Aging Creativity and Productivity – Several Factors that Influenced in the Later Years
Creativity is most often defined as the individual capacity to generate ideas that are both original and useful. In everyday life there are numerous solutions to problems that work just fine but are totally routine, such as a motorist’s decision to take an alternate route to the grocery store when an automobile accident blocks the habitual route. Of course, the two defining components of creativity—originality and utility—are not discrete characteristics—there are varying degrees of these elements in a creative idea. Hence, a measure of originality can vary from utterly conventional ideas (the zero point) to ideas that can be considered extremely surprising or even revolutionary.
Similarly, a measure of utility can range from an idea that proves completely impractical or unworkable (the zero point) to an idea that solves a problem perfectly. As a necessary consequence, their joint product, creativity, can also vary along some implicit scale. At the lower end of this scale is everyday creativity. At a higher level on this scale is creativity that actually results in some discrete product, such as a poem published in a regional literary magazine or a painting displayed at a local gallery or exhibit. Higher still are those products so creative that they exert a more lasting and pervasive impact on a discipline, culture, society, or civilization. At this extreme it is common to speak of ‘‘creative genius.’’
Yet it is critical to stress that genius-grade creativity and productivity is not necessarily superior to more ordinary forms of creativity. Although the influence of an artistic or scientific masterpiece is more impressive in the long run, such master- works are also relatively rare. In contrast, ideas that appear at the middle levels of creativity, because of their frequency, play a bigger role in daily affairs, whether in the home, school, or workplace.
From the standpoint of aging, there are two fundamental questions that must be addressed. The first question concerns how aging creativity and aging productivity changes across the human life span, particularly in the final years of a person’s life or elderly. The second question regards the best explanations for any developmental changes. In short, the first question is empirical, the second theoretical.
Nevertheless, research using aging productivity measures also have positive implications for the expected level of creativity develop in the later years. This optimism follows from seven empirical results:
The age-curve specific form—especially the placement of the peak and the slope of the post peak decline—depends on the domain in which aging creativity takes place. In some domains the optimum will occur much develop later in life, and the drop will be very slow, or even negligible.
Creativity and productivity amongst elderly seldom declines to zero. On the contrary, in most creative domains, persons in their seventies will display higher output rates than they did in their twenties. Furthermore, those in their seventies will usually be generating ideas at a rate only 50 percent below what they achieved during their productive peaks.
Individual differences in lifetime productivity are far more substantial than longitudinal changes in productivity within any particular creator’s career. In other words, cross-sectional variation in output accounts for more variance than does age. Accordingly, highly prolific creators in their seventies and eighties are more productive than are less prolific creators during their career acme.
Longitudinal fluctuations in creative output are a function of career age, not chronological age. Hence, ‘‘late bloomers’’ who begin their careers much later in life will not reach their career optima until much later in life. The same pattern holds for those who switch fields, thereby resetting the longitudinal clock.
A respectable amount of the aging creativity and aging productivity loss in the last half of life is not necessarily inevitable, in so far as it can be ascribed to various extrinsic factors, such as declining health or increased professional or personal responsibilities. By the same token, certain settings can sustain creativity well into effects in the later years. In the sciences, for instance, those creators who are enmeshed in a rich network of colleagues and students are prone to exhibit longer creative careers.
If one looks at the quality ratio of successful works relative to total works produced in consecutive age periods, one discovers that this ratio does not change systematically over the course of a creative career. Most notably, this success rate does not diminish as a creator ages. As a result, although creative elders may produce fewer masterpieces in their final years, they also generate fewer inferior works. On a work-for-work basis, there is absolutely no reason to speak of any age-related decrement.
Quantitative declines in aging creativity and productivity across the life span are often accompanied by qualitative changes in the nature of the output—changes that frequently operate in a compensatory manner. For instance, as creators mature, they will tend to focus on more ambitious products, such as epics, operas, novels, and monographs. More critically, creators in their concluding years often greatly alter their approach to their creative endeavors. In the visual arts, this longitudinal shift is called the old-age style, while in music this change is styled the swan-song phenomenon.