Abstract
Thomas Edison is credited with saying that “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration”, suggesting thus that having a creative idea is not the only thing that matters, there is also a lot of hard work involved. He was, in this way, responding to popular beliefs that consider insight the real mark of the genius. In fact, the first conceptions of creativity were actually based on the idea of divine inspiration (Sternberg & Lubart, 1999) and the Ancient Greeks, for instance, metaphorically pointed to the muses as the source of true creation. While this image actually locates creativity outside of the person, it was following the Renaissance that genius became ‘internalised’ as biological and hereditary (Montuori & Purser, 1995). Today, such extreme views are avoided but the ethos of attributing creative qualities to the individual continues in research focused on creativity and intelligence, personality, thinking styles, neurological correlates, and so on. This kind of research typically uses ideation/divergent thinking tasks as a measure of creativity (more specifically, ‘creative potential’) and, since it rarely looks at what people actually do, it contributes to the classical separation between inspiration and perspiration (for a more distributed understanding of inspiration, see Glăveanu, 2022).
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Glăveanu, V.P. (2023). Craft. In: Glăveanu, V.P., Tanggaard, L., Wegener, C. (eds) Creativity — A New Vocabulary. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41907-2_5
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