The key question isn't "What fosters creativity?" But why in God's name isn't everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might not be why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle that anybody created anything.
Interpretation
The quote questions why creativity is not universal and urges us to rethink our perceptions about it.
Abraham Maslow's quote challenges the common notion that creativity is rare or miraculous. Instead, he suggests that we should investigate the reasons behind the lack of creativity in many people, questioning societal and psychological factors that inhibit human potential. By reframing our understanding of creativity, we can encourage more individuals to express their creative abilities and innovate.
In practice
In a workshop about encouraging creative thinking in teams.
It looks as if there were a single ultimate goal for mankind, a far goal toward which all persons strive. This is called variously by different authors self-actualization, self-realization, integration, psychological health, individuation, autonomy, creativity, productivity, but they all agree that this amounts to realizing the potentialities of the person, that is to say, becoming fully human, everything that person can be.
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.
The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy
Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.
It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.
I was awfully curious to find out why I didn't go insane.
Those who are possessed by nothing possess everything.
Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both.
Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.
Today's headlines and history's judgment are rarely the same. If you are too attentive to the former, you will most certainly not do the hard work of securing the latter.
It's better to live cherishing a dream than face the possibilty that it might all come to nothing.
The problem with listening, of course, is that we don't. There's too much noise going on in our heads, so we never hear anything. The inner conversation simply never stops. It can be our voice or whatever voices we want to supply, but it's a constant racket. In the same way we don't see, and in the same way we don't feel, we don't touch, we don't taste.
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