Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality

4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.

Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas. as fantasies without relevance to current reality.

And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality At the same time, this “escape” is not into a never-never land.

What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.

Most of us assume that artists–musicians, writers, poets, painters–are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists.

This may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off.