Are you Creatively or Intellectually Gifted?

"This self recognition test is based on more than thirty years of immersion in counseling and

1. Developmental indicators

_____ Were you “into everything” as a child, taking things apart to see how they worked, opening things up to see what was inside, or attempting to create things that you wanted because you had to have your own personally designed model?

_____ Were you a nonconformist in your learning methods, developing your own paradigm instead?

_____ Did you accept both failure and perseverance as important?

_____ Did you stubbornly stay with your own vision rather than being tempted to follow the teacher or copy other children when presented with projects in school?

_____ Did you have to deal with with criticism and rejection from other children because you were different or “weird?”

_____ Did you grow up with family members that were creative in ways that are not conventionally associated with creativity?

2. Personality traits

_____ Do you have, as Beethoven described of himself, an “awakened imagination?”

_____ Are you driven by relentless curiosity?

_____ Do you prefer depth to breadth?

_____ Have you been consistently willing to learn unfamiliar or complicated things to implement your ideas?

_____ Are you self-motivated and undaunted by your projects, even when they become unwieldy or more time consuming than anticipated?

_____ Do you have extraordinary energy and become intensely engaged?

_____ Einstein once commented, “...I myself have no special talent [beyond] curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance...” Can you identify the less glamorous traits you have without which the actualization of your talents would not be possible?

_____ Have you felt underutilized in your field, and experienced profound disappointment when an exceptional opportunity was offered and then taken away?

_____ Are you impervious to criticism that is intended to dissuade you from the value of a creative or intellectual undertaking?

3. Intellectual creativity

_____ Are you an avid, diverse reader who is fascinated by language?

_____ Do you hungrily consume the writings of people you consider to be the great thinkers of history and our times?

_____ Are you inclined to entertaining yourself and others with inventive and witty observations, especially enhancing mundane things?

______ Do you like to do original research in areas you’re interested in?

_____ Do you like riddles, puzzles, or highly sophisticated games?

_____ Would you consider yourself a divergent thinker?

_____ Do you continually question the basis of consensus knowledge?

_____ Do you contemplate complex ideas like the unified field theory, paradox, moral relativism, or concepts in languages with no equivalent in English?

_____ Are you able to incorporate a spectrum of incongruous, multilayered feelings or opinions into an overarching view?

_____ Are you as fascinated by thought processes (like reasoning, differentiating fact from opinion, or evaluating sources of information) as you are with its products, such as knowledge, theories and conclusions?

_____ Do you like to participate in discussion forums with other thinkers who may or may not agree with your own conclusions?

_____ Are you intellectually competitive and prone to be critical of others’ ideas or conclusions?

_____ Do you make a conscious effort to avoid becoming dogmatic or rigid?

4. Artistic creativity

_____ Are your creative endeavors original and recognizably unique?

_____ Have you always been highly sensitive and reactive to sensory things, like sounds, smells, colors, shapes, textures, and environments?

_____ Do you see a visual potential overlaying an ordinary sight?

_____ Do you add creative embellishments to ordinary tasks?

_____ Are you frequently emotionally overwhelmed around music, art, or other expressions of beauty or brilliance?

_____ Do you tend to linger in museums to fully take in the works on exhibit?

_____ Are you enamored of language -- the meaning, articulation and combination of words?

_____ Are there particular themes or forms of self expression that you have concentrated on expressing?

_____ Does your work express a point of view?

_____ Are you drawn to combining sounds, colors textures or other elements that ordinarily don’t go together to create something unique and interesting?

_____ Are you fascinated by the creative process of artists and musicians you admire?

_____Has your creativity manifested in unconventional ways?

4. Process

_____ Are you spontaneous and flexible when you are in a creative state?

_____ Do you tend to slip into a “zone” when you’re doing something creative, losing track of time and completely forgetting things you were supposed to do?

_____ Do you want to shut out everything when you’re on a roll, not wanting to answer the phone or be distracted in other ways?

_____ Are you introverted, unwilling to share a work in progress?

_____ Can you suspend self-criticism until your creative outpouring is complete?

_____ Do you observe your creative process with interest in how it works, when it works, and when things typically break down for you?

_____ Have you had to develop a specialized use of language to accurately communicate your vision and explain your process to people who live in ordinary reality?

_____ If you lack the materials you’d prefer for a project, are you creative in making do with what you have?

_____ When you make a mistake, do you regard that as a creative stimulus as much as something to fix?

_____ Can you feel when a creative burst is expended and you are at a natural stopping point?

_____ Are you able to sustain your concentration alone and for years, if necessary, to develop your vision even when others don’t understand what you’re doing or think you’re “crazy?”

5. Products and outcome

_____ Do you tend to delay closure on projects because as your original vision unfolds, it tends simultaneously to evolve?

_____ Are you forever struggling to explain your ideas and your paintings, books, plays, photographs, experiments and such to people in your field and others because the meaning is beyond what you’ve created?

_____ Do you handle criticism appropriately?

_____ Have you sought out marketing strategies and resource people to get your creative work sold, published, shown in galleries, taught in classes?

_____ Do you care about the legacy you want to leave with your body of work, and if so, are you participating in shaping it even as your work is not yet completed?