Why is it that most of Google's hits on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi are all about his concept of "flow", and very few about his (much more interesting) ideas on systemic creativity?
The question, of course, is not about Google. It is about why/how an author can be 'eaten' by his own ideas, whilst other contributions remain virtually ignored by most. Doug Hofstadter mentions this problem regarding his "Gödel, Escher, Bach" book and how most people didn't quite get the key point he was trying to get across.
So here is my point: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's greatest contribution has been the least appreciated: his "map" of creativity. Asking "where" instead of "what" is creativity, Csikszentmihalyi was able back in the 1980's to propose a systemic triad of culture (domain), field (society) and individual (person) that should have transformed the entire research enterprise around creativity. But it hasn't -yet.
It will.
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