Why mastery matters and creativity shouldn’t be easy

Being creative makes us happy – that’s true – but not just because we just enjoy dreaming up new ideas and having flights of fancy. In fact, research tells us that what we really love about creativity is the daily drudgery – the slow and frequently painful trudge towards getting it done and mastering our  creative pursuit. Mihaly Csikszentmihaly (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) is the Hungarian psychologist who first coined the term flow in 1975. He describes flow as be