Education Quote by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The line lands like a buzzkill in a culture that sells genius as a personality trait and “disruption” as a lifestyle. Csikszentmihalyi is doing something deliberately unfashionable here: re-centering creativity on craft, not vibe. Calling it a “truism” is rhetorical sleight of hand. He’s not just citing a neutral fact; he’s trying to shut down a perennial fantasy that originality springs fully formed from raw talent, a good idea, or a single epiphany.

The “10 years” benchmark works less as a stopwatch than as a moral argument about seriousness. It frames creativity as a long apprenticeship inside a domain’s rules, tools, and traditions - the stuff that makes outsiders impatient because it looks like conformity. Subtext: before you can break rules in a way that matters, you have to know which rules are load-bearing. Without that immersion, novelty is often just ignorance with better branding.

Context matters. Coming from a psychologist known for “flow,” this isn’t anti-joy or anti-spontaneity; it’s a corrective to the myth that flow is merely a mindset. Flow becomes possible, and productive, when skill meets challenge - and skill is accumulated, slowly, through technical friction. The quote also carries an institutional warning to educators, managers, and TED-era motivational culture: don’t demand constant innovation from people you won’t give time to train. If you want breakthroughs, fund the boring years.