect of the creative process.

With all the crazy manuals out there that claim to enhance creativity, it was delightful to find a book that actually describes what it is, explains all the models for how it happens, and connects each point to empirical, verifiable facts. Funny how once you understand the components, it's easier to get more creative. Unlike cornball recommendations that appear in other books (like blathering out morning pages or going on journeys), this one actually makes folks more creative by explaining exactly what that means. Part of the joy comes from the creative, witty, and enjoyable nature of the writing. You finish wishing you could have a beer with the author and talk some more.

This book was not a good read. The information presented was done so in a ridulous way. The examples were very extreme and not helpful. The infomation presented was information that has been shown in countless ways. I am a firm believer in creativity in writing cannot be taught so that made this book even more ridiculous to read, and a little crazy to read. It over all was an unhelpful read.

Gives a great synopsis of the history and contemporary components of studying creativity. Maybe there is not much written on it but I would have liked to see more on social creativity. I know Amabile's work but I expected to hear about other similar work.

Purchased this book for school for son, and so far, so good. My son has not used the book yet, but it arrived to me in record time and in very good shape.

I had a great experience with this transaction. It arrived just when it said it would and was in the condition just as described. I couldn't ask for a better experience.