Robert Sternberg:
I had been giving talks for years and saying, the one thing about creativity you learn is you don’t give up. That a lot of creative ideas are rejected, especially at first, and you have to keep persisting. So here I was in that situation, and I persisted, I persisted, I persisted, and finally I gave up. And I knew that’s what I said not to do in my talks, but I couldn’t take another rejection letter. I just gave up.

Matthew Worwood:
Hello, everyone. My name is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
And my name is Dr. Cindy Burnett.

Matthew Worwood:
This is the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast.

Cyndi Burnett:
On this podcast, we’ll be talking about various creativity topics and how they relate to the field of education.

Matthew Worwood:
We’ll be talking with scholars, educators, and resident experts about their work, challenges they face, and exploring new perspectives of creativity.

Matthew Worwood:
All with a goal to help fuel a more rich and informed discussion that provides teachers, administrators, and emerging scholars with the information they need to infuse creativity into teaching and learning.

Matthew Worwood:
So let’s begin.

Cyndi Burnett:
If you’re curious about creativity and intelligence, the challenges of college admissions, testing, or the future of creativity in education, or you want to have a good laugh, you won’t want to miss today’s double.

Matthew Worwood:
Espresso episode because we have one of the leading creativity researchers in the world to talk about his work, Dr. Robert Sternberg, who is a professor of psychology in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell and honorary professor of psychology at Heidelberg University, Germany. Dr. Sternberg is past president of the American Psychological association, the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, the Eastern Psychological association, and the International association for Cognitive education and psychology. Dr. Sternberg holds 13 honorable doctorates from 11 countries and has won more than two dozen awards for his work. He is the author of over 1800 publications. Wow.

Matthew Worwood:
And as a principal investigator, has received over 20 million in grant funding. He was cited in an APA Monitor on Psychology report as one of the top 100 psychologists of the 20th century. And today he is here. A fault of my own, because we’ve been trying to get him here for over a year, but my communications have been terrible. But we finally got you here for season nine. Double espresso. Welcome, Dr. Robert Sternberg.

Robert Sternberg:
Thank you. And, Cindy, thanks for clapping. That’s the only clapping I’ve gotten the last 20 years, so I do appreciate it.

Matthew Worwood:
Well, in my defense, I want to say something because I always feel bad when I don’t clap, but I went to drama school, and I had a director I massively respect, but she would tell us, never clap, because when you clap, you are passing Judgment. And she said, well, I won’t do the voice. But she would say, you don’t pass judgment. You sit quietly. Because if you are ever in a theater production with one of the night actors, she would say, would you clap? You know, would you clap for them? So that’s why I don’t clap. So I apologize.

Cyndi Burnett:
Well, I’m clapping. Yay. I’m so excited to have you here, Bob.

Robert Sternberg:
Thank you.

Cyndi Burnett:
So I want to kick off in 2014, you wrote an article called I Study what I Stink At, Lessons Learned from a Career in Psychology and the Annual Review of Psychology. So based on this title of the article, can you share a bit about your story and how you ended up in the field of creativity?

Robert Sternberg:
Sure. There are two questions there. The first question is, I got interested in. I think I got interested in creativity probably when I was young. But what really sparked the interest, as the article says, which is the point of the article, is that I only study things I’m really bad at because those I’m curious to figure out why I’m so bad at them. And the few things I’m good at, I don’t study because I don’t really understand them. It’s easier to understand things you don’t do well. So what happened in my case is at the end of my first year of graduate school, my undergraduate advisor, who was from Yale, I was at Stanford in grad school, but my undergrad advisor was from Yale, he was visiting at the center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford.

Robert Sternberg:
And he nicely invited me to lunch with some big shot big wigs who were at the center. And I was a very small wig, this is not a wig, but they were big wigs. So they asked me what I was doing. So I told them, well, I just finished my first year project, which was on negative transfer and part hall and hall, part free recall, which is about as interesting as it sounds. And I could sort of see their faces sagging after I said that. I said, but I don’t plan to continue with that research. I’m going to be studying intelligence, which is what I came here to study. And then they said, well, how are you going to do that? And I said, I don’t really know.

Robert Sternberg:
I could see their faces really full because my first year project on that boring topic actually had been very successful and had been published as the lead article in a major journal. But now they’re thinking, well, this is, this guy is a one idea wonder. I mean, he had his one idea for a first year of psychology and now he’s sort of like one of these rock singers who gets one song and like, and that’s the end of it. Or they just never go beyond that. So I wondered how after just one year graduate school, I could be so far on the way down. I actually learned the lesson from that. I teach a course on creativity now and I tell my students this. And that is what I’ve been doing.

Robert Sternberg:
My first year. I didn’t want to study part whole free recall. I wanted to study intelligence. And I was kind of waiting for the muse to hit me and you know, God taps you and tells you what you’re going to do. And I waited and I waited and waited. Nothing was happening. So what I realized then is, you know, it’s like waiting for God to talk to you. I’m still kind of waiting.

Robert Sternberg:
I’d have to go out and actively seek and I a way of studying intelligence. Not that I’d find an exact way, but I had to look for free associations. I had to sort of look in my environment, what’s going on and say, does any of this somehow click with my wanting to study intelligence? So instead of taking this super passive approach, I took an active approach and I started looking around for things that might spark me. And I found one. Betty, my wife at the time, was using something called people pieces. She’s a math specialist, inner work. And I realized that those could be used to form analogies and that could be used to study intelligence. And everything kind of fell in place from there.

Robert Sternberg:
The work did the. Unfortunately the relationship didn’t. But the people pieces were really crucial. And so, but it stayed with me that if you want to get an idea, don’t just wait for, you know, one of these Archimedes eureka kind of things. You have to kind of look around and say what in my environment might give me that idea that I need. And it’s probably not going to come directly, but it might start you thinking. And that’s what happened with me. But I decided then I really have to understand why I ran out of ideas after just one year of graduate school.

Robert Sternberg:
And then later I started studying creativity. Everything I study is something I stink at every single thing. Unfortunately, I stink at a lot of stuff. I do use deodorants and not that, but in terms of my work and my life, there are many things I don’t do well and those are things I study.

Matthew Worwood:
I’ve got a few follow up questions, but just out of curiosity, do you feel that some of your story is connected to you just having A passion for learning. You just like learning new things?

Robert Sternberg:
Yeah, I like learning new things if there’s sort of an affordance if they kind of are me. So, you know, when I was young, I sort of did everything in school that I had to do and you know, got pats on the head sometimes. But I really love to learn about things that are exciting to me. My son Sammy is very much the same way and I have to really. So give him a little bit of a kick in the ass every once in a while because he loves to learn about things he likes, but the things he doesn’t like so much, he doesn’t learn about. And my son Seth, my older son, was the same way. You know, when it’s something that connects, I really love learning about it. And it worked for Seth much better than it has for me.

Robert Sternberg:
And I hope it works for Sammy too.

Cyndi Burnett:
It’s interesting you bring that up, Bob, because you met my son last week, came for a visit and he is very much that way where if he’s interested in something, he’s 100% in. If he’s not, it’s more of a struggle. So do you think it’s important for kids to be well rounded? Do you think it’s okay for them to just focus on what they’re passionate about? If you could go back to your younger self, would you allow yourself when you were getting those pats on the head for doing a good job and everything? Do you think it really matters?

Robert Sternberg:
I don’t think the pats on the head matters. I think that the two main things that matter in life are that you’re passionate about something and you work really hard at it. I think that’s really what it’s about. That much more than so called abilities or anything else. You have the passion and you really say, I’m going to, I’m going to put the hours. And it doesn’t even seem like hours. That said, I had a very broad education as an undergraduate because at that point I was interested in a lot of things and wow, was that a good decision because, you know, the stuff I use the least in my work is the stuff I learned in psychology. But the courses I took in philosophy and history and politics and just different kinds of things have really influenced me.

Robert Sternberg:
And having that broad education, some of my work has been like, I just published a few months ago a Tree of Philosophy, Theory of Wisdom. And if I hadn’t had the philosophy background, I never could have done that. And I was just writing this big paper yesterday and I cited some of my work that was based on philosophical paradoxes like the new riddle of induction. So when I took the courses, I saw it as separate from psychology. In my intro, psychology courses were pretty damn boring. But it’s really been great as a professional to have that broad liberal arts education because you just never know what’s going to be relevant. And today, you know, I read a lot of newspapers and I read on the Internet, Broadway, and sometimes I drive my wife Karen crazy because she says, you know, you’re not working, you’re just always reading the news. But I always bring that.

Robert Sternberg:
That’s what I write about. So, yeah, have a passion, but realize that things you never thought would be relevant may actually prove to be crucial to what you do.

Matthew Worwood:
I’ve got a follow up on this conversation and then we’ll move on, I promise. But the reason why I asked that question, do you like learning? Is listening to your story. It sounds like you’re someone that is passionate to learn new things and not just one thing, multiple things. And you reference looking around in your environment for inspiration. And I can relate to that. And I see that with my eldest son as well. He just looks around and gets curious about something and then can really get in the zone and dig deeper and deeper into that piece. The reason why I asked the question is that at the moment, you know, I kind of wrestle with this because I teach, I believe in a liberal arts and science education because of all of the things that you just said.

Matthew Worwood:
And Cindy and I loosely touched on this on in a debrief this, this season actually where we was talking about. It’s tough. You don’t really know if what you’re learning at that moment is going to be valuable for you in the future. So sometimes when we speak to guests, they talk about, well, I didn’t really learn anything in this class. Do I really need to take that? And I sit there and I’m like, yeah, but that. Because you didn’t pick that piece up and run with it. But actually, there may have been some other classes you took and you may not connect the fact that you actually are now utilizing that. So how do you know which class is of value to you and which class isn’t of value? And so this, in addition to me looking at this scenario, when I teach a lot of these Gen Ed courses and I feel I’m perceiving, I could be wrong, that some teach students walking and they’ve made a decision, this, this class has nothing to offer me.

Matthew Worwood:
And so then I’m trying To, you know, my passion can sometimes bring them some of the way, but I’m always like, well, how do I ignite that passion in the student who right now doesn’t see any value of this in the future? I see the value, right. But I’m not the student. And it’s so hard. And I don’t know if it’s. If it is a subtle personality trait or if it’s something that can be learned. So that’s why I was asking that initial question. Are you just curious about, like, a passion for learning?

Robert Sternberg:
Yeah. Well, there, I sort of had two things to say. One is, so I’ve done music throughout a lot of my life, but I always viewed the music as totally separate from my career. I viewed that as, like a fun thing. I was in the orchestra in high school and did cello in college and, you know, have a violin and a viola and a cello, but I viewed as totally. And then I get a student who’s interested in music. And so I’ve written probably a half dozen articles. One is applying my theory of love to musical instruments.

Robert Sternberg:
Another is a theory of musical intelligence, a theory applying my ideas about love to different aspects of musical experience. But I would have said that that’s totally off the track. So if you have interests that are separate, you may be surprised that they’ll help you in your career. Dean Simonton, very famous and in my view, the premier researcher on creativity of all time, said that, you know, after a while, if you keep doing the same thing, you hit a rut. The people who stay creative throughout their lives are the ones who keep finding new things. And you see this in the study of creativity, that there’s some people who come up with a theory of creativity when they’re 30 or 40 or 45, and they stick with it forever, they get stuck. So it’s ironic that they study creativity and then they get stuck when they’re 40 and other people keep doing new things. I think in terms of college students, it’s a real shame.

Robert Sternberg:
And I’ve just been having an email correspondence with one of my students about this in the last day. It’s kind of a real shame that many of them think it’s all about, I just want to learn stuff I need to know and then make a lot of money. Because I think in the end, you know, being older, if I look at. If I go to my reunions, the people who led happy, satisfying lives are the ones who, you know, they did what they wanted to do and they changed when they wanted to change. And they tried new things. And the ones who were very grindy and just focused on one thing, they burn out, you know, and then soon as they can retire, they retire. Because they didn’t approach it creatively, they approached it in a plodding way and they just ran out of gas. So what I tell students is you never know what’s going to be relevant.

Robert Sternberg:
But take stuff you’re really excited about because it may be that some of the stuff you’re excited about is going to be relevant to you later on. I’ll give you another example. I wrote articles on leadership and I would have said that, well, you know, I’m interested in leadership because it stems out of creativity research. But that’s something. The last thing in my life I am ever going to do, ever is going to be to go into academic administration. Well, then something happened in my life. I went into academic administration and all of a sudden all the stuff I learned about leadership from my research was relevant in my actual practice. So you just don’t know where you’re gonna go.

Robert Sternberg:
Actually, the story about how I went into academic administration is relevant to this podcast. May I tell the story, please? So I had been a professor of psychology at Yale for a long time and I was kind of, you know, it was getting on to 30 years and I thought, well, you know, it’s a long time. And I had this great project and the great project, which was called the Rainbow Project, was if you added tests of creativity and practical intelligence or creative and practical intelligence to tests of analytical intelligence, more like the SAT and the act, would it improve prediction of college success? And so we did a study, a national study, the Rainbow Study, in my last years at Yale, where we devised tests of creativity and practical thinking as well as tests of analytical thinking. We gave them to students and the question we asked was, will this increase prediction of first year college grades? That’s all we are funded for. So we do the study and the results are great. It turns out that the measure of creativity doubled prediction nationally. A first year gpa. I mean, we never expected that.

Robert Sternberg :
And the measures of practical intelligence also increase prediction, but not as much. So you might ask, why would that be? And I think the reason is that when you change environments from high school to college, it’s really different. I remember being a struggling freshman, I had a pretty screw up freshman year actually. So you need this sort of coping with novelty and creative skill as well as some practical skills to get used to the differences between college and high school. So we get that result and on top of that result, it turns out that when we use tests of creativity as well as practical intelligence, we greatly decreased ethnic and racial as well as economic group differences. In other words, not only did we increase prediction, but the different racial, ethnic, economic groups, their scores didn’t completely converge, but the differences were smaller. And the reason for that, we believe, based also on other research we’ve done, is that different groups emphasize different skills in their implicit theory of what it means to be smart in their folk theory of intelligence. So different groups basically are good at different things.

Robert Sternberg :
And that’s what we found in our cultural studies. That, you know, what looks smart in a high school in Connecticut or New York or Massachusetts, it’s very different from what looks smart in rural Kenya or rural Alaska or, you know, maybe even, you know, today, parts of the south, different parts of the country, different groups have different conceptions. So the results were great. We wrote it up, it was published as the lead article in the best journal field of intelligence. And I said, this is great. You know, now they were given a small funding. Now the testing company that’s funding us is going to give us the big bucks because we got such great results. And one of the things I teach in my course is that creativity is often rewarded not with more money, but a slap in the face, which is what we got.

Robert Sternberg:
They cut off our funding entirely. They said it was because they thought we couldn’t upscale it. But I realized that, well, you know, they probably funded us to make their test look good, but our research didn’t make it look so good because their test was very narrow test of knowledge and analytical skills. So I was in a crisis. I’d been at Yale 30 years as a professor, and I had hoped that much of my future at Yale as a professor would be on developing more of these measures. And now our funding was cut off, and I said, well, what can I do? And I realized that if I applied to any other testing company, the same thing was going to happen. It’s sort of like food companies. If food companies fund your research, your research better support how great their food is, or you get cut off.

Robert Sternberg:
For drug companies, if your research says their drug is a piece of crap, don’t expect to get funded again. Right? It’s the same thing. So that’s when I had always thought that I didn’t want to do academic administration. But what I realized is that if I wanted to further this work on using tests of creativity for college admissions, the one way I could do it is to become an administrator and actually do it not as a research project, but as an admissions device. So I started applying for deanships, and, you know, I thought this. This should go pretty well, because I’ve been president of APA and president of FABS and president of four APA divisions. I’ve been an acting chair. I’ve done a lot of stuff.

Robert Sternberg:
And so I applied for all these deanships, and, you know, I thought, this is like a whole new life direction. And then I got rejection after rejection. I could have papered the walls with rejections, and, you know, motherwise didn’t even interview me. A lot of them didn’t even send the letter. So I had done what, for me, was a really creative thing in my life, which is change directions so I could pursue my passion to make a difference by measuring creativity and college admissions and also teaching for creativity, since it seemed to be so important. So I had been giving talks for years and saying, the one thing about creativity you learn is you don’t give up. That a lot of creative ideas are rejected, especially at first, and you have to keep persistent. So here I was in that situation, and I persisted.

Robert Sternberg:
I persisted, I persisted, and finally I gave up. And I knew that’s what I said not to do in my talks, but I couldn’t take another rejection letter. I just gave up. So, you know, I said, all right, well, being a psychology professor at Yale, it’s going to be the rest of my life. And then after I gave up, I got two job offers, and I’d forgotten about them. I’d applied to so many places, I thought all the applications were gone, but there were a few more, and I got two job offers, so I took one of those and became Dean of Arts and Sciences and Tufts. And we actually implemented these ideas in something called the Kaleidoscope Project. But it was a reminder for creativity that what I’ve been saying all those years is really true, that if you want to be creative, you have to be incredibly persistent and take failure after failure after failure and believe in yourself and overcome the obstacles, and eventually, you know, maybe you’ll get your chance, but not.

Robert Sternberg:
And not if you’re a quitter, you know? Yeah. You just have to keep going. So that was how. And then I did administration for about a decade, and then when that started to get icky, I went back to being a professor, and now I’m at Cornell.

Matthew Worwood:
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Cyndi Burnett:
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Matthew Worwood:
And if you’re craving a community of creative educators who love new ideas, don’t miss out on their creative thinking network. Get access to monthly webinars, creative lesson plans, and a supportive community, all focused on fostering creativity in the classroom.

Cyndi Burnett:
To learn more, check out curiositytocreate.org or check out the links in the show notes for this episode Intelligence and Creativity can you define both of these and their relationship for us?

Robert Sternberg:
Sure. I define intelligence as the ability to adapt to the environment, which is a very standard kind of definition. I’ve written a book on adaptive intelligence, so my definition is standard. What’s not standard is I think that much of the field has lost sight of that definition, which goes back at least to the early 1900s and probably much further back. And that is intelligence is really about adaptation to the environment. It’s about what do I do if my girlfriend wants to leave me? Or what do I do if I can’t pay my bills? Or what do I do if my kids are misbehaving? Or what do I do if I need a new car? I don’t have the money for it. It’s about real adaptation. And what’s happened in the field is that the definition of adaptation has become very narrow in terms of vocabulary test items and reading items and math problems.

Robert Sternberg:
Things are not related to real world adaptation. In my theory of intelligence, there four parts now Creative intelligence, which you need to come up with ideas. Analytical intelligence, which you need to know if you have. Your ideas are good because everyone comes up with ideas that seem good at the time but aren’t. You need practical intelligence or common sense to figure out how to express your ideas to others and to persuade them of the value of the ideas. And you need wisdom in order to ascertain whether your ideas are helping others beside yourself. Are they leading toward a common good? Creativity involves much more than intelligence. Intelligence is part of it.

Robert Sternberg:
But as I was telling you before, I just submitted a paper yesterday, a big theory paper. I think it’s not the time to go into great detail, but I think that the most important thing for creativity, it involves both intelligence. Creative intelligence, that is. But the most important thing is your attitudes that you’re willing to defy the crowd. The hardest thing about creativity isn’t anything about ability or genetics. It’s just hard to if everyone’s doing one thing, to do something different, or if everyone thinks one thing. I mean, look at the politics in this country. It’s become like tribal.

Robert Sternberg:
It’s like two religions. And how many people are willing to defy the crowd in their own party? And when they do, they often sort of get expelled or they get a mob after them on the Internet. So being creative is hard not because you lack ability. Creativity is largely a decision. It’s rather because there’s so much pressure to conform, even among people who are supposed to know better. I mean, in academia, it’s terrible. Academia is supposed to be, you know, being a professor supposed to be about, well, you’re free to come up with your own ideas, but if you diverge too much from the sort of academic zeitgeist, get into trouble. So I think creativity is largely.

Robert Sternberg:
Are you willing to defy other people? I just. We just had a conversation this morning with my kids about this, and this is very typical. This is this morning’s conversation. There’s this a kid in the group, their sort of group, who’s very disruptive, but the other kids don’t have the guts to say, you’re being disruptive. We don’t want you in the group. And then my kids don’t want to do it because one of them tried, but she couldn’t get others to support her because, you know, they wanted to conform. It’s very hard to get people not to conform. I actually.

Robert Sternberg:
The origins of my theory, this idea that you have to defy the crowd, were in graduate school. When I was in my first few weeks of grad school. Gordon Bauer, who was my wonderful advisor, invited all his first year students over for dinner. And we had dinner, and then after dinner, he asked each of us, what do you want to study here at graduate school? So the first guy says, I want to study semantic memory. Which is what just so happens Gordon was studying, I mean, like, you know, obvious. What we call ass kicker in New Jersey. I mean, it’s really kicking ass and kissing ass and, oh, God, it was terrible. But all right, that was one guy.

Robert Sternberg:
Then Gordon asked the second guy, what do you want to study? Well, I was totally grossed out because the second guy also says, I want to study semantic memory. And I knew he didn’t want to study semantic memory. I knew that guy. And he didn’t want to study. But he was, you know, doing the apple polishing thing. He wanted to say what Gordon wanted to hear. And then he has this third guy. And the third guy, of course, has semantic memory, which I expected by now.

Robert Sternberg:
Dennis, the fourth guy, who is me and is, I think you can see even from talking to me, For a few minutes. I’m not one of these suck ups who’s just going to say semantic memory. Because that’s why Gordon was here. I mean, I stand for what I stand for. I mean, I believe in things, I know what I want to do. And I really hate people who just say things to please others. So when he asked me what I wanted to do, I said semantic memory, which was a total lie. But there was too much pressure.

Robert Sternberg:
It was like what’s called the Nash experiment, where everyone conforms and then you conform to. And I went home that night to my apartment on Park Boulevard in Palo Alto, California. And I remember sitting there and say, you know, I sold out today and I’m never going to do that again. I just cannot live with myself if I’m going to live that way. And I never did it again. And that’s how I realized the importance of defying the crowd, that there’s so much pressure in every field to conform. Even people who say they want you to be creative, like among scientists, they want you to be creative within pretty narrow boundaries. Be creative, but don’t threaten us.

Robert Sternberg:
Don’t upset our apple cart. You know, I’ve published 30 articles using the going paradigm. So be creative, but make sure it doesn’t make me look bad. But I never did that again. And so I realized that so much of creativity is not any kind of ability or set of genetics. It’s just having the guts to defy the crowd, which the kids in my children’s group didn’t want to do. They didn’t want to tell this person, you know, you’re really obnoxious and you shouldn’t be in our group. And then so Todd Lubart and I proposed a theory in the early 90s and we called it the investment theory, that people who are creative buy low and sell high.

Robert Sternberg:
In the world of ideas, they’re willing to do what other people aren’t willing to do. Propose an idea that other people think is no good, and then persuade the other people, and then once they persuaded the other people to sell high and move on to the next idea. And so I stayed with this so called investment theory for many years. And then I tend to be someone who doesn’t stay with theories forever. I mean, other people sort of come up with a theory when they’re 40 and that’s the end of it. I don’t do that. And I just. That’s not me.

Robert Sternberg:
Because the truth is every theory is wrong, including your own. And if you don’t, if you Stay with a theory. It’s like you’re saying, well I found the truth. And as soon as you think you found the truth, that’s the end of your creativity because you know it’s true. Why would you need to learn anything else? So I tend to move on, not with totally different theories, but realizing that my theory is the limiting case. So when I published an article on the triangular theory in 2018, I called it the Triangular theory. And the idea was, yes, you need to defy the crowd, but there are two things that are at least as hard to do. The hardest one is actually not defying the crowd, which is others, it’s defying yourself.

Robert Sternberg:
It’s letting go of bullies you’ve had for a long time that you’re pretty damn sure true. And that’s hard to do. I mean, look at our politics today. People are friggin frozen in place. They’re, you know, it’s like they won’t even try new ideas. They’re stuck in. Our politicians are stuck. And to be creative you have to say, hey, you know, maybe I was wrong or maybe I didn’t quite see everything.

Robert Sternberg:
And so I realized that it’s harder to defy yourself because there’s so many incentives not to. You know, people know you for thinking one way and you think if you change your mind, they’ll think, well, you know, this is, this is a flip flop or this is someone who doesn’t know what they think. And it’s hard to change your ideas because sometimes you’re invested in them, your reputation’s invested in them, your money’s invested, other people’s money’s invested. And it’s hard to change because you get entrenched that you just get so used to seeing things in a certain way. And when I just told the students in my creativity course is that if a professor like me isn’t learning as much from his students as they’re learning from him, he’s doing something wrong. Because the students have the advantage that they’re not experts so they’re not stuck in being entrenched. And finally it’s really hard to let go of ideas because they sort of become you. It’s sort of like I’m the person who proposed Theory X, you know, on divergent thinking or on something else.

Robert Sternberg:
And it sort of becomes part of yourself and it’s almost like excising a part of yourself, you know, like when you think of Reuben Feuerstein, you may or may not have heard of, but he had a program, instrumental Enrichment And I. E. Is Reuven. And Reuven is. That is. And he never let go of it. And there are other people who don’t let go of their theories or they change them in only the most minor ways, because that’s them, you know, like this is Howard Gardner’s theory or somebody else’s theory or. And it just stays the same because it’s so identified, you become personally identified with it instead of saying all theories are wrong.

Robert Sternberg:
So if I’m sticking with the same theory, I’m missing something. So you have to defy yourself. And the third thing you have to do is you have to defy what I have called the zeitgeist, which is just there’s a lot of stuff you believe that you don’t know. You believe it. It’s like the things you do every day that are just so much a part of your life that you don’t even look at them is. It couldn’t be any different. It’s like it used to be that when you meet someone, you shake hands, and nobody thought twice about it till Covid. And then you realize there’s a lot of stuff like that.

Robert Sternberg:
That’s like the air you breathe. You don’t notice it until it’s not there. So an important part of creativity is asking, what are the things I just know have to be this way? Then maybe they don’t really have to be this way. So that was my 2018 theory, and I’ve stuck with that through 2024. And as I said to you earlier, I just submitted a paper yesterday that sort of goes beyond that, that. I call it a systems theory of Creativity. I don’t know if it’s going to be accepted.

Matthew Worwood:
And we can come in our second double express. We do have to wrap this one up because we’re getting tight on time, but. But we’ll talk about that in the Future of Creativity from your perspective. I really like what you just shared, and I’m going to resist going off on multiple tangents, but I quite often find myself saying, I know I’m being annoying, right? But when I’m saying I know I’m being annoying, I’m in essence, challenging the system, right? And it is difficult. And I will tell you, when I stepped away from my administrative role, a colleague said, why are you stepping away? And I think I used the words, I need to go and be creative now. Because I always find it ironic in academia, especially in administration, I felt it very difficult to be creative. And ironically, academia, I think, has an environment where you can be incredibly creative. But then it also has an environment where you can really get stuck and you have to conform to the system because, wow, if you go against that system, it’s not just getting your hand slapped, it can really beat you down.

Matthew Worwood:
Right.

Robert Sternberg:
So I’ve been there.

Matthew Worwood:
Yeah. But interestingly enough, listening to what you’re saying and trying to now bring it into A K through 12 environment, I’ve got a question coming, I promise. But from a teacher perspective, I would challenge our teachers listening right now to say, you know, we all have our theories, right? Well, I’ve got this theory that this works, and I’ve got the theory that this student works in this way. And I’ve got the theory, well, I know if I do this, they’re going to be more engaged. And I think you’re reminding us to the fact that if you’ve been teaching 10, 20, 30 years, I’m not here to say that your theory is wrong. But consider the possibility that there are other theories for you as a teacher, as a practitioner in the classroom that you can still discover and that might ignite some passion as you’re looking, perhaps for the upcoming year. Now, one question I do have, and I do think it’s relevant to K12 education. I look at myself, I feel that I’m re entering a period of high productivity, meaning I’ve got my creative juice flowing and I’m excited and saying yes to projects and making new connections and I feel like I’ve got lots of energy.

Matthew Worwood:
I also have experienced burnout. So, you know, between 2019 to 2021, you know, and I find it ironic that we started the podcast during that year, but for the most part, I know I shut down and I became less receptive to, in essence, going and pursuing new theories or making new discoveries or challenging myself. So I just wanted to get your sense on that because I’m sure there are educators, I often say to them during the academic year, it’s January, you got midterms, maybe that might not be the moment where you do go and challenge something new. So it’s a case of maybe finding time, the right time sometimes to go and challenge your existing theories. Do you conform to that or not conform to that? That thinking or perhaps the research there can explain that a little bit better than I did.

Robert Sternberg:
Yeah, well, again, I can tell you what I tell my kids and my students that in my theory of intelligence, I said that there are these different aspects and two of them are creative and practical intelligence. And I say to students, life is a balance between Those two things that on the one hand, you want to be creative, but you can’t be creative all the time. When you take the ACT or the New York State Regions tests or the Iowa Test of Basic Skills or some set of standard. I said it’s not the time to be creative. Sometimes when you’re teaching, there’s certain things you have to cover and. And you might want creatively to spend a whole lot of time on one thing and think some of the other stuff isn’t so important. But if it’s going to be on the statewide mastery test, somehow you cover it. So there are times when the practical wins out and there are times when the creative wins out and you say, screw it, I’m going to just.

Robert Sternberg:
I really need to do things this way, and that’s what I stand for, and I’m going to do it. And I think life is just a constant kind of struggle between the two. And so you’re always kind. We have a paper on meta intelligence which is kind of balancing these things and saying, sometimes it’s time for this, sometimes time for that. You can’t be creative all the time, but if you’re never creative, then you have to find time for it. If you’re never practical, you have to find time for that. I just wanted to say one thing, though. I went into administration, I did that for almost 10 years.

Robert Sternberg:
And then I found myself in a situation where I was president of a university. And I discovered that my values were just totally at odds with the values of the place. I’m not saying mine were better. I didn’t fit. And one of the things I tell my students is the most important thing in finding a job is finding place where you fit. Just as it is in a relationship with a guy or a gal that you want to find someone who’s a good fit to you. Well, it’s the same with jobs. And every day I was realizing more and more that I wasn’t a fit to the place.

Robert Sternberg:
And they were realizing it too. So, you know, it was. The thought of moving again was, oh, my God. Not another move would just come from. I’d been a provost, the senior vice president. Now we’re going to. But I resigned and I said, you know, I just couldn’t make it work in terms of the clash between my values and the values of the place. And that’s okay.

Robert Sternberg:
You know, their values were different from mine. But it goes back to that experience in graduate school that sometimes you have to ask if you’re going through a long period where you want to be creative and you can’t, and everybody. Time you get shot down, maybe you’re in the wrong environment and it’s time to think. At first, you know, first you try to adapt. It’s what the theory, successful intelligence says. First you try to adapt. You try to change yourself to fit the environment. And then if there’s things about it you still don’t like, you try to shape the environment and make it better.

Robert Sternberg:
It’s the same with relationships, right? First you try to adapt to the other person. Then if you can, you try to shape the environment, relationship to make it better. But sometimes it just. It’s the wrong person, it’s the wrong job, it’s the wrong stream of life. And you just say, you know, I’m going to have the guts to say it’s. It’s been good for however long it’s lasted or not so good, it’s time to move on. And that’s part of creativity to environmental selection and realizing that it’s just not going to work here. And if I stay in this.

Robert Sternberg:
This situation where I can’t be creative, I’m going to just be frustrated the rest of my life, and I won’t be making the other people happy either. So I did leave and I went to Cornell.

Cyndi Burnett:
And I think that’s a great observation as well for teachers, because one of the things that I hear a lot from teachers is they’re in schools where they want to be creative with their students, but they’re also forced to read from scripts or books and be on a certain page at a certain time. And. And I think there’s a lot of schools out there that are doing great things in creative things. So if you’re listening to this, be inspired by Bob’s story and think, you know, sometimes it’s best to just pick up and move on. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just a matter of a fit. Like you mentioned, with relationships as well. Now, Matt, I don’t want to move on from this conversation, but I do want to get onto the conversation and I don’t want to miss this opportunity to talk about the future of the field, which is the second part of this double espresso.

Cyndi Burnett:
So for those of you listening, we’ve got a second episode with Dr. Sternberg, and it’s all going to be about the current state and the future state of the field of creativity and education. And we’re going to pick up where Bob was mentioning about his new theory of creativity and how that might apply to education. But for now, if you’ve enjoyed this episode and you want to share it with someone who’s interested in college admissions or intelligence and creativity, please share this with them. I’m Dr. Cindy Burnett, and my name.

Matthew Worwood:
Is Dr. Matthew Worwood.

Cyndi Burnett:
This episode was produced by Matthew Worwood and Cindy Burnett. Our podcast sponsor is Curiosity to Create, and our editor is Sam Atkins.