Creativity and Immaturity

I wonder if there is a link between creativity and immaturity. I started pondering this idea over the weekend, as my wife and I watched The Social Network. I was listening to some of the commentaries, and one thing that stuck with me was when Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Mark Zuckerberg in the movie, commented that Mark was only 19 when he made some of these poor decisions. This is a good time to point out that the movie is certainly a dramatized version of events, but the point still holds.

Maturity is sometimes thought of as when you "put your childish dreams aside" or when you start living in reality - I am a full grown man, I need to stop playing video games and get a real job. It's that realization that you need to live in the real world that sometimes is used to define maturity.

But creativity happens outside of the real world. When we imagine something, we are by definition not looking at what is. And that, by our definition, is no longer a mature view.

It makes sense to me. When I look at places that are stark and unimaginative, they seemed to be filled with so called "mature" or grounded people. Look at a church that is lifeless and still; it seems to be full of good people, but they are grounded in what is. Same thing happens in the business world - the people without imagination run things, but they can never create anything better than what is.

Certainly sometimes the issue is that creativity comes with too much immaturity - as we see in The Social Network. You have to balance the immaturity with responsibility. But we also may need to embrace our immaturity to find our imagination.