5 Pitfalls to Avoid When Judging Creativity: Looking for potential, rather than performance
4. Looking for potential, rather than performance.
If there is anything that the “genius studies” of Lewis Terman clearly demonstrated, it is that potential for greatness is often mistaken as evidence th
at the future will bring achievement and success. Terman spent decades at Stanford working the Stanford-Binet IQ test and on testing that thought would identify “geniuses” and track their success over the years. Terman hoped to be able to follow, test, and cultivate a generation of geniuses to show how to nurture special talent in children. His conception of giftedness was closely linked to academic talent, and he expected that the youngsters he identified would be successful in both school and life. His research was colored by his biased attitudes about the supposedly limited abilities of girls, many immigrants, and persons of any race but his own.
Over the decades of his studies, many of the students he followed did make impressive achievements. But, it must be admitted that many others, identified as having great potential, often did not manifest this talent through their achievements. What’s more, other children – not included in his studies — who didn’t appear to have that much going for them were able to achieve greatness, including for example, winning Nobel Prizes (which none of the “Termites” had achieved.) This gives hope to all of the rest of us “non-geniuses.”
If you want to find a creative person, look at what she has made, done, or built. If one has been creatively productive in the past, he or she will be likely to do it again. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that creative potential will imply creative productivity in the future.