The idea that the journey in creating is more personally rewarding than having reached the destination doesn't hold for all creators. I have explained it this way:
The difference between the scientist Richard Feynman and the humanitarian Florence Nightingale is the difference between a commanding motive to envision and project theories and a commanding motive to improve human welfare. Feynman was essentially an artist who used equations to “paint” pictures of the subatomic world. To him the journey of creating mattered above the arrival; to her it was the reverse. More pointedly, devising theories gripped him in inescapable thrall; her ardor was to make society better off. He was self-centered and worked alone; she was other-centered and collaborated. To him, envisioning and designing were foremost; to her, it was planning and putting into practice.
Those driven to improve human welfare will gladly give up their work for being handed the result. Conservationists who undertake an imaginative project to preserve a species must be delighted on hearing that safeguarding regulations have just been enacted, and their efforts can be called off. Rescue teams at avalanches feel similarly at seeing the buried somehow crawl out on their own. And in the event of a genie bequeathing a cure for cancer, it is hard to imagine medical researchers refusing to hear of it, preferring the chance to discover it themselves.
(Quoted from page 58 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
Keep tuned: The next post after this one will be on the motive of creating to feed one’s egotism
The difference between the scientist Richard Feynman and the humanitarian Florence Nightingale is the difference between a commanding motive to envision and project theories and a commanding motive to improve human welfare. Feynman was essentially an artist who used equations to “paint” pictures of the subatomic world. To him the journey of creating mattered above the arrival; to her it was the reverse. More pointedly, devising theories gripped him in inescapable thrall; her ardor was to make society better off. He was self-centered and worked alone; she was other-centered and collaborated. To him, envisioning and designing were foremost; to her, it was planning and putting into practice.
Those driven to improve human welfare will gladly give up their work for being handed the result. Conservationists who undertake an imaginative project to preserve a species must be delighted on hearing that safeguarding regulations have just been enacted, and their efforts can be called off. Rescue teams at avalanches feel similarly at seeing the buried somehow crawl out on their own. And in the event of a genie bequeathing a cure for cancer, it is hard to imagine medical researchers refusing to hear of it, preferring the chance to discover it themselves.
(Quoted from page 58 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
Keep tuned: The next post after this one will be on the motive of creating to feed one’s egotism
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