‘I am very motivated by frustration': A Yale creativity expert on how to turn your ideas into action

Fast Company

a day ago

BY
When scientist Zorana Ivcevic Pringle first started out in academia as an undergraduate student, she wanted 'to study interesting people.' Unfortunately, that's not a scientific term, and it carries with it a value judgement (also unscientific, as fun as it sounds). 'I started being interested in describing what creative people are like, and understanding that complexity in a creative personality,' she says. 'They seem to embody these dichotomies, things that oftentimes don't go together in most people. It grabs your attention to something really important.'
She frames creativity in her research around strength and vulnerabilities, particularly engaged in how both personality and processes feed a creative act or idea: 'How do you approach it when you have an idea? What happens with it? I became interested in what I ended up calling the process of self-regulation in creativity. And that is, how do you make yourself do it?'
Now, on the heels of launching her book The Creativity Choice (May 2025), Pringle, who is a senior research scientist at the Yale School of Medicine's Center for Emotional Intelligence, admits she was onto something, and that dichotomy she senses about creativity is endlessly inspiring and interesting, across disciplines, everywhere. 'I wanted to study people who are complex, who are doing things that are different, and who are pushing boundaries of what is possible.' The body of work she's cultivated in more than two decades of researching creative individuals and their processes is both incredibly layered and also fundamentally pedestrian. We all can relate to it, even if we don't have the last name of Bezos, Einstein, or Monet.
Creativity has a lot of fun in it. We don't talk enough about it, but it also has times that are very hard—I mean, excruciatingly hard. We encounter obstacles, as a rule. Nothing you ever try works out. That's disappointing, frustrating, overwhelming. That can be stressful. We have to deal with that and on some level accept it will happen. We have to have comfort that we can handle it somehow. I became fascinated by that.
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