A personality scientist designed a simple checklist that can tell you if your creativity might be hurting your career

For all the potential benefits of mindfulness, the creative mind tends to behave in rather different ways, namely jumping from one thought to the next. If you find yourself in an imaginary thought expedition during most work meetings, or others have trouble following your train of thoughts (because you go from one thought to the next before you can even verbalize it), then you would probably benefit from being more conventional.

Innovation is the practical application of creativity. It always happens as a result of teams working together effectively to turn latent ideas into actual product and services. This is why too many creatives working together will never produce something innovative. One challenge if you love producing but not implementing ideas is to team up with people who can complement you around execution to follow-through, and deliver results. Unless you are already quite senior and influential, and have a team behind you to help you turn your ideas into actual innovations, you should not assume that your ideas are an inherent asset to the organization. In fact, a lack of creative ideas is not the main reason why so many companies struggle with creativity. Rather, it is the inability to act to turn those ideas into effective innovations — and creative people don't do much to address this challenge.

Just like any other socially desirable trait, creativity co-exists with far less valued behavioral tendencies. One such tendency is the inability to conform or follow rules. Yes, we do still applaud non-conformists who change the world and become the inspiration for many, but by definition any organization, system, or society requires most people to fit in a norm and follow the rules. This is what makes successful rebel talents so rare: they are the exception to the rule, for they have managed to defy the odds to make it. The much more mundane and less inspiring reality, however, is that most people who confront authority or have a grumpy attitude when they are told what to do struggle to succeed in their careers. And, for sure, even the most successful non-conformists had to go through stages in their lives where they played by the current rules, and even agreed to doing things they didn't want to do.

Although not all creatives are overconfident or arrogant, there has long been evidence for a positive association between creativity and narcissistic tendencies. If you love your ideas so much that you are likely to see other people's ideas as trivial or stupid, and you feel that you are not given the credit you deserve for having such brilliant thoughts, or that your colleagues and boss are making a bad mistake for ignoring your suggestions, the bad news is that this may be you. Of course, overconfidence may often be adaptive, in that it helps you persuade others that you are better than you actually are. As I argued in my latest book, this is why so many incompetent men become leaders: because being unaware of their limitations can, ironically, make those very limitations invisible to others. That said, overconfidence will also drive people to underestimate risk and make avoidable mistakes; it makes them more immune to feedback and less coachable, and when others realize that you are not as good as you think, you will be deemed arrogant and obnoxious.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is an international authority in psychological profiling, talent management, leadership development, and people analytics. He is the chief talent scientist at Manpower Group, cofounder of Deeper Signals and Metaprofiling, and professor of business psychology at both University College London and Columbia University. He has previously held academic positions at New York University and the London School of Economics and lectured at Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, London Business School, Johns Hopkins, IMD, and INSEAD. He was also the CEO at Hogan Assessment Systems. Tomas has published nine books and over 130 scientific papers (h index 58), making him one of the most prolific social scientists of his generation.