[westoncb]

Another way of looking at it: effective creativity is the result of tension between a generative process and a filtering/selecting process.

You need both, but people vary widely in how much they emphasize on or the other: too much on the filtering side, you may end up a critic, but not an artist; too little on the filtering side, you may end up a crackpot; too much on the generative side, you may never get anything done; too little on the generative side, you may never come up with something worth working on.