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4 Opposing Traits That Define Creative Personalities

And how you can find inspiration from them

Jean-marc Buchert
5 min readSep 4, 2020
Photo by melissa mjoen on Unsplash

Various psychologists and scientists have tried to study the personality that defines the creative person.

Facing numerous and contradictory traits, they found that the talented artist, the genius scientist, or the deep thinker cannot be reduced to a single psychological type.

According to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery, creatives embody personalities fluctuating between various and contradictory tendencies, crossing all the spectrum of human emotions.

Their creativity comes from an ability to bring this complexity together in a shifting, adaptive, and unique personality.

It comes from personal aspects such as a self-confident modesty, a playful focus on their work, transgressive respect for tradition, and a rigorous passion for their efforts.

Here is how examples of creatives from Csíkszentmihályi’s book talk about these 4 traits and how you can find inspiration from them.

Showing Self-Confidence and Modesty

When creative people talk about their field of expertise, they show a precise and firm vision of its history and future.

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