The 7 vices of highly creative people

http://archive.salon.com/people/feature/2000/02/09/sevenvices/print.html

by ivankirigin • 17 years ago

123 43 17 years ago

archive.salon.com

edw5192• 17 years ago

Drink, smoke, gamble, eat oysters, dress well, have sex, use your credit card.

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.

jrbedard• 17 years ago

vice correlation != creativity causation ;)

edw5192• 17 years ago

I was betting myself that someone would respond like this. See, I'm ahead already.

emontero1• 17 years ago

Although I do see the point, I wouldn't advocate strict adherence to the author's propositions. I think the following has been said on HN before, but it bears repeating: balance is key.

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. =)

trominos2• 17 years ago

Wow, this feels so surreal -- I thought the article was satirical at first, and now here it's changing people's lives.

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.

brooksbp• 17 years ago

I believe you failed to sense the sarcasm in that post. Get real.

dkarl• 17 years ago

I sometimes feel guilty because they may adversely affect my work.

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.

wallflower• 17 years ago

I disagree. I see part of my job (software developer) as creative writing because I get to manipulate abstractions and generate something tangible. I feel the iterative process of making something from a blank editor screen is one of the most fulfilling parts of my job. Yes, there is frustration and sometimes I lose myself in focus and become irritable (to interrupting coworkers) but when it flows, it flows like running the rack in pool.

sorbits• 17 years ago

I wonder if you consider yourself “creative for a living” because I am, and your generalization does not ring any bells for me.

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.

pieceofpeace• 17 years ago

Agree with you. But, I believe creative people get bored easily except when they are not creating something and so they would get bored of too much gambling, drinking, dressing up, spending money, finding/buying sex. All these vices are mostly ways of removing brain clog (engaging the brain in trivial activities so that the creative part can sleep and start afresh). But there are better ways of doing this.

noble_Davidson2• 17 years ago

I also disagree. Creativity requires that someone see rules as suggestions, and then go beyond them to ultimately accomplish what the rules were trying to take you to in the first place. In my experience, programming takes a lot of creativity to make a more efficient process... creativity is like seeing the world as a puzzle when everyone else is spacing out.

jwesley• 17 years ago

You could substitute basically any group for "highly creative people" and the article would still be the same. Like if you substituted "power twitter users" this would be ready for Mashable. You could also write an equally namedrop-filled article from the opposite perspective touting the benefits of abstinence. Clearly the creativebait worked though. Sigh.

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

I think it is more about the word "vice" than creative people mimicry. Something probably doesn't deserve such a strong word if it doesn't preclude success, and in some cases encourages it.

zackham• 17 years ago

Completely agree. Public opinion seems to be so easily polarized (a feedback effect?) it is pleasant to read something that comes off as a casual defense to it

jacquesm• 17 years ago

procrastinating...

dtf2• 17 years ago

Well it was going to be number 8. But, you know...

Rickasaurus• 17 years ago

I think some of you guys might be missing the overall point of the article. Creative people tend to do things that make them feel good in the moment (as creating things does) and think less about the future. The least creative people are too preoccupied with thinking about what is going to happen to create. That is, what other people will think or what will happen to their health down the road.

alanthonyc• 17 years ago

Great post. What I'm wondering is: It's been nine years...where's the book already?

lallysingh2• 17 years ago

It seems the author is busy. I have 7 guesses as to what's taking so long :-)

socratees• 17 years ago

I do everything on that list. Why am I not famous still?

ilamont• 17 years ago

Am I the only one who is disappointed to see this rise to the top of HN with 32 points?

cvg• 17 years ago

I think there may be a few others, but I think the essence of a hacker is based in creativity. The more creative, the better you are at figuring out that problem.

billswift• 17 years ago

It's funny, with enough truth to make it even funnier. (And it's got 66 points now)

geebee2• 17 years ago

I loved reading it. But keep in mind...

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.

lallysingh2• 17 years ago

A good part of being creative is giving yourself over to the world around you. Drinking, gambling, smoking, etc., are all ways of letting the world penetrate that self-world barrier.

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

Maybe it was performance art.

caffeine• 17 years ago

So, to become creative .. I should light up a Cohiba, pour some rum, and have kinky oyster-eating tuxedo sex with a bevy of Amex-charging escorts?

This sounds curiously like something the Most Interesting Man In The World might do (his blood smells like cologne..)

dkersten• 17 years ago

I'm starting to like the sound of this "creativity" thing I keep hearing about.

10ren• 17 years ago

"Writers write"

derefr• 17 years ago

True, but on the other hand, if you're already creating, but you find there's just no spark in your work, these things could be good muses.

chez17• 17 years ago

Great point. However, as a musician, there seems to be some catch 22 here. There are a lot of drug addicts in the world, but there was only one John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, etc... so clearly doing drugs isn't a passport to creativity. However, it is undeniable that really creative people seem to flock to drugs and use them as a tool. So you can't say the drugs are responsible but you can't say they aren't responsible either.

geebee2• 17 years ago

I completely agree. While I haven't done or seen any scientific study of this, the connection seems pretty undeniable.

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.

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

oh hi confirmation bias, I didn't see you there!

anovaskulk• 17 years ago

I have to say, this is garbage.

petercooper• 17 years ago

This piece delivers only slightly dangerous bullshit if you read it as a serious article - when it really ain't.

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.

DanielBMarkham• 17 years ago

Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/quotes

noble_Davidson2• 17 years ago

Does anyone think that these vices come about because creative answers are found when crashing opposing worlds, and creatives seek to crash into as many worlds as they can? Isn't it the ability to see the world outside of itself that gives someone new insight? Is it wrong that I think of such things as tools instead of vices?... or has my creative lifestyle warped my thought process?

The 7 vices of highly creative people

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