The 7 vices of highly creative people
archive.salon.com
archive.salon.com
Anyone can drink, gamble, smoke, eat oysters, dress well, have sex(1) and use their credit card.
However, creative people create, and this is the only common attribute of creative people.
I did a lot of creative writing in college, and a lot of folks acted the part, but when you asked to read what they'd written, there wasn't much to show. Even something bad. Just nothing.
(1) may require use of the credit card.
This sounds curiously like something the Most Interesting Man In The World might do (his blood smells like cologne..)
The connection is kind of fascinating. I have no idea if it is correlation or causative. Maybe these things are actually destructive to creativity but are so tempting to creative people that they appear causative. Maybe they actually do help creativity. Maybe they just tend to ride along together.
I certainly saw a lot of self destructive behavior in some of the writers I met. There was one dude that got on my nerves in almost every way, and I thought his drinking was a bit of an affectation to seem creative (the way PG in one essay mentioned that some people in computer science depts talk quickly to appear smart). However, 10 years later, he had produced two legitimate novels, and the second one got a paragraph long nod in time magazine and a longer, semi-positive bit in the new york times book review. I thought it was decent, didn't love it, but it was undeniably real and coherent, not 300 pages of drivel stapled together.
Fact is, he did something incredibly difficult that I couldn't do, which is write a real, legitimate, worthy novel. I respect his ability to create - and I'm definitely nobody to judge what he deems to be the necessary process.
I am so glad you posted this!
I already enjoy 3 of these (drink, sex, credit card) and I sometimes feel guilty because they may adversely affect my work. Starting immediately I'm adding the other 4 and I'm not going to feel guilty about any of them.
A friend of mine offered me a real Cuban cigar yesterday and I politely refused. I'm calling him back tonight. I'm also going to the mall and buying something I never would have worn before. Then I'm hitting the casino and I don't care if I win or lose. I'll skip the oysters, but Saturday night, I'm picking the most decadent thing on the menu. And yes, there will be beer (maybe even spirits) and sex.
If Hemingway, Einstein, Churchill, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde indulged to feed their creativity, then maybe I should do it more often, too. I'll let you all know how it goes. A couple of days later.
Please, let us know how it goes with the intensified debauchery. Maybe I'll change my ways if your experiment's results prove to be enlightening. =)
Anyway, I'll keep this short:
1) It's your life.
2) Taking risks is wonderful. So is breaking rules, particularly the invisible ones, like social norms.
3) Nevertheless, taking up smoking because you read a bad article about the habits of highly creative people written by somebody who clearly isn't highly creative is fucking retarded.
In my defense, posts like the parent's -- except earnest -- aren't uncommon on HN.
This is the difference between people who are creative for a living and people who merely wish to be creative while earning a living. For 95% of programming work, if you're reasonably bright and experienced, getting it done boils down to the very difficult and subtle art of not being bored to the point of depression. Creativity requires the opposite art: being easily bored, tormented by the familiar. That would make any programmer miserable and unproductive.
Creative people are often motivated by a task, filling in holes in the patterns they see (and finding these patterns), not by boredom.
I don’t smoke or gamble and have no interest in picking it up. Drinking is limited to “on special occasions” (and that is how I like it). I do however like to travel, and that is my guilty pleasure.
I can feel guilty about this (hence guilty pleasure), so I travel less than what I want to, exactly because it affects “work”, like the grand parent talks about. But that feeling helps me be creative for a living, because I finish the things I start rather than go awol, smoking, drinking, or traveling the world.
I'm going to say this not because I think everyone is naive, but because I know some people are naive. I certainly have been in the past and pieces like this once made me rationalize stupid behavior..
Please don't use "well so-and-so does it" as an excuse for engaging in any bad behavior that you know is bad. There are more than enough vice-free tee-totallers who reach the peaks of every field - it's just that these "highly creative people" stand out because of how fucking annoying and self-centered they are - don't be one unless you truly want to be and it feels right to you.