Awhile back over at Fast Company, Jennifer Miller wrote a quick synopsis about a study from BI Norwegian Business School. It seems that Professor Øyvind L. Martinsen has tried to determine the markers of a “creative” personality. He divided 481 subjects into three groups and asked them 200 questions. One group was the “baseline,” which consisted of people like lecturers or managers; the other two groups were folks generally considered to be “creative.” Mainly (I gather) students of advertising and performing artists.

Professor Martinsen says he’s found meaningful differences between creatives and non-creatives and has distilled the data down to seven elements.

You can read more about it here: “How to tell if you’re creative (hint: you might be a bit of a jerk)”.

One of my personal mantras is, “Correlation does not imply causation.” So just because some or all of these elements can apply to you does not mean that you are not creative, or that you’re not a jerk. But it is an interesting line of study, and it reminds me (at least in the immediate moment) that I should try hard to be nice as often as I can.