Creativity as Autotelic Experience......Creativity Page 121 by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Autotelic: Greek word for something that is an end in itself
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Games are designed so that we can keep score and know how well we are doing. Most jobs give some sort of information about performance: The salesman can add up daily sales, the assembly worker can count pieces produced. If all else fails, the boss may tell you how well you are doing. But the artist, the scientist, and the inventor are moving on very diffent timelines. How do they know, day in and day out, whether they are wasting their time or actually accomplishing something?

This is indeed a difficult problem. Many artists give up because it is just too excruciating to wait until critics or gallries take notice and pass judgement on their canvases. Research scientists drift from pure science because they can not tolerate the long cycles of insecurity before reviewers and editors evaluate their results. So how can they experience flow without external information about their performance?

The solution seems to be that those individuals who keep doing creative work are those who succeed in internalizing the field's criteria of judgement to the extent that they can give feedback to themselves, without having to wait to hear from the experts. The poet who keeps enjoying writing verse is the one who knows how good each line is, how appropriate is each word chosen. The scientist who enjoys her work is the one who has a sense of what a good experiment is like and who appreciates it when a test is well run or when a report is clearly written. Then she need not wait until October to see if her name is on the Noble Prize list.

MAny creative scientists say that the difference between them and their less creative peers is the ability to separate bad ideas from good ones, so that they don't waste much time exploring blind alleys. Everyone has both good and bad ideas all the time, they say. But some people can't tell them apart until it is too late, until they have already invested a great deal of time in the unprofitable hunches. This is another form of the ability to give oneself feedback: to know in advance what is feasible and what will work, without having to suffer the consequences of bad judgement. At Linus Pauling's sixtieth birthday celebration, a student asked him, "***Dr. Pauling, how does one go about good ideas?" He replied, "You have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones." To do that, ofcourse, one has to have a very well internalized picture of what the domain is like and what constitutes "good" and "bad" ideas according to the field.
***(oh, I remember how I was desperate during my college days to see it in front of my name one day.......I still remember when one of my classmates asked me the reason behind my interest in PhD and you know what was my answer.........This dream of adding Dr. in front of Nidhi Gupta, Dr. Nidhi Gupta, sounds good........)