- Creativity can be malevolent. A purposeful act that is planned to hurt other people may be creative. Kaufman calls it "malevolent creativity," which has a pleasing ring, evocative of the robber baron tying the pretty innocent to the railroad tracks. Only, if the bad guy was actually creative, his dirty deed would have looked more like something you'd see on Itchy and Scratchy. Kaufman jokes (?) that if you find yourself among a group of friends who sit around planning the perfect murder, you need new friends. (I often meet with a group who talk about things like new ways to discombobulate the cat that belongs to the wife of one group member. They're only being playfully malevolent. Which is good.
- Creative artists may be less conscientious. Maybe that's not news to those of us who are familiar with at least one careless artist and at least one conscientious but mentally rigid non-artist. But it disconcerted me to learn that the psychological findings are pretty consistent about this one: that those who are high in openness to experience (great for being creative) tend to be lower in conscientiousness. Kaufman's analysis is more nuanced than that, of course, and no one's saying you can't learn to be more open (and creative) without necessarily giving up all semblance of order in your life (uh-oh, did I just give myself away?
- Creativity may have a dark side. When Kaufman studied writers, he found that "poets, especially female poets, were more likely to be mentally ill than other types of writers." The italics are Kaufman's. When the media noticed his finding, it got twisted into something about poetry being hazardous to your health. He goes over the whole episode in Creativity 101, explaining that "The Cost of the Muse," the title of his original article, was perhaps too salacious not to be misconstrued.
In this brief trade paper book (174 pages without the References), Kaufman includes a plethora of humanizing examples, some from his own life.
