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60 Creativity

immediately below a proposed cutoff point functions similarly to someone
who is immediately above it, a fact that denies the proposition that the cutoff
implements a significant distinction.
These observations notwithstanding, it is a fact that some individuals
create more than others and this fact cries out for explanation. But variation
in the frequency of creative acts is a better explanation than the amount
of creativity expanded in each such act. We do not all live equally creative
lives. Some life trajectories provide more opportunities to undertake creative
projects than others, and individuals differ with respect to their disposition
to respond to such opportunities, the amount of time they devote to them
and the passion and persistence with which they pursue them. a would-be
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creator has to be willing to work every day on tasks that he does not know
how to do, to be driven by goals that he cannot reasonably hope to achieve
and to live with the realization that the products of his best efforts are likely
to be declared failures at the very moment they are completed. as a conse-
quence of differences in the willingness to suffer these burdens, some indi-
viduals attempt a larger number of creative projects than others, and this is a
sufficient explanation for the differences in their accomplishments. He who
hammers more often drives more nails, even though his blows are no harder
than anyone else’s.
to explain how opportunity and disposition intertwine in the life story
of a creative person is a complicated enterprise, better executed with the tools
of biographers and novelists than with those of cognitive psychologists. Much
has indeed been learned from such studies. The important point for pres-
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ent purposes is that the question of how opportunity and disposition enabled
someone to produce more than his share of novelty is distinct from the ques-
tion of what distinguishes creativity from its opposite.

Processes
The conceptual pains associated with the attempts to measure creative prod-
ucts or creative individuals are relieved if we assume that there are distinct
types of cognitive processes with different properties and patterns of unfold-
ing, generating different types of outcomes. One set of processes corresponds
to what we intuitively recognize as routine, normal or analytical thinking, pos-
sibly brilliant and worthwhile along some dimension (rigor, systematicity, use-
fulness, etc.) but not creative. The contrasting set contains processes that are
essential ingredients in acts of creation. The question of what is creative about
creative thinking is to be answered in terms of the differences between the two
types of processes.