Thinkering Creativo ARTICULOS
Thinkering Creativo ARTICULOS
Thinkering Creativo ARTICULOS
- The articles are from selected publications written by Michael that offer some clarification and amplification of his views toward creative thinking and his vision of reality. - The creative-thinking techniques give you the extraordinary ability to focus on information in a different way as well as different ways to interpret what youre focusing on.
The Creative Thinking Habit Da Vinci, Edison & Walt Whitman Had in Common
A habit to consciously cultivate is the habit of keeping a written record of your creativity attempts in a notebook, on file cards, or in your computer. A record not only guarantees that the thoughts and ideas will last, since they are committed to paper or computer files, but it will also goad you into other thoughts and ideas. The simple act of recording his ideas enabled Leonardo Da Vinci to dwell on his ideas and improve them over time by elaborating on them. Thus, Leonardo was able to take simple concepts and work them into incredible complex inventions that were years ahead of their time, such as the helicopter, the bicycle, and the diving suit. EDISONS NOTEBOOKS
Thomas Edison organized his ideas by relentlessly recording and illustrating every step of his voyage to discovery in his 3,500 notebooks that
were discovered after his death in 1931. His strategy of keeping a written record of his work was a significant key to his genius. His notebooks got him into the following habits:
They enabled him to cross-fertilize ideas, techniques and conceptual models by transferring them from one problem to the next. For example, when it became clear in 1900 that an iron-ore mining venture in which Edison was financially committed was failing and on the brink of bankruptcy, he spent a weekend poring over his notebooks and came up with a detailed plan to redirect the companys efforts toward the manufacture of Portland cement, which could capitalize on the same model of the iron-ore company. Whenever he succeeded with a new idea, Edison would review his notebooks to rethink ideas and inventions hed abandoned in the past in the light of what hed recently learned. If he was mentally blocked working on a new idea, he would review his notebooks to see if there was some thought or insight that could trigger a new approach. For example, Edison took his unsuccessful work to develop an undersea telegraph cable variable resistance and incorporated it into the design of a telephone transmitter that adapted to the changing sound waves of the callers voice. This technique instantly became the industry standard. Edison would often jot down his observations of the natural world, failed patents, research papers written by other inventors, and ideas others had come up with in other fields. He would also routinely comb a wide variety of diverse publications for novel ideas that sparked his interest and record them in his notebooks. He made it a habit to keep a lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others had used successfully on other problems in other fields. To Edison, your idea needs to be original only in its adaptation to the problem youre working on. Edison also studied his notebooks of past inventions and ideas to use as springboards for other inventions and ideas in their own right. To Edison, his diagrams and notes on the telephone (sounds transmitted) suggested the phonograph (sounds recorded), and those notes and diagrams, in turn, suggested motion pictures (images recorded). Simple, in retrospect, isnt it? Genius usually is.
WALT WHITMANS SYSTEM Walt Whitman was another creative thinker who collected ideas to stimulate his creative potential. His journals describe an ingenious technique he developed for recording ideas. Anytime an idea would strike his imagination, he would write it down on a small slip of paper. He placed these slips into various envelopes that he titled according to the subject area each envelope contained. In order to have a place for each new idea he encountered, Whitman kept ideas in many different envelopes. Whitman, whenever he felt a need to spawn new thoughts or perspectives, would select the various envelopes pertaining to his current subject or interests. He retrieved ideas from the envelopes, randomly at times or, on other occasions, only those ideas relevant to his subject; then he would weave these ideas together as if he were creating an idea tapestry. These idea tapestries often became the foundation for a new poem or essay.
CREATE YOUR OWN IDEA COLLECTION SYSTEM 1. Collect all interesting ideas that you encounter from brainstorming sessions, ideas you read about or ideas you create. 2. Record them thematically in a notebook, in your computer, or on note cards. File them by subject (e.g. organizational improvement, sales presentations, new markets, new product ideas, etc.) in a file box. In the event you need further information about an idea, indicate the source where you found the idea. Cross reference any ideas that may fit into several different categories. Whenever you experience a problem, retrieve ideas from your file that you feel may apply to your need. Spread the ideas out before you and review them.
This section contains some articles and techniques from Michael Michalko. - The articles are from selected publications written by Michael that offer some clarification and amplification of his views toward creative thinking and his vision of reality. - The creative-thinking techniques give you the extraordinary ability to focus on information in a different way as well as different ways to interpret what youre focusing on.
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The Creative Thinking Habit Da Vinci, Edison & Walt Whitman Had in Common What Color Best Represents Your Feeling for Creativity? What I learned about Creative Thinking from Leonardo Da Vinci The Most Important Lesson Nobel Laureate Physicist Richard Feynman Learned about Creativity What I have Learned about Creative Thinking from the Wright Brothers What I Learned about Creative Thinking from Walt Disney What I Learned about Creative Thinking from Aristotle What I Learned about Creative Thinking from Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Niels Bohr What I Have Learned about Creative Thinking from Vincent van Gogh What I Learned about Creative Thinking from Michelangelo What Ive Learned about Creative Thinking from Henri Matisse Your Mind Was Once a Cathedral
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Einsteins Gift of Fantasy 10 Odd Facts about Famous Creative Geniuses The Only Thing of Consequence in Life is What You Do You Do Not See Things as They Are; You See Them as You Are If You Can Dream it, You Can Do It THOUGHT WALK How Rational is the Average Consumer? When You Cant Change Your Circumstances, Change Yourself Cognitive Laziness Inhibits Creative Thinking Gods Bed Do Corporations Really Want New Ideas? 101 Tips on How to Become More Creative What your Favorite Words Reveal about your Personality LEARN HOW TO CREATE IDEAS FROM MOTHER NATURE To be a Creative Thinker, Act like One You Cant Create Something Out of Nothing Your Words Shape the Way You Think Become a Child Again How to Communicate with Your Subconscious Mind One of the Most Common Questions I Am Asked At My Seminars How Easily False Memories are Created What Color Best Represents Your Attitude? Wierd Habits and Rituals of Famous Historical Figures ACT The Incredible Genius that America Ignored HERE IS MY DAM RESPONSE EINSTEINS NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK
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WHY ARE WE SO AFRAID OF CREATIVITY? HEATING YOUR IMAGINATION How to Get a Mind Popping Idea THE ARTIST IS A CHIMPANZEE Scratch a Genius and You Surprise a Child BRAINSTORMING SESSION ICEBREAKERS IS YOUR IDEA CRAZY ENOUGH? MICHELANGELOS MINDSET Einsteins Insight About Thinking Why Didnt You Think of That Idea? HOW LEONARDO DA VINCI GOT HIS IDEAS THOUGHT EXPERIMENT ABOUT CHOCOLATE The Art of Framing Challenges Creatively Perception Constructs Rather than Records Reality A Review of Creative Thinkering from StrategyDriven Your Habits Determine Your Character Cracking Creativity book review Pencils Washington Why the Geese Did Not Fly Why We Believe Our Own Lies Creative Thinkering by Michael Michalko Book review THINKING METAPHORICALLY How Your Mind Creates Ideas Culture of Helplessness THE IDIOCRACY THEORY DONT READ THIS
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Breaking through your creative blocks Think! Think Again!! Ideas Having Sex False Memory Thought Experiment Seven Ways to Wake up your Imagination EINSTEINS IMAGINATION LETTING GO The Twelve Things You Are Not Taught in School about Creative Thinking Why We Cannot Perceive the World THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS THAT PREVENT PEOPLE FROM BEING CREATIVE THINKERS http://blogs.psychcentral.com/creative-mind/2011/10/how-to-stop-yourcreative-thinking/ It Is Impossible Not to Make Connections Joseph Sale Interviews Michael Michalko, the Author of Creative Thinkering Becoming the Subject of Your Life An Interview with Michael Michalko about Creative Thinkering Stop Thinking About It Change the Way You Look at Things and the Things You Look at Change Walt Disneys Creative Thinking Technique When You Cant Change Your Circumstances, Change Yourself You Become What You Pretend To Be Thought Experiment Mind Reading There Is No Such Thing as Failure What Did Henry Ford Learn From Pigs That Made Him A Billionaire How to Increase a Groups Ideas 10X in Brainstorming Sessions Thought Walk
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Leonardo daVincis Ideabox The Big Bang of Creativity What is Not Speaking? Who Was This Man? The Exquisite Corpse Creative Ways to Spice Up Your Meetings Getting Published Breaking habits Attribute Analysis
Imagine you are an artist. You are asked to paint the dress of the girl in the illustration above.
1.
RED
2.
PINK
3.
YELLOW
4.
ORANGE
5.
BLUE
6.
PURPLE
7.
GREEN
8.
BROWN
9.
BLACK
10.
WHITE
You are asked to use a color to convey an emotion or feeling. (Write your answers next to the question. The answers follow at the end.) As an artist, which of the above colors would you paint the dress on the stick figure of a little girl to convey:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
A sense of depression?
7.
8.
9.
10.
For people, color is an important component of sight. Socially, color is extremely important. For example, red, green, and yellow are all used in directing traffic. Stoplights and signs are red; a green light indicates that it is safe to proceed. Yellow symbolizes the need for caution, orange alerts drivers to construction. While all these signs could be executed in black and white (for the written messages would be the same), color is used to help drivers tell the difference between types of messages. Color usage in society is prevalent in advertising, packaging, school buildings, offices and numerous other applications. Even the color of foods can influence peoples willingness to eat them. At one time, Heinz tried making strangely colored ketchup, including purple, but gave up on it because consumers didnt believe it was ketchup. Would you eat blue ketchup?
Colors are not merely descriptors. Scientific evidence shows that observing colors can affect a persons mood. The human brain associates colors with where they are seen in nature. Do you feel anxious in a yellow room? Does the color blue make you feel calm and relaxed? Artists and interior designers have long understood how color can dramatically affect moods, feelings and emotions. It is a powerful communication tool and can be used to signal action, influence mood, and cause physiological reactions. Certain colors can raise blood pressure, increase metabolism, or cause eyestrain.
There seems to be universal agreement that color associations link mental or emotional reactions with specific colors acting as a stimulus. It is as if the idea that colors elicit emotions is so innate that it does not require an explanation in order to be deemed credible. Interior designers, architects, and paint manufacturers all rely on color associations. Following are some of the most common connections color therapists have between color and specific emotions. I used the connections as answers to the thought experiment above.
ANSWERS:
1. BROWN. The color brown signifies earth and nature. Brown makes people think of home, providing them with a sense of comfort and confidence. For this reason, it gives people more of a willingness to have a conversation. Men generally like brown more than women.
2. ORANGE. Orange is a very positive color and is known to boost self-esteem. It gives people a feeling of youthfulness. It stimulates digestion and hunger. This can be
helpful for restaurants trying to sell more food or for parents trying to get a fussy child to eat their vegetables. Men are more drawn to it than red.
3. RED. As the most outrageous color, red represents power and strength. It is a stimulating color that has been shown to increase activity in the adrenal glands. While having more adrenaline can boost the sex drive and rid the mind of negative thoughts, it can also make an individual more irritable. While it affects both sexes, women tend to respond to it with more intensity. It increases the likelihood of impulsive purchases as well.
4. BLUE. Blue is the color of healing because the sight of it causes the body to produce calming chemicals. The color blue can curb an appetite. There are no foods that are naturally blue except the blueberry, so therefore, if we see the color blue we subconsciously think not to eat. People trying to lose weight may paint their rooms blue to keep them from being as hungry. Blue implies loyalty too, which is why many presidential candidates choose to wear blue ties.
5. PURPLE. Purple is the most mysterious color because it is found so rarely in nature. That is perhaps why an abundance of it is attributed to royalty. Purple is said to alleviate nervousness and fear. It is the color of spirituality and signifies someones connection with a higher power. It is also associated with creativity.
6. BLACK. Black is the absence of color meaning there are no stimulating or calming effects. For this reason, black generally makes people feel depressed. Too much exposure to black can prevent growth and change. Black consumes and hides. It evokes the underground and a sense of mourning.
7. GREEN. As the color of balance, green provides people with a feeling of harmony and relaxation. It evokes youth, nature, growth and renewal. Green is the gentlest color on the eyes and observing it can actually help to slow breathing.
8. PINK. Though it is merely a shade of red, pink actually produces the exact opposite emotion. The color pink represents sensitivity and love, and it makes people feel calm and safe. While red can be sexual, pink is associated with unselfish love.
9. YELLOW. Yellow sometimes makes people feel more fatigued and tired. It is the brightest color and therefore, when it is reflected, it is the color to irritate the eyes most. When yellow is observed, the eyes feel heavier, which imitates tiredness. It also evokes cowardice.
10. WHITE. White is certainly one of the more tranquil hues. People view white objects as pure and clean.
Its also important to note that colors often have different symbolic meanings in different cultures. For example, white is the color for weddings in western societies but for funerals in traditional Chinese culture; red is associated with rage in America but with happiness in China. In American fashion and decoration, blue is for boys while pink is for girls, which is a symbolic use of color that is not shared by many cultures.
B. Juxtaposing the smaller arc of A to the larger arc of B makes the upper figure seem smaller. The juxtaposition of the arcs creates a connection between the arcs that changes our perception about their size. We perceive the arcs in terms of thought patterns that are triggered by what is in front of us. We do not see the arcs (equal in size) as they are but as we perceive them (unequal).
In a similar way, you can change your thinking patterns by connecting your subject with something that is not related. These different patterns catch your brains processing by surprise and will change your perception of your subject. Suppose you want a new way to display expiration dates on packages of perishable food and you randomly pair this with autumn. Leaves change color in the autumn. Forcing a connection between changing colors with expiration dates triggers the idea of smart labels that change color when the food is exposed to unrefrigerated temperatures for too long. The label would signal the consumer, even though a calendar expiration date might be months away. Our notion of expiration dates was changed by making a connection with something that was unrelated (autumn) which triggered a new thought pattern which led to a new idea. In order to get original ideas, you need a way to create new sets of patterns in your mind. You need one pattern reacting with another set of patterns to create a new pattern. Recently, an engineer needed to place a large generator into an excavated area. The usual way to do this was with a heavy crane, which costs $8,000 to lease. Randomly leafing through a National Geographic magazine, he read about Eskimos and the construction of igloos. He connected igloos made of ice with his problem and came up with an ingenious solution. He trucked in blocks of ice and placed the ice in the excavated area. Next, he pushed the generator onto the ice and placed the generator over the location for it. When the ice melted, the generator settled perfectly into the location. I first learned of this connecting the unconnected thinking process from Leonardo Da Vinci who wrote how he connected the unconnected to get his creative inspiration in his notebooks. He wrote about this strategy in a mirror-image reversed script secret handwriting which he taught himself. To read his handwriting, you have to use a mirror. It was his way of protecting his thinking strategy from prying eyes. He suggested that you will find inspiration for marvelous ideas if you look into the stains of walls, or ashes of a fire, or the shape of clouds or patterns in mud or in similar places. He would imagine seeing trees, battles, landscapes, figures with lively movements, etc., and then excite his mind by forcing connections between the subjects and events he imagined and his subject. Da Vinci would even sometimes throw a paint-filled sponge against the wall and contemplate the stains. Once while thinking of new ways to transport people, he threw a paint-filled sponge against the wall which produced a scattering of irregular shapes. Trying to make sense out of the meaningless shapes, he imagined one group of shapes to resemble a rider on a horse. He perceived the bottom half of the horses feet as resembling two wheels. Thinking of a horse on wheels, then of a structure that resembles a horse on wheels, he realized people could be transported on two wheels and a frame that resembles a horse; hence, the bicycle which he invented. The metaphors that Leonardo formed by forcing connections between two totally unrelated subjects moved his imagination with a vengeance. Once he was standing by a well and noticed a stone hit the water at the same moment that a bell went off in a nearby church tower. He noticed the stone caused circles until they spread and disappeared. By simultaneously concentrating on the circles in the water and the sound of the bell, he made the connection that led to his discovery that sound travels in waves. This kind of
tremendous insight could only happen through a connection between sight and sound made by the imagination. Da Vincis knack to make remote connections was certainly at the basis of Leonardos genius to form analogies between totally different systems. He associated the movement of water with the movement of human hair, thus becoming the first person to illustrate in extraordinary detail the many invisible subtleties of water in motion. His observations led to the discovery of a fact of nature which came to be called the Law of Continuity. Da Vinci discovered that the human brain cannot deliberately concentrate on two separate objects or ideas, no matter how dissimilar, without eventually forming a connection between them. No two inputs can remain separate in your mind no matter how remote they are from each other. In tetherball, a ball is fastened to a slender cord suspended from the top of a pole. Players bat the ball around the pole, attempting to wind its cord around the pole above a certain point. Obviously, a tethered ball on a long string is able to move in many different directions, but it cannot get away from the pole. If you whack at it long enough, eventually you will wind the cord around the pole. This is a closed system. Like the tetherball, if you focus on two subjects for a period of time, you will see relationships and connections that will trigger new ideas and thoughts that you cannot get using your usual way of thinking. This is what happened to NASA engineer James Crocker when the Hubble telescope failed and embarrassed NASA. In the shower of a German hotel room, NASA engineer James Crocker was contemplating the Hubble disaster while showering and absentmindedly looking at the adjustable shower head that could be extended and adjusted in various ways for personal comfort and cleanliness to the users height. He made the connection between the shower head and the Hubble problem and invented the idea of placing corrective mirrors on automated adjustable arms that could reach inside the telescope and adjust it to the correct position. His idea turned the Hubble from a disaster into a NASA triumph. It is not possible to think unpredictably by looking harder and longer in the same direction. When your attention is focused on a subject, a few patterns are highly activated in your brain and dominate your thinking. These patterns produce only predictable ideas no matter how hard you try. In fact, the harder you try, the stronger the same patterns become. If, however, you change your focus and think about something that is not related, different, unusual patterns are activated. If one of these newer patterns relates to one of the first patterns, a connection will be made. This connection will lead to the discovery of an original idea or thought. This is what some people mistakenly call divine inspiration or out of the blue. DuPont developed and manufactured Nomex, a fire-resistant fiber. Its tight structure made it impervious to dye. Potential customers (it could be used in the interior of airplanes) would not buy the material unless DuPont could manufacture a colored version. A DuPont chemist read an article about gold mining and how the mines were constructed. This inspired the chemist to compare Nomex to a mine shaft in a gold mine, a subject that had nothing to do with Nomex. What is the connection between a tight structure and a mine shaft? To excavate minerals, miners dig a hole into the earth and use props to keep the
hole from collapsing. Expanding on this thought, the chemist figured out a way to chemically prop open holes in Nomex as it is being manufactured so it could later be filled with dyes. In nature, a gene pool that is totally lacking in variation would be totally unable to adapt to changing circumstances. In time, the genetically encoded wisdom would convert to foolishness, with consequences that would be fatal to the species survival. A comparable process operates within us as individuals. We all have a rich repertoire of ideas and concepts that enable us to survive and prosper. But without any provision for the variation of ideas, our usual ideas become stagnate and lose their advantages. For this variation to be truly effective it must be blind. When we use our imagination to develop new ideas, those ideas are heavily structured in predictable ways by the properties of existing categories and concepts. We have not been taught how to process information by connecting remotely-associated subjects through trial and error. This is true for inventors, artists, writers, scientists, designers, businesspeople, or everyday people fantasizing about a better life. DaVincis thinking process provides a means of producing blind variations of ideas through the use of unrelated stimuli, such as random words, random objects, pictures, magazines and newspapers to produce a rich variety of unpredictable ideas. CONNECTING THE UNCONNECTED The random object technique generates an almost infinite source of new patterns to react with the old patterns in your mind. Random words are like pebbles being dropped in a pond. They stimulate waves of associations and connections, some of which may help you to a breakthrough idea. There are several ways to select a random object. You can retrieve random words from a dictionary by opening it, by chance, at any page, closing your eyes and randomly putting your finger on a word. If the word is not a noun continue down the list to the first noun, Another way is to think of a page number (page 22) and then think of a position of the word on that page (say the tenth word down). Open the dictionary to page 22 and proceed to the tenth word down. If the word is not a noun continue down the list until you reach the first noun. You can use any other resource (e.g., magazine, newspapers, books, telephone yellow pages, etc.). Close your eyes and stab your finger at a page. Take the noun closest to your finger. EXAMPLE: I usually retrieve five random words when I use this technique. Suppose our challenge is to improve the automobile. The group of random words we blindly drew from the Random Words list are: nose Apollo 13
soap dice electrical outlet (1) LIST CHARACTERISTICS. Work with one word at a time. Draw a picture of the word to involve the right hemisphere of your brain and then list the characteristics of the words. Think of a variety of things that are associated with your word and list them. For example, some of the characteristics of a nose are: Different shapes and sizes Sometimes decorated with pins and jewels Has two nostrils Can be repaired easily if broken Hair inside Decays with death (2) FORCE CONNECTIONS. Make a forced connection between each characteristic and the challenge you are working on. In forcing connections between remote subjects, metaphorical-analogical thinking opens up new pathways of creative thinking. Ask questions such as: - How is this like my problem? - What if my problem were a? - What are the similarities? -.is like the solution to my problem because? - How like an idea that might solve my problem? EXAMPLE. Connecting a nose has two nostrils with improving the car triggers the idea of building a car with two separate power sources; a car with battery or electric power for city driving and liquid fuel for long distances. (3) WHAT IS ITS ESSENCE? What is the principle or essence of your random word? Can you build an idea around it? For example, the essence of a nose might be smell. Forcing a connection between smell and improving the automobile inspires the idea of
incorporating a cartridge in the auto during manufacturing that warns the driver of malfunctions with various odors. If you smell orange blossoms, for example, its time to have your brakes checked, or if you smell cinnamon, you might have a gasoline leak and so on. For each random word, list the principle or essence, characteristics, features and aspects and force connections with the challenge. Another example is derived from the random word Apollo 13. Astronauts used the LEM as an emergency alternative power source in Apollo 13 in order to return to earth. Connecting this thought with the automobile led to the re-design of the automobile engine so that it can be used as an emergency power generator for the house during power failures. E.g., plug the house into the car. (4) CREATE MANY CONNECTIONS. When using the Random Word list, use all five words in the group and force as many connections as possible. Allow yourself five minutes for each word when you try it. Five minutes should be ample time to stimulate ideas. You should find that long after the fixed time period of five minutes, further connections and ideas are still occurring. ROULETTE Imagine that you are invited to play roulette with someone elses money. You can keep your winnings but your losses are paid for you. Its a game of chance you can not lose. You can never be sure of winning on any particular bet, but you know that if you played long enough, you would win, sooner or later. Chances are you would play as often as possible despite the unpredictability of the game. You would play as often as you could, in order to increase your chance of winning. Using this model, it is possible to see what can be done about randomly connecting unrelated subjects in thinking. The first step is to be aware that there is the possibility of this thinking strategy. The second step is to learn how to do it. The third step is to use this strategy as often as you can and to get rid of any inhibitions which interfere with your using it. The more times you use it and the more different ways you use it, the more you increase your chances of coming up with original ideas and creative solutions to problems.
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The Most Important Lesson Nobel Laureate Physicist Richard Feynman Learned about Creativity
If you survey the history of science, it is apparent that most individuals who have created radical innovations did not do so simply because they knew more than others. One of the
most important experiences Noble laureate Richard Feynman had in his life was reading a copy of James Watsons typescript of what was to become his famous book, The Double Helix, about his discovery, together with Francis Crick, of the structure of DNA. Feynman was a highly acclaimed physicist who had become unproductive and began to believe he had run out of ideas. The discovery Feynman made was that Watson had been involved in making such a fundamental advance in science, and yet he had been completely out of touch with what everybody else in his field was doing. As told in Watsons classic memoir, The Double Helix, it was a tale of boundless ambition, impatience with authority and disdain, if not contempt, for received opinion. A goodly number of scientists, Watson explained, are not only narrow-minded and dull but also just stupid. Feynman wrote one word, in capitals: DISREGARD on his notepad when he read that. This word became his motto. That, he said, was the whole point. That was what he had forgotten, and why he had been making so little progress. The way for thinkers like himself to make a breakthrough was to be ignorant of what everybody else was doing and make their own interpretations and guesses. Just trying to keep up with his field had suppressed his own sources of inspiration, which were in his own solitary questions and examinations. This, indeed, is the fate of most research in most disciplines, to make the smallest, least threatening, possible addition to current knowledge. Anything more would be presumptuous, anything more might elicit the fatal Dont you know what so-and-so is doing from the established experts and dismissed as some off-the-wall speculation not serious work. So Feynman stopped trying to keep up with what others were doing or compete with other theorists at their own game and went back to his roots, comparing experiment with theory, making guesses that were all his own. He called this the most important lesson in his life. Thus he became creative again, as he had been when he had just been working things out for himself, before becoming a famous physicist. While this is an important lesson for science, it is a supreme lesson for any discipline where current knowledge can be dominated by theories that are simply incoherent. I have always been intrigued by the paradox of expertise. It seems that the more expert one becomes in an area of specialization, the less creative and innovative that person becomes. The paradox is that people who know more, see less; and the people who know less, see more. What is it that freezes the experts thought and makes it difficult to consider new things that deviate from their theories? Look at the illustration of 17 figures transforming from a male to female.
When test subjects are shown the entire series of drawings one by one, their perception of this intermediate drawing is biased according to which end of the series they started from. Test subjects who start by viewing a picture that is clearly a man are biased in favor of continuing to see a man long after an objective observer (an observer who has seen only a single picture) recognizes that the man is now a woman. Similarly, test subjects who start at the woman end of the series are biased in favor of continuing to see a woman. Once an observer has formed an imagethat is, once he or she has developed an expectation concerning the subject being observedit influences future perceptions of the subject. Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., believed the marketing experts who thought the idea of a personal computer absurd, as he said, there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry, was ridiculed by every scientist for his revolutionary liquid-fueled rockets. Even the New York Times chimed in with an editorial in 1921 by scientists who claimed that Goddard lacked even the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high school science classes. If we experience any strain in imagining a possibility, we quickly conclude its impossible. This principle also helps explain why evolutionary change often goes unnoticed by the expert. The greater the commitment of the expert to their established view, the more difficult it is for the expert to do anything more than to continue repeating their established view. It also explains the phenomenon of a beginner who comes up with the breakthrough insight or idea that was overlooked by the experts who worked on the same problem for years. Think of all the delivery experts in the post office and UPS who believed affordable overnight was not possible and doomed beginner Fred Smiths enterprise, Federal Express, to failure. There is also a tendency to assimilate new data into pre-existing images. In the early 1900s, Psychologist, Cheves W. Perky, demonstrated this principle in several experiments. She would ask a group of subjects to form a mental image of a banana, and to mentally project it on a blank wall. She then surreptitiously projected a very dim slide of a banana. Anyone coming into the room sees the slide immediately, but the subjects did not. Perky claimed that the subjects incorporated the slide into their mental image of a banana. Stateof-the-art experiments have borne out what is now called the Perky effect: holding a mental image interferes with perception and understanding. What happened in this experiment is what happens in real life; despite ambiguous stimuli, people form some sort of tentative hypothesis about what they see. The longer they are exposed to this blurred image, the greater confidence they develop in this initial and perhaps erroneous impression, so the greater the impact this initial hypothesis has on subsequent perceptions. This is why experts always try to assimilate new insights, ideas and concepts into their view. Their mental image of the established view interferes with their perception and understanding of new ideas and concepts. In the case of the Perky experiment with the slide of a banana, the students did not see the slide. In the case of real life, physicists could not see Einsteins theory of relativity because of their established, accepted view. For years,
they tried to incorporate his view into the established view without success. As these physicists died, they were replaced with younger ones who were unprejudiced by the older established views and were able to comprehend and appreciate Einsteins theory. World-renowned physicist, Professor Freeman Dyson, has been described as a force-ofnature intellect and a visionary who has reshaped scientific thinking with his skepticism about theories that are based on chains of inferences. One of his humorous examples is about an expert who has an established theory about the danger of boxes and their effect on human life and the environment. The theory is that boxes might be harmful and the use of boxes should be regulated. Now, suppose that I leave a box on the floor, and my wife trips on it, falling against my son, who is carrying a carton of eggs, which then fall and break. The experts approach to an event like this would be that the best way to prevent the breakage of eggs would be to outlaw leaving boxes on the floor. As silly as this example is, it is analogous to what is happening in the world of global warming. The chief difference is that in the case of atmospheric CO2 and climate catastrophe, the chain of inference is longer and less plausible, according to Dyson, than in the example. Dysons impression about climate change is that the experts are deluded because they have been studying the details of climate models for 30 years and they have come to believe the computer models are real. After 30 years they have lost the ability to think outside their models. Make your own guesses, experiences and interpretations of your experiences to shape your own beliefs and concepts about your world. This is the lesson Feynman called the most important of his life.
What I have Learned about Creative Thinking from the Wright Brothers
The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, battled depression and family illness before starting the bicycle shop that would lead them to experimenting with flight. They were competing against the best engineering and scientific minds in America at the time, who were all well financed and supported by the government and capital investors to make the first airplane. Samuel Pierpont Langley was the leading government funded scientist because of his education and engineering experience. Langley and his assistants studied the problem of flight, consulted with experts around the world, researched the field comprehensively and
finally produced the blueprint of his airplane. He bought the finest material and hired the best available craftsmen to build his airplane. Finally on December 8, 1903 with much attention and fanfare from the national media and politicians, he launched his flying machine on the Potomac. It plummeted directly into the river. It was a colossal failure.
Nine days later, Orville and Wilbur Wright got the first plane off the ground. Why did these bicycle mechanics succeed when a famous scientist failed? It was because Langley thought reproductively and only considered what great thinkers thought about how to manufacture a manmade machine that would fly and had hired experts to execute his theoretical concepts without doing a series of trial and errors. Studying the Wrights diaries, you see that insight and execution are inextricably woven together. Over years, as they solved problems like wing shape and wing warping, they made several mistakes that produced unintended results. They recorded and studied these unintended results which inspired several adjustments, all of which involved a small spark of insight that led to other insights. Their numerous mistakes led to unexpected alternative ideas which, in turn, led to the numerous discoveries that made flight possible. The lesson the Wright brothers taught me was to create by acting, by doing, by going through the motions and discovering what doesnt work and what does through trial and error. Langley, on the other hand, had been educated to think critically and judgmentally and to avoid failure at all cost. He imagined strong reasons for inaction until, in his mind, it was not possible to fail. Consequently, he spent a fortune on study and months of planning and designing his prototype before he made an attempt. The Wright brothers did not believe that failure was something to be avoided at all costs. They embraced failure as a way to succeed. Whenever they attempted to do something and failed, they ended up doing something else. They realized that you cannot fail, you can only produce results. What counted was what you did with the
results. Rather than judging some result as a failure, ask Why did it not work as I thought it should? What have I learned about what doesnt work?, Can this explain something that I didnt set out to explain?,What can I do with these results?, and What have I discovered that I didnt set out to discover? Answering these questions about their results is what gave the Wrights the creative insights they needed to succeed. It is the same with everything in life. Before we are educated, our nature is to act spontaneously and produce results without fear. As an infant, you learned how to walk by trial and error. The first time you made the effort, you fell down and returned to crawling. You ignored your fears about falling and learned from the results you had produced. You stood up again and again and fell again and again. Eventually you stood with a wobble and then another fall. Finally, you walked upright. Suppose as infants we had learned to fear failure and avoid mistakes before attempting to walk. Many of us would still be crawling around on all fours.
Walt Disney was a high school dropout who was fired from his first job on a newspaper because he lacked imagination. Over the next few years, he suffered several business disasters and bankruptcy. He overcame his personal and financial challenges by using his imagination to create an entertainment empire that has touched the hearts, minds and emotions of all of us. I learned imagineering from Walt Disney. The term Imagineering combines the words imagination and engineering and basically means engineering your dreams and fantasies back to earth into something realistic and possible. This enabled him to transform the dreams, fantasies and wishes of his imagination into concrete reality. Disneys imagineering strategy involved exploring something using three different perceptual positions. Imagineering synthesizes three different strategies: the dreamer, the realist, and the critic. A dreamer and realist can create things but find that a critic helps to evaluate and refine the final products.
DREAMER. A dreamer spins innumerable fantasies, wishes, outrageous hunches and bold and absurd ideas without limit or judgment. Nothing is censored. Nothing is too absurd or silly. All things are possible for the dreamer. To be the dreamer, ask: If I could wave a magic wand and do anything I want what would I create? How would it look? What could I do with it? How would it make you feel? What is the most absurd idea I can conceive? REALIST. The realist imagineers the dreamers ideas into something realistic and feasible. He would try to figure out how to make the ideas work and then sort them out in some meaningful order. To be the realist, ask: How can I make this happen? What are the features and aspects of the idea? Can I build ideas from the features or aspects? What is the essence of the idea? Can I extract the principle of the idea? Can I make analogicalmetaphorical connections with the principle and something dissimilar to create something tangible? How can I use the essence of the idea to imagineer a more realistic one? CRITIC. The critic reviews all the ideas and tries to punch holes in them by playing the devils advocate. To be the critic, ask: How do I really feel about it? Is this the best I can do? What can make it better? Does this make sense? How does it look to a customer? A client? An expert? A user? Is it worth my time to work on this idea? Can I improve it? Suppose a person wants a better way to keep her plants watered. The dreamer might suggest teaching the plants how to talk, so they can tell you when they are dry. The realist imagineers this into developing a fake bird on a probe that you stick into the soil. When the soil gets dry, the bird chirps. The realist refines the idea by exploring various sensors and lithium-powered computer chips. Finally the critic evaluates the idea. Following is another example: Suppose your challenge is to improve morale at work. Dreamer Here are three ideas from the dreamer:
Create a happy pill that makes people feel happy and positive. Provide them free to employees. Pay people to stay at home. Give everyone a company car of their choice.
Realist: Study the ideas and try to work them into something practical. Examine the principle and then try to create metaphorical-analogical connections with something in your experience.
Happy pill. The essence of this idea is to improve an employees attitude. How can this be made into a benefit? How are attitudes adjusted? o Ideas. Bring in motivational speakers to speak during catered in-house lunches. Bring in a masseur once a week to give back massages. Bring in
a facilitator to give attitude adjustment exercises and produce role playing skits. Encourage employees to take evening or weekend courses in art, sculpture, crafts, woodworking, creative writing and so on. Pay the tuition and provide a room where employees can display their creative products. Have each employee bring in an object for their desk that symbolizes something important about them. E.g., a crystal ball represents forwardlooking vision, jumper cables to represent a person who jump starts others, a can of WD-40 representing someone who is called upon to do many different things, etc.
Pay people to stay at home. The essence of this idea is at home. What do people do when they stay home? They work on their house, household projects, remodeling, painting, landscaping, and gardening. How can this be made into a benefit?
o
Ideas. Offer the employees the services of a handyman as a benefit. Employee pays for materials; employer pays the handyman to fix sinks, hang wallpaper, and so on. Provide the services of a real estate consultant who will offer suggestions on how employees can upgrade their houses and property to increase the value of their assets.
Company car. The essence of this idea is to provide something related to cars or transportation. What are some aspects of cars that can be engineered into ideas?
o
Ideas. Make a fiscal arrangement with a youth group to come once a week and wash all the employee cars at the companys expense. The cause should be a tax deductible one. Create an incentive system where points are awarded for exceptional performance. When so many points are accrued, award the employee with a gift certificate for gasoline or routine maintenance from a local garage. Make a company car available for employees to use while their cars are being serviced or disabled. Provide a company designated driver for Friday and Saturday evenings. Employees whove imbibed too much can call the driver. The driver drives them home and then drives them back to their car the next day. TEAMWORK
Disney used the same three strategies to keep his staff coordinated in their thinking on a particular project. He moved the ideas around three rooms. Each room had a different function. Room 1 was the Dreamer room, Room 2 was the Realist room and Room 3 was the Critic room. The critics room was called the sweat box, by the employees. It was a small room under the stairs where the whole team would review the ideas with no-holds barred. The cycle always involved three rooms. Sometimes the idea would return to Room 1 to allow for further work. The usual outcome was that either an idea did not survive Room 3 the critics room and was abandoned, or if it met with silence, it was ready for production.
Aristotle, ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, was one of the greatest intellectual figures of Western history. His thinking strategies were responsible for producing some of the greatest advances in human thought. Our modern society and education have tended to focus more on the discoveries resulting from these strategies than on the mental processes through which the discoveries were made. We learn about great ideas and we learn the names of the creative geniuses, but we are seldom taught about the mental processes or creative thinking techniques creative geniuses used to look at the same things as the rest of us and see something different. We learn who got the ideas, but not how. This article is about what I learned about the importance of using words to shape your thinking from Aristotle. In his book, On Interpretation, Aristotle described how words and chains of words were powerful tools for thought that both reflected and shaped his thinking. His ability to record and express his ideas and discoveries was as important as his ability to make them. Aristotle believed that the words and chains of words that we use in framing a problem play a significant role in the way we approach problems. Consider the following problem: Water lilies double in area every twenty-four hours. On the first day of summer, there is one water lily on the lake. Sixty days later, the lake is completely covered with water lilies. On which day is the lake half covered? The words double, twenty-four, one, on which day, and sixty coax most people to divide the sixty days by two and propose the thirtieth day as the solution, but since the lilies increase in area geometrically, this is incorrect. The lilies cover half the pond on the next-to-last day. The word structure of the problem influences us to come up with the incorrect answer. THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: The figure below is a square defined by four dots. A square is a rectangle with four equal sides and four 90-degree angles. Your challenge is to move 2
dots and create a square twice as big as the one defined by the dots as they are presently arranged. The solution is at the end of the article.
Thought is fluid. When you frame a problem in words, you crystallize your thoughts. Words give articulation and precision to vague images and hazy intuitions. But a crystal is no longer fluid and committing yourself to the first words that come to mind may disrupt your thought process. CHANGE THE WORDS. A simple change of words or the order of words in a problem statement will stimulate your imagination by adding new dimensions of meaning. Consider the statement Two hundred were killed out of six hundred, as compared to Four hundred were spared out of six hundred. A few years back, Toyota asked employees for ideas on how they could become more productive. They received few suggestions. They reworded the question to: How can you make your job easier? They were inundated with ideas. Examine your problem statement, identify the key words, and change them five to ten times to see what results. Using different words will lead you to think of different things. One of the easiest words to change is the verb. Suppose you want to improve your communication skills. Look at the changing perspectives as the verb is changed in the following: In what ways might I improve my communication skills? In what ways might I refresh my communication skills? In what ways might I develop my communication skills? In what ways might I transform..? In what ways might I complement.? In what ways might I prepare.?
In what ways might I acquire..? In what ways might I vary..? In what ways might I spotlight...? PLAYING WITH VERBS AND NOUNS. Playing with verbs and nouns encourages you to think of perspectives that you would probably not think of spontaneously. Try changing the nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns in your problem statement. For example, a problem might be How to sell more bottles? Changing the verbs into nouns and nouns into verbs makes this into How to bottle more sales? Bottling sales now suggests looking for ways to close sales, instead of ways to sell more bottles. The problem How to improve customer relations? becomes How to customize related improvements? This new perspective leads one to consider customizing products and services for customers, customizing all relevant aspects of the customer relations department, and so on. Another way to change your perspective is to substitute an antonym for the noun. If your problem is How to increase sales?, convert sales to its antonym expenditure. The new line of speculation now becomes one of spending more to get more: Should we budget more money in our sales budget? Should we sell higher quality products? Should we buy more advertising? And so on. TRANSPOSE THE WORDS. One of Aristotles favorite ways to test a premise was what he called convertibility. He felt that if a premise were true than the negative premise should be convertible. For example, if every pleasure is good, some good must be pleasure. By simply transposing words, you achieved a different perspective. Sometimes changing the order of words in a problem statement will create a verbal-conceptual chain that may trigger a different perspective. In the following illustration, words were arranged in two different series, A and B, and subjects were asked to solve certain situations. When skyscraper was listed first, subjects tended to come up architectural concepts, and when prayer was transposed with skyscraper and listed first, it increased the likelihood of a religious direction. SERIES A SKYSCRAPER PRAYER TEMPLE CATHEDRAL SERIES B PRAYER SKYSCRAPER CATHEDRAL TEMPLE
To change the order, transpose the words in your problem. Following are some examples: In what ways might I get a promotion? To: In what ways might I promote myself? In what ways might I advertise my T-shirts? In what ways might I use my T-shirts to advertise? In what ways might I learn how to use the Internet? In what ways might I use the Internet to learn more? How can I make more money? How can my money make more? A priest asks his bishop if it is okay if he smokes while he prays. The bishop is disgusted and says, No, that would be profane. Another priest asks the bishop if it is okay to pray while he smokes. The bishop replies Of course, my son, you may pray during any human activity. A very simple change in the way something is looked at can have a profound effect. One of the most effective medical discoveries of all time came about when Edward Jenner transposed his problem from why people got small pox to why dairymaids apparently did not. From the discovery that harmless cowpox gave protection against deadly smallpox came vaccination and the end of smallpox as a scourge in the western world. KEY WORDS AND WORD CHAINS. According to Aristotle, words are sounds that become symbols of mental experience through the process of association. The most striking characteristic of the poetry of Shakespeare and Milton are the words they chose to build up a chain of associations in the readers mind. The effect of their masterpieces was produced not so much by what they expressed, as by what they suggested, not so much by the ideas they conveyed, as by other ideas which were remotely connected with them. In an atomic pile, a chain reaction comes about when a particle splits off from one atom nucleus and then collides with another atom nucleus and dislodges a second particle which, in turn, collides with a second nucleus. If the mass of material is large enough, the chain reaction becomes an explosion. So it is with words. One new word can set off a reaction when it collides with another, and a sort of creative chain reaction follows. (1) Ask yourself the questions: What is the theme of my problem at this point in time? What one word describes the current problem or situation Im dealing with right now? (2) Write down the key word at the top of a page of paper.
(3) Then make a list of words that pop into your mind in connection with this word. Dont think about it. Let the words flow spontaneously in a free-association manner. Let one word trigger another and so on. Continue this for a few minutes. (4) Read over your word chain and write down your reactions and comments. (5) Look for a particular theme or issue that keeps recurring. These themes are worth exploring in terms of significance to the problem. Also, if a particular word evokes a strong emotional reaction, its worth exploring. A Swiss insurance company wanted an idea that would make them stand out from the other providers. Their theme was to provide what other providers are not. The one word they felt described the situation was PROTECTION. Following are some of the words they freeassociated from PROTECTION. Security Health Accidents Weather Falling Cars Icy roads Blizzards Vaccination Many of the words were weather-related and the theme they decided to pursue was how to protect our insured from bad weather. This inspired their idea. The insurance company created a service to alert their policy holders with text messaging of inclement weather that might impact driving conditions, like ice and snow, rain, severe thunderstorms, and heavy winds. This unique texting service uses weather reports from the National Meteorological Institute to keep their subscribers up to date on the driving conditions in the area. They expect to evaluate the number of accidents with their policy holders who get this service and compare it to the average number of accidents per capita of people who have other insurance carriers. SOLUTION FOR THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: The trick is the word square. The definition of the word square biases your thinking and diminishes your capacity to see the right answer. Most people try to solve it by keeping the sides of the larger square parallel
with the smaller one. That wont work. But, if you rephrase the problem and rethink the illustration, you might figure out that a diamond is a square with a point. Then by connecting one diagonal and then moving the two other dots to make the remainder of the points, youve got a square twice as large as the original one.
What I Learned about Creative Thinking from Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Niels Bohr
Niels Henrik David Bohr was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He is considered to the father of Quantum Physics. Niels Bohr once said that, one day, he was looking at a friend who had done something wrong, when he realized he could not look at his friend in the light of love and in the light of justice simultaneously. The two were totally incompatible. He then went on to speculate that there must be an analogue to this in physics, in which you could not look at the same thing from two different perspectives simultaneously. This insight became the foundation for his famous discovery of the principle of complementarity. This is the idea that particles could be separately analyzed as having several contradictory, and apparently mutually exclusive, properties (an example being the wave-particle duality of light, where light can either behave as a particle or as wave, but not simultaneously as both).
Albert Rothenberg, a noted researcher on the creative process, has extensively studied the use of opposites in the creative process. He was intrigued by Bohrs ability to imagine two opposite or contradictory ideas, concepts or images existing simultaneously. Bohr demonstrated that if you hold opposites together, then you suspend your thought and your mind moves to a new level. The suspension of thought allows an intelligence beyond thought to act and create a new form. The swirling of opposites creates the conditions for a new point of view to bubble free from your mind. Rothenberg identified this process as Janusian thinking, a process named after Janus, a Roman God who has two faces, each looking in the opposite direction. Janusian thinking is the ability to imagine two opposites or contradictory ideas, concepts, or images existing simultaneously. Imagine, if you will, your mother existing as a young baby and old woman simultaneously, or your pet existing and not existing at the same time. Rothenberg found that other geniuses as well resorted to paradoxical thinking quite often in the act of achieving original insights. Albert Einstein, for example, was looking for an example in nature that would allow him to bring Newtons theory of gravitation into the theory of relativity, the step making it a general theory would have objects in motion and at rest simultaneously. He was able to imagine this, but to better understand the nature of this paradox, he constructed an analogy that reflected the essence of the paradox. An observer, Einstein posited, who jumps off a house roof and releases any object at the same time, will discover that the object will remain, relative to the observer, in a state of rest. The unique feature of this analogy was that the apparent absence of a gravitational field arises even though gravitation causes the observers accelerating plunge. This analogy and its unique feature inspired his insight that led him to arrive at the general theory of relativity. This insight, Einstein said, was the happiest moment of his life. I learned the value of thinking in terms of simultaneous opposites from Niels Bohr. Bohrs quote, The opposite of fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth, inspired me to always think of opposites when looking for creative ideas and solutions to a problem. Once in a heated debate over how electrons can appear in one place and then in another without any traveling in between, he declared how wonderful it was that they have met with a paradox. For now they can make intellectual progress. Consider how Louis Pasteur discovered the principle of immunology by discovering the paradox. Some infected chickens survived a cholera bacillus. When they and uninfected chickens were inoculated with a new virulent culture, the uninfected chickens died and the infected chickens survived. In seeing the unexpected event of the chickens survival as a manifestation of a principle, Pasteur needed to formulate the concept that the surviving animals were both diseased and not-diseased at the same time. This prior undetected infection had therefore kept them free from disease and protected them from further infection. This paradoxical idea that disease could function to prevent disease was the original basis for the science of immunology. I learned to convert a subject into a paradox and then find a useful analogy. For example, foundries clean forged metal parts by sandblasting them. The sand cleans the parts but the
sand gets into the cavities and is time consuming and expensive to clean. The paradox is that the particles must be hard in order to clean the parts and at the same time not hard in order to be removed easily. An analogue of particles which are hard and not hard is ice. One solution is to make the particles out of dry ice. The hard particles will clean the parts and later turn into gas and evaporate. Following are specific guidelines for solving problems based on this thinking strategy which include creating a paradox, finding an analog and using the unique feature of the analog to trigger original ideas. THOUGHT EXPERIMENT. A CEO noted that when his high-tech company was small, people would often meet spontaneously and informally. Out of these meetings came their best ideas. With the companys rapid growth, these informal meetings (and the number of good ideas) declined. He tried the usual ways to stimulate creativity (meetings, dinners, parties, roundtables, etc.), but they did not generate novel ideas. He wanted to re-create the spontaneous creative environment. 1. PARADOX. Convert the problem into a paradox. The question to ask is: What is the opposite or contradiction of the problem? And then imagine both existing at the same time. One of the things that distinguishes the vision of genius is its curious relationship to contraries. EXAMPLE: The paradox of the companys situation was that unless the gatherings were unorganized, they wouldnt produce novel ideas. 2. SUMMARIZE THE PARADOX INTO TWO OR THREE WORDS. The summary should capture the essence and paradox of the problem. The summary should usually include an adjective and a noun. Some examples: Sales target Focused Desire Different level employees Balanced Confusion Seasonal sales cycles Connected Pauses Birth control Dependable Intermittency Nature Rational Impetuousness
EXAMPLE: In our example, the CEO summarized his paradox as Unorganized Gatherings. 3. ANALOGUE. Find an analogy that reflects the essence of the paradox. Think of as many analogies as you can and select the most suitable.
EXAMPLE: Our CEO found a suitable analogy in nature. He thought of herring gulls who are very unorganized scavengers, but effective survivors. 4. UNIQUE FEATURE. What is the unique feature or activity of the analog? Creative ideas often involve taking unique features from one subject and applying them to another. John Hopfield was a physicist who knew a lot about spin glass, which are magnetic substances in which the atoms have a spin and interact in either a positive or negative way with each other. Hopfield discovered that the brain is composed of neurons that are either on or off and either excite or inhibit one another. He took a set of unique features from spin glass and applied them to the brain, thereby creating his famous neural network theory. EXAMPLE: In our example, the CEO determined that the unique feature of his analogy is scavenging. The gulls gather for an easy meal when fishermen throw unwanted fish and fish parts back into the sea. 5. EQUIVALENT. Use an equivalent of the unique feature to trigger new ideas. EXAMPLE: The equivalent of this unique feature might be to have people come together for convenient meals at attractive prices. 6. BUILD INTO A NEW IDEA. The CEO decided to serve inexpensive gourmet food in the company cafeteria. By subsidizing the cost of the gourmet food, the CEO encouraged employees to gather there (much like the herring gulls drawn to the fishermens free food) to meet informally, mingle and exchange ideas. These informal unorganized gatherings worked and the ideas began to flow again. A few years ago I was in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, a small town where many buildings were vacated when the steel industry declined. But there was one old abandoned factory doing a tremendous business. Their product? Placebos. For almost any drug on the market, they produce an inert replica: round pink pills, triangular red ones, blue ovals, yellow tablets, the entire range. The irony is that the drug companies have built research lab upon research lab hoping to discover new products, while the placebos are made in an abandoned factory with no research labs (and no lawyers) because they have one product, no side effects, and no patents. The paradox is that they are selling a product that is not a drug that works like the drug that people are prescribed. The paradox could be summarized as counterfeit reality. They work remarkably well. How and why they work is still a mystery. In another example of paradoxical thinking, the city of Troy, Michigan was forced to make personnel and city services cuts due to a struggling economy and a 20% loss in city revenue due to the drop in property values. The public library was among the city services that would get cut if a tax increase for additional operating funds didnt pass. The tax increase didnt pass and there was no organized group defending the library, and a highly-organized anti-tax group, Troy Citizens United, rallied against the proposed tax increase. The city then proposed a library-only tax increase the Troy Library would need a minuscule 0.7% tax increase to continue to operate. Troy Citizens United campaigned
again against the tax increase, and again, the tax increase didnt pass. The library was scheduled to close, but supporters of the library rallied to try one last time to pass the tax increase. In the face of two losses, a last-ditch vote was scheduled but it looked like the library would close. The Troy Library needed something drastic to keep it alive. An anonymous advertising agency in Detroit decided to help save the Troy Library by turning around the anti-tax sentiment. Their thought was to dramatize what closing the library would mean. PARADOX: The paradox was how can you save something by destroying it? Save by destroying. ANALOGUE: Medieval towns were threatened with total destruction unless they surrendered to the aggressors and saved themselves. UNIQUE FEATURE: Threatening total destruction inspires action. Citizens of the medieval towns were forced to decide to surrender or fight. The agency campaigned to save the library by pretending to want to destroy the books in the library; agency staff posed as a fake radical political group, Safeguarding American Families (SAF), and distributed yard signs around the city of Troy with the message Vote To Close Troy Library On Aug. 2 Book Burning Party On Aug. 5. All are Invited. People were so enraged by the idea of a book burning party by this fake political action group that they went in droves to the voting booths to save the library.
What I Have Learned about Creative Thinking from Vincent van Gogh
What would you think of someone who said, I would like to have a cat provided it barked? The common desire to achieve or create great things
provided its something that can be easily willed or wished is precisely equivalent. The principles of behavior that lead to great accomplishments are no less rigid that the biological principles that determine the characteristics of cats. Consider, for example, the life of Vincent Willem van Gogh. He is generally considered to be one of historys greatest artists and his art had a farreaching influence on 20th-century art. His artistic accomplishments are not an accident, not a result of some easy magic trick or secret, but a consequence of his nature to work persistently on his art every day. He revered the doing in art. He wrote about his hard work many times to his brother Theo. In a letter he sent Theo in 1885 he stated that one can only improve by working on your art, and many people are more remarkably clever and talented than him, but what use is it if they do not work at it. He did not begin painting until his late twenties, completing many of his best-known works during the last two years of his life. In the first years of his career, van Gogh displayed no natural talent. David Sweetmans biography Van Gogh: His Life and His Art gives a detailed description of his intention to be an artist and his insatiable capacity for hard work to become one. He turned himself into an artist by acting like an artist and going through the motions by turning out mostly bad innumerable rough sketches, day and night. In Van Goghs own words he said, In spite of everything I shall rise again and take up my pencil and draw and draw. He received encouragement from his cousin, Anton Mauve, who supplied him with his first set of watercolors. Mauve was a successful artist and gave Vincent some basic instructions in painting. Their relationship was short-lived, however, as Vincent was incapable of receiving criticism of his art from Mauve. Mauve even went to Vincents father and told him it would be better for Vincent to stop attempting to be an artist and find another occupation that better suited his talent. It was then that Vincent unveiled what art critics label as his first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters. The lesson about creative thinking I learned from Van Gogh is action. Just do it. Stop waiting and start working toward what you want. What we think, or what we know, or what we believe something is, in the end, is of no consequence. The only consequence is what we actually do. In Van Goghs own words, Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You dont know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas, which says to the painter, You cant do a thing. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerizes some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of you cant once and for all by getting to work and painting. It was very difficult at times, but he believed nobody can do as he wishes in the beginning when you start but everything will be all right in the end. Each day he made every effort to improve because he knew making beautiful paintings meant painstaking work, disappointment and perseverance. In the end, Van Gogh produced 2000 works of art between 1880 and 1890 (1100 paintings and 900 sketches). Thats 4 works of art a week for a decade, and he didnt start making art until his mid twenties.
Van Gogh taught me to commit myself to a desire and go through the motions of working toward accomplishing it. His advice was if you do nothing, you are nothing. You must keep working and keep working come what may. Even when your final goal is not clear, the goal will become clearer and will emerge slowly but surely, much as the rough drawing turns into a sketch, and the sketch into a painting through the serious work done on it and through the elaboration of the original vague idea and through the consolidation of your fleeting and passing thoughts on it as you work. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them. Think of the first airplane. On December 8, 1903, Samuel Pierpont Langley, a leading governmentfunded scientist, launched with much fanfare his flying machine on the Potomac. It plummeted into the river. Nine days later, Orville and Wilbur got the first plane off the ground. Why did these bicycle mechanics succeed when a famous scientist failed? It was because Langley did the mental work and hired other people to build and execute his intellectual design for him. The Wright brothers did their own work. When they were working and producing creative ideas and products, they were replenishing neurotransmitters which are linked to genes that are being turned on and turned off in response to what the brain is doing, which in turn is responding to challenges. When they constantly worked on their idea and learning through trial and error, they were energizing their brains by increasing the number of contacts between neurons. The more times they act, and the longer they worked, the more active their brains became and the more creative they became. Their creative brains made them aware of the range of many potentials for each adjustment they built into their design. Their personal observations of the many alternative potentials led them to constantly change and modify their ideas that created the airplane. I like to metaphorically compare working toward a desired goal such as the goals of Van Gogh and the Wright brothers to weight lifting. If you want to build muscles you lift weights. If the weight is heavy enough its going to damage the muscles. That damage creates a chemical cascade and reaches into the nuclei of your muscle cells, and turns on genes that make proteins and build up muscle fibers. Those genes are only turned on in response to some environmental challenge. Thats why youve got to keep lifting heavier and heavier weights. The phrase, No pain, no gain, is literally true in this case. Interaction with the environment turns on certain genes which otherwise wouldnt be turned on; in fact, they will be turned off if certain challenges arent being faced. To get a feel for how powerful the simple act of just starting something creative and working on it is, try the following thought experiment. THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Take out a sheet of paper and at least ten items, money, credit cards, keys, coins, etc. Your task is to create an assemblage that metaphorically represents you. Here are the guidelines:
1. In your mind, imagine an assemblage that metaphorically represents you. Do not think about the materials you have in hand. Instead think about the shape you would like your assemblage to have. What are the rhythms you want? The texture? Where would you want it to be active? Passive? Where do things overlap and where are they isolated? Think in general and overall pictures, and leave out the details. Do not think about great art; just think about who you are and how you can represent yourself metaphorically. 2. Now form a more specific idea of the final assemblage. As you look at the paper, imagine the specific assemblage you want to create. Make sure youve formed this image before you move to the next step. 3. Place the items on the paper. Since the composing stage is already done, its time to bring your creation into physical existence. How closely did it come to your conception? Become a critic for the assemblage. Look at it for its own sake, independent of the fact that you have created it. Take the items off and go through the same procedures. Make the assemblage again. 4. By conceptualizing and using materials you had on hand, you created an artistic assemblage from nothing. 5. If you performed this exercise every day with different objects for five to ten straight days, you will find yourself becoming an artist who specializes in rearranging different objects into art. It is the activity that turns on the synaptic transmissions in your brain that turn on the genes that are linked to what you are doing, which is responding to an environmental challenge (i.e., the making of an assemblage). Dont wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful. We are what we repeatedly do.
Before you go to school, your mind is like a cathedral with a long central hall where information enters and intermingles and combines with other information without distinction. Education changes that. Education changes the
cathedral of your mind into a long hall with doors on the sides that lead to private rooms segregated from the main assembly. When information enters the hall, its recognized, labeled, boxed, and then sent to one of the private rooms and trapped inside. One room is labeled biology, one room is labeled electronics, one room is labeled business, one room is for religion, one is for agriculture, one is for math, and so on. Were taught that when we need ideas or solutions, we should go to the appropriate room and find the appropriate box and search inside. Were taught not to mix the contents of the rooms. For example, if youre working on a business problem, go to the business room, and stay out of all the other rooms. If youre working on a medical problem, stay out of the religion room; and if youre an electronics expert, stay out of the agriculture room; and so on. The more education people have, the more private rooms and boxes they have, and the more specialized their expertise becomes and the more limited their imagination becomes. This separation of information and concepts explains our ability to associate related concepts. This learned ability is one of the reasons education limits creativity. We end up forming mental walls between associations of related concepts and concepts that are not related at all. Think for a moment about a pinecone. What relationship does a pinecone have to the processes of reading and writing? In France in 1818, a nine-year-old boy accidentally blinded himself with a hole puncher while helping his father make horse harnesses. A few years later the boy was sitting in the yard thinking about his inability to read and write when a friend handed him a pinecone. He ran his fingers over the cone and noted the tiny differences between the scales. He conceptually blended the feel of different pinecone scales with reading and writing, and realized he could create an alphabet of raised dots on paper so the blind could feel them as separate letters and read them as words. In this way, Louis Braille opened up a whole new world for the blind. Braille made a creative connection between a pinecone and reading, two totally unrelated things. When you make a connection between two unrelated subjects, your imagination will leap to fill the gaps and form a whole in order to make sense of it. This is an example of conceptual blending, which is the act of combining, or relating, unrelated items in order to solve problems, create new ideas, and even rework old ideas. It succeeds because it is not possible to think of two subjects, no matter how remote, without making connections between the two. It is no coincidence that the most creative and innovative people throughout history have been experts at forcing mental connections via the conceptual blending of unrelated subjects. No learned scholar who thought logically and linearly would ever contemplate associating feeling something with reading something. I sometimes think this is why the person, who knows more, sees less; and the person who knows less, sees more. Maybe this is why it took a child to invent the television. Twelveyear-old Philo Farnsworth was tilling a potato field back and forth with a horse-drawn harrow in Rigby, Idaho, while thinking about what his chemistry teacher had taught him about the electron and electricity. Philo conceptually blended tilling a potato field with the
attributes of electronic beams and realized that an electronic beam could scan images the same way farmers till a field row by row or the same way a person reads a book, line by line. (Interestingly, the first image ever transmitted was a dollar sign.) Amazingly, this was 1921, and a child conceived the idea of television while the mind-sets of thousands of electronic experts prevented them from looking at the same information they had always looked at and seeing something different. Leonardo da Vinci is considered the greatest genius in all of history. Leonardo, a polymath, was not allowed to attend a university, because he was born out of wedlock. Because of his lack of a formal education, his mind was like a cathedral with a long hall and no separate rooms. He enjoyed fluidity of thought, as his concepts, thoughts, and ideas intermixed and danced with each other. His mind integrated information instead of segregating it into separate disciplines. Leonardo wrote in his notebooks that his creativity secret was the ability to mentally combine dissimilar subjects in his mind. He wrote that it is impossible for the human mind to spontaneously think about two different subjects without connections being formed. This is why he was so polymathic. He created breakthroughs in art, science, engineering, military science, invention, and medicine.
Think of how Albert Einstein changed our understanding of time and space by fantasizing about people going to the center of time in order to freeze their lovers or their children in century-long embraces. This space he imagined is clearly reminiscent of a black hole, where, theoretically, gravity would stop time. Einstein also fantasized about a womans heart leaping and falling in love two weeks before she has met the man she loves, which lead him to the understanding of acausality, a feature of quantum mechanics. A caricature of special relativity (the relativistic idea that people in motion appear to age more slowly) is based on his fantasy of a world in which all the houses and offices are on wheels, constantly zooming around the streets (with advance collision-avoidance systems). Even the Many worlds interpretation which is espoused by some physicists, including Stephen Hawkins, is based on Einsteins fantasy of a world where time has three dimensions, instead of one, where every moment branches into three futures. Einstein
summarized value of using your imagination to fantasize best when he said The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Try to solve the following thought experiment before you read the paragraph that follows it. The thought experiment is attributed to the German Gestalt psychologist Karl Dunker. One morning, exactly at sunrise, a Buddhist monk began to climb a tall mountain. The narrow path, no more than a foot or two wide, spiraled around the mountain to a glittering temple at the summit. The monk ascended the path at a varying rate of speed, stopping many times along the way to rest and to eat the dried fruit he carried with him. He reached the temple shortly before sunset. After several days of fasting and meditation, he began his journey back along the same path, starting at sunrise and again walking at a varying speed with many stops along the way. His average speed descending was, of course, greater than his average climbing speed. Is there a spot along the path that the monk will occupy on both trips at precisely the same time of day? If you try to logically reason this out or use a mathematical approach, you will conclude that it is unlikely for the monk to find himself on the same spot at the same time of day on two different occasions. Instead, visualize the monk walking up the hill, and at the same time imagine the same monk walking down the hill. The two figures must meet at some point in time regardless of their walking speed or how often they stop. Whether the monk descends in two days or three days makes no difference; it all comes out to the same thing. Now it is, of course, impossible for the monk to duplicate himself and walk up the mountain and down the mountain at the same time. But in the visual image he does; and it is precisely this indifference to logic, this superimposition of one image over the other, that leads to the solution. The imaginative conception of the monk meeting himself blends the journeys up and down the mountain and superimposes one monk on the other at the meeting place. Your brain is a dynamic system that evolves its patterns of activity rather than computes them like a computer. It thrives on the creative energy of feedback from experiences real or fictional. You can synthesize experience; literally create it in your own imagination. The human brain cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and a fantasy imagined vividly and in detail. This discovery is what enabled Albert Einstein to create his thought experiments with imaginary scenarios that led to his revolutionary ideas about space and time. Imagination gives us the impertinence to imagine making the impossible possible. Einstein, for example, was able to imagine alternatives to the sacred Newtonian notion of absolute time, and discovered that time is relative to your state of motion. Think of the thousands of scientists who must have come close to Einsteins insight but lacked the imagination to see it because of the accepted dogma that time is absolute, and who must have considered it impossible to contemplate any theory.
Think of an impossibility, then try to come up with ideas that take you as close as possible to that impossibility. For example, imagine an automobile that is a live, breathing creature. List the attributes of living creatures. They are, for example, breathing, growing older, reproducing, feeling emotions, and so on. Then use as many of those attributes as you can while designing your automobile. For instance, can you work emotions into something that a car displays? Japanese engineers for Toyota are working on a car that they say can express moods ranging from angry to happy to sad. The car can raise or lower its body height and wag its antenna, and it comes equipped with illuminated hood designs, capable of changing colors, that are meant to look like eyebrows, eyes, and even tears. The car will try to approximate the feelings of its driver by drawing on data stored in an onboard computer. So, for example, if another car swerves into an expressive cars lane, the right combination of deceleration, brake pressure, and defensive steering, when matched with previous input from the driver, will trigger an angry look. The angry look is created as the front end lights up with glowering red U-shaped lights, the headlights become hooded at a forty-five-degree angle, and downward-sloping eyebrow lights glow crimson. A good-feeling look is lighting up orange, and one headlight winks at the courteous driver and wags its antennae. A sad-feeling look is blue with tears dripping from the headlights. Stretching your imagination by trying to make impossible things possible with concrete thoughts and actions is a mirror reversal of dreaming. Whereas a dream represents abstract ideas as concrete actions and images, this creative process works in the opposite direction, using concrete ideas (a car that is alive) to gain insight on a conscious level to reveal disguised thoughts (about cars showing emotion) as creative imagery.
Think of how Albert Einstein changed our understanding of time and space by fantasizing about people going to the center of time in order to freeze their lovers or their children in century-long embraces. This space he imagined is clearly reminiscent of a black hole, where, theoretically, gravity would stop time. Einstein also fantasized about a womans heart leaping and falling in love two weeks before she has met the man she loves, which lead him to the understanding of acausality, a
feature of quantum mechanics. A caricature of special relativity (the relativistic idea that people in motion appear to age more slowly) is based on his fantasy of a world in which all the houses and offices are on wheels, constantly zooming around the streets (with advance collision-avoidance systems). Even the Many worlds interpretation which is espoused by some physicists, including Stephen Hawkins, is based on Einsteins fantasy of a world where time has three dimensions, instead of one, where every moment branches into three futures. Einstein summarized value of using your imagination to fantasize best when he said The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Try to solve the following thought experiment before you read the paragraph that follows it. The thought experiment is attributed to the German Gestalt psychologist Karl Dunker. One morning, exactly at sunrise, a Buddhist monk began to climb a tall mountain. The narrow path, no more than a foot or two wide, spiraled around the mountain to a glittering temple at the summit. The monk ascended the path at a varying rate of speed, stopping many times along the way to rest and to eat the dried fruit he carried with him. He reached the temple shortly before sunset. After several days of fasting and meditation, he began his journey back along the same path, starting at sunrise and again walking at a varying speed with many stops along the way. His average speed descending was, of course, greater than his average climbing speed. Is there a spot along the path that the monk will occupy on both trips at precisely the same time of day? If you try to logically reason this out or use a mathematical approach, you will conclude that it is unlikely for the monk to find himself on the same spot at the same time of day on two different occasions. Instead, visualize the monk walking up the hill, and at the same time imagine the same monk walking down the hill. The two figures must meet at some point in time regardless of their walking speed or how often they stop. Whether the monk descends in two days or three days makes no difference; it all comes out to the same thing. Now it is, of course, impossible for the monk to duplicate himself and walk up the mountain and down the mountain at the same time. But in the visual image he does; and it is precisely this indifference to logic, this superimposition of one image over the other, that leads to the solution. The imaginative conception of the monk meeting himself blends the journeys up and down the mountain and superimposes one monk on the other at the meeting place. Your brain is a dynamic system that evolves its patterns of activity rather than computes them like a computer. It thrives on the creative energy of feedback from experiences real or fictional. You can synthesize experience; literally create it in your own imagination. The human brain cannot tell the difference between an actual experience and a fantasy imagined vividly and in detail. This discovery is what enabled Albert Einstein to create his thought experiments with imaginary scenarios that led to his revolutionary ideas about space and time.
Imagination gives us the impertinence to imagine making the impossible possible. Einstein, for example, was able to imagine alternatives to the sacred Newtonian notion of absolute time, and discovered that time is relative to your state of motion. Think of the thousands of scientists who must have come close to Einsteins insight but lacked the imagination to see it because of the accepted dogma that time is absolute, and who must have considered it impossible to contemplate any theory. Think of an impossibility, then try to come up with ideas that take you as close as possible to that impossibility. For example, imagine an automobile that is a live, breathing creature. List the attributes of living creatures. They are, for example, breathing, growing older, reproducing, feeling emotions, and so on. Then use as many of those attributes as you can while designing your automobile. For instance, can you work emotions into something that a car displays? Japanese engineers for Toyota are working on a car that they say can express moods ranging from angry to happy to sad. The car can raise or lower its body height and wag its antenna, and it comes equipped with illuminated hood designs, capable of changing colors, that are meant to look like eyebrows, eyes, and even tears. The car will try to approximate the feelings of its driver by drawing on data stored in an onboard computer. So, for example, if another car swerves into an expressive cars lane, the right combination of deceleration, brake pressure, and defensive steering, when matched with previous input from the driver, will trigger an angry look. The angry look is created as the front end lights up with glowering red U-shaped lights, the headlights become hooded at a forty-five-degree angle, and downward-sloping eyebrow lights glow crimson. A good-feeling look is lighting up orange, and one headlight winks at the courteous driver and wags its antennae. A sad-feeling look is blue with tears dripping from the headlights. Stretching your imagination by trying to make impossible things possible with concrete thoughts and actions is a mirror reversal of dreaming. Whereas a dream represents abstract ideas as concrete actions and images, this creative process works in the opposite direction, using concrete ideas (a car that is alive) to gain insight on a conscious level to reveal disguised thoughts (about cars showing emotion) as creative imagery.
EINSTEINS MARRIAGE CONTRACT. In Walter Isaacsons book on Einstein, he reveals the great physicist as a smooth operator when it comes to picking up ladies. Einstein was quite the ladies man. At one point Einsteins cousin, Elsa, who is the object of his intense affection, writes to him and asks for a photograph as well as a book that explains the theory of relativity. Einstein writes back: There is no book on relativity that is comprehensible to the layman. But what do you have a relativity cousin for? If you ever happen to be in Zurich, then we (without my wife, who is unfortunately very jealous) will take a nice walk, and I will tell you about all of those curious things I have discovered. Baby, Im your relativity relative. The relationship progressed. Einstein became estranged from his wife. The biography reprints a chilling letter from Einstein to his wife, a proposed contract in which they could continue to live together under certain conditions. Indeed that was the heading: Conditions. A. You will make sure:
1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order; 2. that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room; 3. that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only. B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons Theres more, including you will stop talking to me if I request it. She accepted the conditions. He later wrote to her again to make sure she grasped that this was going to be all-business in the future, and that the personal aspects must be reduced to a tiny remnant. And he vowed, In return, I assure you of proper comportment on my part, such as I would exercise to any woman as a stranger. THINK HORIZONTALLY. Truman Capote would supposedly write supine, with a glass of sherry in one hand and a pencil in another. In a Paris Review interview, Capote explained: I am a completely horizontal author. I cant think unless Im lying down, either
in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. Ive got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I dont use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. THIS IS THE LIFE FOR ME. Author William Faulkner drank a lot of whiskey when he was writing. It all started when he met Sherwood Anderson when they were both living in New Orleans (Faulkner was working for a bootlegger). In a 1957 interview, Faulkner explains their relationship: Wed meet in the evenings, and wed go to a drinking place and wed sit around till one or two oclock drinking, and still me listening and him talking. Then in the morning he would be in seclusion working, and the next time Id see him, the same thing, we would spend the afternoon and evening together, the next morning hed be working. And I thought then, if that was the life it took to be a writer, that was the life for me. GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE NOW Ludwig van Beethoven was famous among his contemporaries for more than just his hauntingly beautiful compositions. He also had a nasty temper and often alienated his household staff and most of his friends. He fought with everybody, including landlords, relatives, and friends. As a result of his temper tantrums, he had trouble keeping maids and servants because hed often throw things at them or accuse them of stealing. According to his acquaintances, he also wore dirty clothes and left food out to rot, which perhaps also explains why he never married. I AM THE CAPTAIN. Lyndall Gordon writes in T.S. Eliot: A Modern Life, that in the early 1920s, T.S. Eliot only answered to Captain Eliot in his hideaway above Chatto & Windus, a publishing house on St Martins Lane; however, at another hideaway on Charing Cross Road, visitors were asked to call him The Captain. In his upstairs office, Eliot usually tinted his face green with powder to look cadaverous for visitors. WHO NEEDS SLEEP? Leonardo da Vinci had a lot going for him, what with the stillunmatched talent and cultural importance and, you know, Mona Lisa. But he was a weird mix of perfectionist and procrastinator, and sometimes hed work for hours on one minuscule detail while leaving the larger scope of a project untouched. To keep himself going for as long as possible, he practiced polyphasic sleep which is the practice of taking short naps multiple times in a 24-hour period. He slept no more than two hours a day. Polyphasic sleep is common in many animals, and is believed to be the sleep state of our ancient ancestors when they needed most of a 24 hour day to hunt and gather food for their daily survival. POWER NAP. What is it about genius and a disdain for sleep? Thomas Edison was another who believed most people sleep far too much and are unproductive as a result. Thomas Edison was a fan of the power nap. He gave it a good twist, though, which he claimed was integral to some of his best ideas. Edison would sleep sitting upright in his chair, elbow propped on the arm with a handful of marbles. He would think about his problem until he fell asleep, and soon enough he would drop the marbles on the floor. When the racket woke him up, Edison wrote down whatever was in his head, regardless of what it wascreative solutions, new ideas, a reminder to pick up milk on the way home.
FEAR OF PEARLS. Another genius who rarely slept was the inventor Nikola Tesla. Early on in his career, his work started mid-morning and continued with few to no breaks until 5 a.m. the next day. The inventor and engineer also had strange aversions to pearls, overweight women, certain clothes, human hair and sex. What he did love were numbers divisible by three, to the point that he wouldnt stay in a hotel room with a number that didnt fit that guideline. Tesla felt driven to perform repetitive behavior in sets of three. For instance, after walking around a block once, Tesla would feel compelled to do so two more times. He also preferred to dine alone, due to his meticulous compulsion to clean his plates and silverware with 18 (divisible by 3) napkins before a meal. (Afterwards, he would calculate the cubic contents of all the food on his plate before eating.) He was strictly celibate and felt himself a better inventor for it, preferring the company of pigeonshe actually likened his love for one pigeon in particular (a white pigeon he claimed came to his hotel room every day) to the love hed have for another person. When the pigeon died, he felt that his ability to work died with her. ALWAYS FACE NORTH. Charles Dickens was a quirky guy. One of his required writing-time necessities was a desk that faced due north, and even when he slept he took every precaution to ensure that his body was aligned with the poleshead at the northern end, feet toward the south. In addition to his bizarre directional work and sleep arrangements, Dickens also liked to hang out at the morgue, where he watched people work on incoming bodies. He followed his attraction to repulsion to crime scenes, too, where hed try to analyze the locations to solve murders. Whether any of this was helpful to his literary plots is second to the regular practice of thinking creatively to solve hard problems. (That said, theres no report that Dickens ever solved a murder.) DONT BREATHE. Nobel Prize-winner and Japanese inventor Yoshiro Nakamatsu, who has more than 3000 patents to his name, has a Plexiglas board installed in his pool. He thinks underwater and takes notes on his board, a process he calls creative swimming. And while it seems silly to take notes underwater when there are perfectly serviceable desks available, Nakamatsu believes that depriving his brain of oxygen underwater sparks his creativity. And lastly, Friedrich von Schiller kept rotten apples in a drawer in his office, because he said he was unable to write without the aroma of rotting apples.
The difference between people who lead fulfilled lives and people who live empty lives is simple. People who act and do things are fulfilled, people who dont are not. Albert Einstein believed people should not be too conscious of why and how they want to accomplish something. They should just do it. In 1905, the year he discovered relativity, Einstein was living in a cramped apartment and dealing with a difficult marriage and money troubles. He worked long hours for six days a week as a patent clerk in 1905 while, in the evenings and on Sundays, he wrote four papers that were destined to change the course of science and nations. Its not that Im so smart, Einstein once said, Its just that I work hard and stay with problems longer instead of doing nothing and waiting for great thoughts. Einstein discovered that when you actively work on a problem you are passionate about, you will start to notice more and more things that relate to what you are working on. With an infinite amount of stimuli constantly hitting our brains, we need the ability to filter that which is most relevant to us. And our mind is that filter. Often these connections can seem like coincidences, but cognitive scientists tell us it is simply that part of our brain that screens out information we are not interested in and focuses on the things that we can use. These connections give you different ways to look at information and different ways to
focus on it. In Einsteins case, it enabled him to understand the underlying realities of his theoretical premises. Had Einstein been consigned instead to the job of an assistant to a professor he might have felt compelled to churn out safe publications and be overly cautious in challenging accepted notions. Special relativity has a flavor of the patent office; one of the theorys charms for the fascinated public was the practical apparatus of its exposition, involving down-to-earth images like passing trains equipped with reflecting mirrors on their ceilings, and clocks that slow as they acceleratecounterintuitive effects graspable with little more math than plane geometry. An elementary school teacher once told me a story that reminded me of how our brains get turned on by action. The teacher asked the children to make up a story each day and recite it before the class. Justin was a painfully shy boy who insisted on waiting until he was inspired to make up the perfect story. After many refusals the exasperated teacher finally asked Justin to stand in front of the classrooms piano and make up a story about a dog. In a trembling voice, Justin told a story about a dog who jumped on a piano keyboard and stepped on the keys up and down making music and learned how to play the piano. The class loved his story. Each time Justin was asked he would tell the same story using different animals over and over: the cat who learned to play the piano; the rabbit; the mouse; the squirrel; the pony and so on. One day there was a subtle change. Justin told the story about the dog who taught her puppy how to play. Then it was back to the same old routine: the cat who taught her kitten how to play the piano; the bird who taught her hatchling and so on. Finally, at the end of the year, the teacher announced a story-telling contest. Everyone would tell a story and the class would vote. When it was Justins turn, everyone expected one of the same old animal variations of his story. Instead, Justin told a story of how a grand piano taught a baby piano how to play. The children clapped and cheered. Unanimously, they voted Justins story the best of the year. Justins repeated story telling turned on his genes that responded to his challenge until he made the unanticipated connection of inanimate pianos teaching their young when no people are around. As the teacher related, the story got her class to wondering if big clouds teach young clouds how to rain; whether big trees teach saplings how to whisper in the wind; and whether ripe bananas teach green ones how to ripen. When Justin was producing make believe stories, he was interacting with his classroom environment which turned on certain genes which otherwise wouldnt be turned on; in fact, they would be turned off if he remained stubborn and did not act. By forcing himself to make up stories he was replenishing neurotransmitters which are linked to genes that are being turned on and turned off in response to what the brain is doing, which in turn is responding to challenges. When you go through the motions of being creative, you are energizing your brain by increasing the number of contacts between neurons. The more times you act, the more active your brain becomes and the more creative you become.
What a person thinks or believes is of no consequence. The only thing of consequence in life is what you do.
Walt Disney was a high school dropout who suffered several business disasters and bankruptcy. He overcame his personal and financial challenges by using his imagination to create an entertainment empire that has touched the hearts, minds and emotions of all of us. He summarized his creativity in one word: Imagineering. The term Imagineering combines the words imagination and engineering. Imagineering enabled him to transform the dreams, fantasies and wishes of his imagination into concrete reality. Disneys thinking strategy involved exploring something using three different perceptual positions. An insight into these positions comes from the comment made by one of his animators that: Disneys thinking technique synthesized three different strategies: the dreamer, realist, and the critic. A dreamer without a realist is often not able to translate fantasies into tangible reality. A dreamer and critic become engaged in constant conflict. A dreamer and realist can create things but find that a critic helps to evaluate and refine the final products. Following are descriptions of each strategy: DREAMER. A dreamer spins innumerable fantasies, wishes, outrageous hunches and bold and absurd ideas without limit or judgment. Nothing is censored. Nothing is too absurd or silly. All things are possible for the dreamer. To be the dreamer, ask: If I could wave a magic wand and do anything I want what would I create? How would it look? What could I do with it? How would it make you feel? What is the most absurd idea I can conceive? REALIST. The realist imagineers the dreamers ideas into something realistic and feasible. He would try to figure out how to make the ideas work and then sort them out in some meaningful order. To be the realist, ask: How can I make this happen? What are the
features and aspects of the idea? Can I build ideas from the features or aspects? What is the essence of the idea? Can I extract the principle of the idea? Can I make analogicalmetaphorical connections with the principle and something dissimilar to create something tangible? How can I use the essence of the idea to imagineer a more realistic one? CRITIC. The critic reviews all the ideas and trys to punch holes in them by playing the devils advocate. To be the critic, ask: How do I really feel about it? Is this the best I can do? What can make it better? Does this make sense? How does it look to a customer? A client? An expert? A user? Is it worth my time to work on this idea? Can I improve it? Suppose a person wants a better way to keep her plants watered. The dreamer might suggest teaching the plants how to talk, so they can tell you when they are dry. The realist imagineers this into developing a fake bird on a probe that you stick into the soil. When the soil gets dry, the bird chirps. The realist refines the idea by exploring various sensors and lithium-powered computer chips. Finally the critic evaluates the idea. Or suppose your challenge is to improve morale at work. Dreamer:
Create a happy pill that makes people feel happy and positive. Provide them free to employees. Pay people to stay at home to work on their houses and lawns. . Give everyone a company car of their choice.
Realist: Study the ideas and try to work them into something practical. Examine the principle and then try to create metaphorical-analogical connections with something in your experience.
Happy pill. The essence of this idea is to improve an employees attitude. How can this be made into a benefit? How are attitudes adjusted?
Ideas. Bring in motivational speakers to speak during catered in-house lunches. Bring in a masseur once a week to give back massages. Bring in a facilitator to give attitude adjustment exercises and produce role playing skits. Encourage employees to take evening or weekend courses in art, sculpture, crafts, woodworking, creative writing and so on. Pay the tuition and provide a room where employees can display their creative products. Have each employee bring in an object for their desk that symbolizes something important about them. E.g., a crystal ball represents forward-looking vision, jumper cables to represent a person who jump starts others, a can of WD-40 representing someone who is called upon to do many different things, etc.
Pay people to stay at home. The essence of this idea is at home. What do people do when they stay home? They work on their house, household projects,
remodeling, painting, landscaping, and gardening. How can this be made into a benefit? Ideas. Offer the employees the services of a handyman as a benefit. Employee pays for materials; employer pays the handyman to fix sinks, hang wallpaper, and so on. Provide the services of a real estate consultant who will offer suggestions on how employees can upgrade their houses and property to increase the value of their assets.
Company car. The essence of this idea is to provide something related to cars or transportation. What are some aspects of cars that can be engineered into ideas?
Ideas. Make a fiscal arrangement with a youth group to come once a week and wash all the employee cars at the companys expense. The cause should be a tax deductible one. Create an incentive system where points are awarded for exceptional performance. When so many points are accrued, award the employee with a gift certificate for gasoline or routine maintenance from a local garage. Make a company car available for employees to use while their cars are being serviced or disabled. Provide a company designated driver for Friday and Saturday evenings. Employees whove imbibed too much can call the driver. The driver drives them home and then drives them back to their car the next day. TEAMWORK Disney used the same three strategies to keep his staff coordinated in their thinking on a particular project. He moved the ideas around three rooms. Each room had a different function. Room 1 was the Dreamer Room, room 2 was the realist room and room 3 was the critic room. The critics room was called the sweat box, by the employees. It was a small room under the stairs where the whole team would review the idea with no-holds barred. Sometimes the idea would return to Room 1 to allow for further work. The cycle always involved three rooms. The usual outcome was that either an idea did not survive room 3-the sweat box and was abandoned, or if it met with silence, it was ready for production. FLOWERS AS BOMB DETECTORS A Researcher at Colorado State University dreamed about using flowers as bomb-sniffers. Plants are uniquely suited by evolution to chemically analyze their environment, in detecting pests, for example. When plants are modified to sense TNT, for example, they react to levels one-hundredth of anything a bomb-sniffing dog could muster. Its possible to modify the plants to drain off chlorophyll, which changes the color from green to white, when explosives are detected. The task now is to refine the process to make the color change faster and for ways for the plant to recover the chlorophyll after the detection process is over, so it can be used again. Imagine defensive lines of bomb-sniffing tulips at airports and subways, or at the local shopping malls floral displays, or lining the streets of Washington, D.C. If you dream it, you can do it.
THOUGHT WALK
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the famous French philosopher, did his best thinking on trips he made alone and on foot, which he called thought walks. Similarly, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the brilliant German author, took a walk whenever he wanted to think and come up with new ideas. It was during his long hikes in the mountains of Berchtesgaden that Sigmund Freud worked out his imposing structure of the unconscious, preconscious and conscious that has bound the twentiethcentury psyche ever since. In fact, he told his good friend, Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin doctor, that his book The Interpretation of Dreams was designed to have the effect of one of his hikes through a concealed pass in a dark forest until it opens out on a view of the plain. Taking a walk stimulated and refreshed their thinking. Whenever youre deeply involved with a problem, take a thought walk. You will find walking around your neighborhood, a shopping mall, a park, the woods, industrial complex and so on to be highly stimulating. Look for interesting objects, situations, or events that are interesting or that can be metaphorically compared with whatever project you happen to be working on. For example, suppose your problem is how to improve communications in your company. You take a walk and notice potholes in the road. How are potholes like your corporate communication problem? For one thing, if potholes are not repaired, they get bigger and more dangerous. Usually road crews are assigned to repair the potholes. Similarly, unless something is done to improve corporate communications, its likely to deteriorate even further. An idea with a similar relation to road crews is to assign someone in the organization to fill the role of communications coach. The role would entail educating, encouraging, and supporting communication skills in all employees. And just as road crews are rotated, you can rotate the assignment every six months. A thought walk is one of my favorite techniques to stimulate creativity. A while back while aimlessly walking around my neighborhood, I noticed a U.S. Postal truck delivering mail. The road was in poor shape and had many large potholes that the truck had to avoid. The postal truck and poor condition of the road inspired an idea. The postal service has thousands of trucks that travel on fixed routes and transport mail to every nook and corner of the country. Fitting the trucks with smart sensors, the trucks can collect important data on weather, communications, infrastructure and several other systems that determine the development and safety of the country.
The data gathered by these truck-mounted sensors would establish a baseline map of ordinary conditions, making it significantly easier to spot a problem or anomaly. Such a system could aid in homeland security by rapidly detecting chemical agents, radiological materials and, eventually, biological attacks; it could also assess road quality, catalog potholes and provide early warning of unsafe road conditions like black ice. A system like this could also detect gaps in cell-tower coverage, weak radio and television signals and sources of radio frequency interference. This data could help provide uninterrupted communication services and promote more efficient use of broadcasting. I have a colleague working with the post office now to develop and implement this idea. This is a valuable resource that can make the postal service profitable. Sometimes I will walk aimlessly and simply list objects or experiences that I find interesting. When I return, I draw a picture of the object or experience and list all of its characteristics. Then I list all the associations I can think of between each characteristic and a problem. I ask questions such as: How is this like my problem? What if my problem were a? What are the similarities? This.is like the solution to my problem because? How is like an idea that might solve my problem? What metaphors can I make between.and my problem? This kind of thought walking is incredibly productive. A designer friend of mine and another designer were thought walking together in New York City. They were discussing new product ideas when they stopped by the site for Daniel Libeskinds Freedom Tower in New York City. The spire of the building is planned to be 1,776 feet high 1776 was the year when the United States Declaration of Independence was drafted. They were intrigued by the idea of using invisible information to generate visible forms that have meaning. When they returned to their office, they mulled over possible ideas of using invisible information to create visible forms. Leafing through catalogs they came across ads for sweaters with computer generated space invader designs. Combining the sweater with the freedom tower inspired their idea. They came up with what they call voice knitting where an audio input (a song or a voice) is computer translated into a simple visual form to give a sweater or other piece of clothing its own unique style and vocal fingerprint of the owner. Thought walks give you different aspects to focus on and different ways to interpret what you are focusing on. An engineer was contracted to find ways to safely and efficiently remove ice from power lines during ice storms. He was blocked. He took a break and went
for a walk. He visited a store that had several different varieties of honey for sale in a variety of different containers. The store advertised the honey with a cutout of a large bear holding a jar of honey. He bought a jar and returned to his office. At his desk, while simultaneously thinking of honey and his power line problem together, he came up with a humorous absurd solution to his problem. The solution was to put a honey pot on top of each power pole. This would attract bears and the bears would climb the poles to get the honey. Their climbing would cause the poles to sway and the ice would Avibrate@ off the wires. This silly idea got him to thinking about the principle of vibration, which inspired the solution. The solution the power company implemented was to bring in helicopters to hover over the iced power lines. Their hovering vibrated the ice off the power lines.
Here is a set of numbers. Ask someone to estimate, not to calculate, the answer within five seconds. A: 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 Here is another set of numbers. Now find another person and ask that person to estimate the answer for version B within five seconds. B: 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 You will probably discover that the second person gave you a smaller answer than the first, and both people gave figures well below the real answer (which is 40,320). What happens is that the first number of the series biases the persons thinking. This number anchors the persons thought process and unduly influences the estimate they make for the calculation. The first series starts with a higher anchor 8 than for the second. When researchers carried out an experiment of these two questions, the average estimate for the first series was 3200 compared to only 300 for the second. Both estimates are well below the correct answer because both series as a whole are made up of small numbers
which biases the estimates to fall far below the true answer. In fact, you can bias a persons reasoning by giving them an anchor that has nothing to do with the problem. Ask a person for the last three digits of the persons telephone number. Add 400 to this number and then ask, Do you think Attila the Hun was defeated in Europe before or after X (X being the year you got by adding 400 to the telephone number)? Dont say whether the person got it right (the correct answer is A.D. 451), and then ask, In what year would you guess Attila the Hun was defeated? The answers you get will vary depending upon the initial number you got adding 400 to the persons telephone number. The strength of the anchoring effect was further demonstrated by an experiment involving the estimation of the value of a house for sale. All subjects were given a tour of the house in question and identical information about it, except for the listing price, which were different, some high and some low. The prices varied 4% or 12% above or below the houses appraised value. The researchers found that the listing price significantly biased the estimates given by the subjects, even the most experienced real estate agents. The subjects anchored their estimated value of the house to their belief about the listed price. The estimates confirmed their belief about the accuracy of the listed price. Most important human judgments are made under conditions of uncertainty. We use heuristics, or rules of thumb, to guide us in such instances as we try to determine what belief or action has the highest probability of being the correct one in a given situation. These rules of thumb are often instinctive and irrational guesses. Social psychologists such as Thomas Gilovich, Daniel Kahneman, and Amos Tversky have studied several important heuristics and discovered errors associated with their use. One of these heuristics is the anchoring heuristic. Our judgment regarding the frequency, probability, or value of items is often determined by comparing the item to an anchor point. I know a clothier who is well aware of how you can influence a customers thinking by manipulating an anchor point. If you found a coat in his store you liked, when you examine the price tag you will find it has three different prices with the highest two crossed out. You may think youre getting a bargain if you accept the highest price as an anchor. In reality, he makes up the highest numbers and the lowest price is much higher than it would be in other shops. Behavioral economist, Dan Ariely, conducted numerous experiments that demonstrate the power of suggestion in establishing arbitrary values of goods and services as anchors. Combined with our tendency to try to be consistent, Ariely explains how we are easily manipulated into patterns of arbitrary coherence. Once we have an anchor price in our mind, it will shape not only how we view present prices but future prices as well. In one experiment, he had the subjects write down the last two digits of their social security number. He then asked them if they would pay that amount (say $79 or $12) for a bottle of wine. The subjects were not wine experts but the lower their social security digits, the lower the price they were willing to pay for the wine. Not only did the arbitrary social security number affect what value they put on the first bottle of wine, it affected the value they put on every bottle of wine that was then offered.
Traditional economics has defended a free market economy on the assumption that human beings are generally rational in their market behavior and choices. More and more, scientists like Ariely are establishing that our market behavior is more irrational than rational. The implication of arbitrary coherence is that it calls into question one of the basic assumptions of a free market and free trade. If we can be manipulated to value things in arbitrary ways, the alleged benefits of a free market are called into question. If values arent simply matters of supply and demand evaluated by rational creatures who know what they want and need and how much they are willing to pay for it or charge for it, then it is the manipulators who stand to benefit from free trade.
There is an old parable about a boy who was so discouraged by his experiences in school he told his grandfather he wanted to quit. His grandfather filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire. Soon the pots came to a boil. In the first, he placed carrots, in the second he placed eggs and the last he placed ground coffee beans. He let them sit and boil, without saying a word. In about twenty minutes he turned off the burners. He fished the carrots out and placed them in a bowl. He pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl. Then he ladled the coffee out into a cup. Turning to the boy, he asked, Tell me, what do you see? Carrots, eggs, and coffee, the boy replied. Then he asked the boy to feel the carrots, which he did and noted that they were soft and mushy. His grandfather then asked him to take an egg and break it. After pulling off the shell, the boy observed the hard-boiled egg. Finally, he asked the boy to sip the coffee. He smiled as he tasted the coffee with its rich aroma. The boy asked, I dont understand. What does this mean, if anything? His grandfather laughed and explained that each of these objects had faced the same adversityboiling waterbut each had reacted differently. Which are you? the grandfather asked. When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Are you a carrot that seems strong, but with pain and adversity, becomes soft and loses strength? Are you the egg that appears not to change but whose heart is hardened? Or are you the coffee bean that changes the hot water, the very circumstance that brings the pain. When the water gets hot, it releases the fragrance and flavor. If you are like the coffee bean, when things are at their
worst, your very attitude will change your environment for the better, making it sweet and palatable. The moral of the parable is that it is not the experience that matters. What matters is how you interpret and react to the experience. We are each given a set of experiences in life. The experiences are neutral. They have no meaning. It is how we interpret the experiences that give them meaning. Your interpretations of your experiences shape your beliefs and theories about the world which, in turn, influence the way you live your life. The grandfathers lesson is that when you cant change your circumstances, you change yourself. We automatically interpret all of our experiences without realizing it. Are they good experiences, bad ones, what do they mean and so on? We do this without much thought, if any, to what the interpretations mean. For instance, if someone bumps into you, you wonder why. The event of her bumping into you is neutral in itself. It has no meaning. Its your interpretation of the bumping that gives it meaning, and this meaning shapes your perception of the experience. You may interpret the bump as an accident or you may feel you are of such little consequence that youre deliberately unnoticed and bumped around by others. You may fault the architect for the design of the sidewalks or you may feel you are at fault for not being more attentive of others. You may interpret the bump as a deliberate example of feminist aggressiveness, or you may even interpret the bump as her way of flirting with you. Your interpretation of the experience determines your perception. Think for a moment about Abraham Lincoln who is considered by many the greatest president in the history of the U.S. He could not choose his parents, the immediate circumstances of his upbringing, or the historical epoch of his birth. Modern day psychologists would label his parents as dysfunctional and abusive. He was mocked and ridiculed by his school classmates because he was awkward and gangly and his clothes never fit properly. At age 22, he failed in business, he ran for the state legislature and was defeated, and he tried to start another business and failed again. At age 26, he was rejected by a woman he loved and had a nervous breakdown. At age 33, he married a woman who was found to be mentally unstable, and once more was defeated for Congress. At age 37, he was finally elected to Congress but at age 39 he was once again defeated. He subsequently campaigned for and was defeated for the senate, vice presidency, and again for the senate. At age 51 he was elected president of the U.S. Lincoln was not born with a positive can do attitude. On the contrary, his life is testimony that a positive attitude toward ones experiences takes considerable effort and practice. Lincoln learned to expect difficulties, and, so was not traumatized and defeated when faced with problems but viewed them as part of the natural course of events. Lincoln learned the harder one works to sustain a positive interpretation, the more one appreciates life. Lincoln did not choose his experiences of failure and defeat, but he did choose how to respond. He realized that he was not reacting to an event but to how he interpreted the
event. His life is testimony to the uniquely human potential to turn defeats into triumphs and to turn ones predicament into a human achievement. For those events that were not up to him, it was his own attitude that determined their influence on him. When he was no longer able to change a situation, he changed himself.
Years ago at St. Bonaventure University, Father Tom, a Franciscan monk, nonchalantly laid five pencils out on a table and asked whats this? I had no idea what he meant, so he said well, this is a five. Then he picked up one of the pencils and laid it across the other four, and asked whats this? I still didnt know, so he said this is a four. I started to get the idea, and began making my own tentative guesses as he set up different configurations: Is that a three? No, thats actually a two. The numbers were always between zero and five, which suggested that the answer was always equal to the number of pencils which were doing something. (Touching the table? Pointing at another pencil? Touching another pencil?) But the longer the game went on, the more random the answers seemed. All my answers failed to support my theories. Then the monk randomly tossed the pencils down onto the table and let them lie wherever they fell, asking whats this? Again, I was wrong. I made him set up some of the configurations I had already seen, but, now the answers were different. Finally, the monk told me the secret. The answer didnt have
anything to do with the pencils at all. The answer to each configuration was simply equal to whatever number of fingers my friend the monk was quietly displaying with his left hand! The lesson Father Tom taught me was always to approach a problem on its own terms. When he said Whats this?, I should have looked to include everything he was doing, instead of excluding everything except the five pencils. Most of us look at a scene rather than look into it. People tend to think of perception as a passive process. We see, hear, smell, taste or feel stimuli that impinge upon our senses. We think that if we are at all objective, we record what is actually there. Yet perception is demonstrably an active rather than a passive process; it constructs rather than records reality. You construct how you choose to see the world. THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Consider the following problem. Four cards are laid out with their faces displaying respectively, an A, a B, a 4 and a 7. A B 4 7
You are told that each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. You are then given a rule, whose truth you are expected to evaluate. The rule is: If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other. You are then allowed to turn over two, but only two, cards in order to determine whether the rule is correct as stated. If you worked this problem silently, you will almost certainly miss it, as have the large percentage of subjects to whom it has been presented. Most subjects realize that there is no need to select the card bearing the consonant, since it is irrelevant to the rule; they also appreciate that it is essential to turn over the card with the vowel, for an odd number opposite would prove the rule incorrect. The wording of the problem determines the perspective most people mentally default to almost immediately. Most people assume that the object is to examine the cards to ascertain that if a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other; and if a card has an even number on one side, then it has a vowel on the other side. This assumption leads them to make the fatal error of picking the card with the even number, because the even number is mentioned in the rule. But, in fact, it is irrelevant whether there is a vowel or a consonant on the other side, since the rule does not take a stand on what must be opposite to even numbers. On the other hand, it is essential to pick the card with the odd number on it. If that card has a consonant on it, the result is irrelevant. If, however, the card has a vowel on it, the rule in question has been proved incorrect, for the card must (according to the rule) have an even (and not an odd) number on it.
The content of this specific problem influenced the way we constructed our perception of the problem. This perception created the assumption that leads to error. This should give one pause about mentally defaulting to first impressions. Leonardo Da Vinci wrote in his notebooks that one should always assume that your first impression of a problem is usually biased toward your usual way of thinking. He suggested looking at your problem in at least three different ways to get a better understanding. If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the other. Here we are working with letters and numbers. Transposing the words to read If a card has an even number on one side, then. Clarifies the problem and gives us a different perspective on even numbered cards. It becomes apparent that what even numbered cards have on the other side has no significance. The rule is only concerned with cards that have vowels on one side. Sigmund Freud would reframe something to transform its meaning by putting it into a different framework or context than it has previously been perceived. For example, by reframing the unconscious as a part of him that was infantile, Freud began to help his patients change the way they thought and reacted to their own behavior. The important thing is not to persist with one way of looking at the problem. Consider the following interesting twist, again using four cards. This time, however, we reframe the problem by substituting journeys and modes of transportation for letters and numbers. Each card has a city on one side and a mode of transportation on the other. LOS ANGELES NEW YORK AIRPLANE CAR
This time, the cards have printed on them the legends, respectively, Los Angeles, New York, airplane, and car; and the rule is reframed to read: Every time I go to Los Angeles, I travel by airplane. While this rule is identical to the number-letter version, it poses little difficulty for individuals. In fact, now 80 percent of subjects immediately realize the need to turn over the card with car on it. Apparently, one realizes that if the card with car on it has the name Los Angeles on the back, the rule has been proved incorrect; whereas it is immaterial what it says on the back of the airplane since, as far as the rule is concerned, one can go to New York any way one wants. Why is it that 80 percent of subjects get this problem right, whereas only 10 percent know which cards to turn over in the vowel-number version? By changing the content (cities and modes of transportation substituted for letters and numbers), we restructured the problem, which dramatically changed our reasoning. The structure of a problem colors our perspective and the way we think. The above thought experiment is a variation on the Wason selection task that was devised by Peter Wason. The Wason selection task was originally developed as a test of logical reasoning, but it has increasingly been used by psychologists to analyze the structure of human reasoning mechanisms.
The significant point about this test is that we are incredibly bad at it. And it doesnt make much difference what the level of education is of the person taking the test. Moreover, even training in formal logic seems to make little difference to a persons performance. The mistake that we tend to make is fairly standard. People almost always recognize that they have to pick up the card with the vowel, but they fail to see that they also have to pick up the card with the odd number. They think instead that they have to pick up the card with the even number. One of the most interesting things about this phenomenon is that even when the correct answer is pointed out, people feel resistance to it. It apparently feels right that the card with the even number should be picked up. It feels right because your initial perspective is biased toward the usual way of thinking. It is only when you look at it from different perspectives that you get a deeper understanding of the problem.
Gods Bed
First there is Gods idea of a bed, and then the carpenters bed, made by someone who believes and pays attention to the idea, and then the artists painting of a bed, say Vincent Van Goghs. The artists bed is just one way a bed might appear, depending on where and how you place the mirror of your imagination, and probably how clear or muddled your imagination is. But even at its best and clearest, say the bed of Andrew Wyeths imagination, the bed of the painter is mirroring only one view partial and incomplete and useless for design or sleepingof the sturdy, useful, pleasant real bed made by the carpenter. The artists imagination is three steps removed from the truth: the idea of a bed. It is the person who uses the bed who knows what the thing is and what it is supposed to do. So you have the knower of the truth (the user) of the bed; the makerthe carpenter who has the true opinion about it which he gets by listening to and believing in the idea, so making the thing correctly; and the artist is third, without any necessary connection to the truth of beds at all: the perspective of the artist may even be perverted or obscured. This is the way I think about the nature of government. First you have the idea of government and then the products of government (essential services, national security, freedoms, transportation, criminal justice, ) made by the founding fathers who have the true opinion about what government is which they get by believing in the idea of government.
Then you have the user of the government, the citizen, the knower of truth, who knows what government is and what it is supposed to do. Finally, there is the politician who mirrors only his or her perspective on government based on his or her personal interest in governing. The politician is much like the artist who ignores the user of the bed, and ignores the users of the government, who are the knowers of truth. Like the artist, the politician is three steps removed from the idea of government, without any necessary connection to the truth of the idea of government at all, and whose incomplete and partial theory about the nature of government may even be perverted or absurd.
Does society really value creativity? People say they want more creative people, more creative ideas and solutions, but do they really? The Greek philosopher Democritus (460-370 BC) promulgated the atomic theory, which asserted that the universe is composed of two elements: the atoms and the void in which they exist and move. Many contemporary historians of the philosophy of science consider Democritus to be the father of modern science because of his stunning insight about the universe centuries before our understanding of atomic structure, which did not occur until the early 19th century. All of his ideas were rejected by all of the Greek philosophers and scientists at the time because his beliefs contrasted with those of Aristotle who, according to his followers, was the ultimate authority about the universe. Their commitment to Aristotle and his theories about the universe caused them to feel a great uncertainty in imagining any other possibility. Plato is said to have disliked him and his atomic theory so much that he wished all his books burned. Democritus was ignored by the Athens intellectual community for the rest of his life. Did the ancient Greeks desire creative ideas? Yes. They prided themselves for their creativity in the arts, science and society. They proclaimed Greece as the enlightened society, and built architectural monuments to their creativity. Yet the rejection of Democritus is just one of many historical examples of breakthrough ideas that were
automatically rejected because of their novelty and their nonconformance with existing beliefs which caused a general feeling of uncertainty. History also recounts how physicists could not see Einsteins theory of relativity because of their established, accepted views. For years, they tried to incorporate his view into the established view without success. Interestingly, the skeptical physicists never did accept his theory; instead they eventually died and subsequent generations of physicists who were not prejudiced by the past were able to accept and understand Einstein. What we learn from history is that our established view interferes with our perception and understanding of new ideas and concepts. Do people desire creative ideas and innovation today? Most us would answer with a loud YES, OF COURSE, asserting that creativity is the engine of discovery in the arts, science and industry, and is the fundamental driving force of positive change, and is associated with intelligence, wisdom, and goodness. Still while most people strongly endorse a positive view of creativity, historians have discovered that scientific institutions, business, education, medical, military, nonprofit, political organizations, and leaders and decision-makers in all fields routinely reject creative ideas much like the Greeks rejected atomic theory. Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocket propulsion, endured ridicule and derision from his contemporary scientific peers who stated his ideas were ludicrous and impossible. The New York Times even chimed in with an editorial written by scientists that Goddard lacked even a high school understanding of rocket propulsion. This example is not unique. Apple Computer Inc. founder, Steve Jobs, attempted, without success, to get Atari and HewlettPackard interested in his and Steve Wozniaks personal computer. As Steve recounts, So we went to Atari and said, Hey, weve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or well give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary; well come work for you. And their experts laughed and said, No. So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, Hey, we dont need you. You havent gotten through college yet. Ken Olsen, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., thought the idea of a personal computer absurd, as he said, there is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. Other examples are: Pierrre Pachet, a renowned physiology professor and expert declared, Louis Pasteurs theory of germs is ridiculous fiction. Every major corporation in the country rejected Chester Carlsons invention of xerography. They said, Why would anyone buy an expensive copy machine when carbon paper is so cheap and plentiful. Fred Smiths Yale University management professor gave Fred a C because Freds paper proposal to provide overnight delivery service was not a feasible business idea. Freds proposal became Federal Express. Incidentally, every delivery expert in the
U.S. doomed FedEx to failure as they said no one will pay a fancy price for speed and reliability. Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899 said.Everything that can be invented has been invented. He urged the closing of the patent office as there no longer was a need for it. Western Union president, William Orton, rejected Bells offer to sell his struggling telephone company for $100,000. He said This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. What use could this company make of an electrical toy? The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular? said David Sarnoffs associates, in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s. TV wont be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first 6 months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.(Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century Fox, 1946). Airplanes are interesting toys for hobbyists but of no military value.(Marshal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre / French commander of Allied forces during the closing months of World War 1, 1918). THE WATCHMAKER Frank was a watchmaker. The watches he made consisted of 1000 parts each. Frank would handle and inspect each part and think about where it should be placed. Each watch was constructed in a slightly different way which made each watch unique and special. One day, a teacher arrived and taught him a new way of watch making. He showed him how to make watches by categorizing all the parts and putting together subassemblies of about ten elements each in a certain order and each with a certain label. Ten of these subassemblies could be put together into a larger subassembly and a system of ten constituted 100 parts and, eventually a system of 100 groups would constitute the whole watch of 1000 parts. He became very efficient and could now make watches in a fraction of the time it took before without much thinking at all. His system of watch making by identity, classification and categorization was carried on by his descendants and became the accepted system of making watches throughout the world. All watches were made the same way and things were good. Everyone was comfortable and secure as they robotically continued to make watches using Franks system, which they all agreed was the only way to make watches profitably.
One day a man who had little knowledge about Franks system decided to invent a new watch. At first he tried combining the subassemblies in different ways but nothing seemed to work. He gave up and tossed all the subassemblies against the wall where it fell apart into 1000 parts. Instead of thinking about improving the watch, he thought about the concept of time and how people throughout history kept track of time and how animals and birds understood time. He suddenly had a mind popping idea for a new concept of how to measure time. Working hard, he created a unique and novel watch. All the watchmakers looked at it and thought it was indeed a novel concept. Yet none would accept it as a watch because it didnt look like a watch, feel like a watch, sound like a watch, made of gears and wheels like a watch and wasnt made the way watches are supposed to be made. No one would accept it so they continued to make watches the way they are supposed to be made. This forced the inventor to start his own company and became the richest man in the world. The above is, of course, a fable. In real life in 1968, the Swiss dominated the world watch industry. The Swiss themselves invented the electronic watch movement at their research institute in Neuchatel, Switzerland. It was rejected by every Swiss watch manufacturer. Based on their experiences with watches, they believed this couldnt possibly be the watch of the future. After all, it was battery powered, did not have bearings or a mainspring and almost no gears. Seiko executives, with no background in the watch industry, took one look at this invention that the Swiss manufacturers rejected at the World Watch Congress that year and took over the world watch market.
Once people establish a hypothesis about the way things are, they develop a deeply-rooted bias against anything that causes them to feel uncertain, anxious or confused about their pre-established hypothesis. The novelty of the new watch caused great uncertainty in the minds of the watchmakers. This bias against uncertainty is activated when people are asked to evaluate new, novel ideas and interferes with the participants ability to recognize a creative idea. The insidious nature of this bias is that there is strong societal pressure to endorse creativity and its products and a strong social desirability bias against expressing any view of creativity as negative. The resulting state is similar to that identified in research on racial bias; a conflict between an explicit preference towards creativity and unacknowledged negative associations with creativity. So we say we strongly support creativity while routinely rejecting creative ideas and never admitting it. This is because creative ideas are novel and different which makes us feel uncertain and afraid.
1. Take a walk and look for something interesting. 2. Make metaphorical-analogical connections between that something interesting and your problem. 3. Open a dictionary and find a new word. Use it in a sentence. 4. Make a connection between the word and your problem. 5. How is an iceberg like an idea that might help you solve your problem? 6. Create the dumbest idea you can. 7. Ask a child. 8. Create a prayer asking for help with your problem. 9. What does the sky taste like? 10. Create an idea that will get you fired. 11. Read a different newspaper. If you read the Wall Street Journal, read the Washington Post. 12. What else is like the problem? What other ideas does it suggest? 13. What or who can you copy? 14. What is your most bizarre idea? 15. List all the things that bug you. 16. Take a different route to work. 17. Make up and sing a song about the problem while taking a shower. 18. Listen to a different radio station each day. 19. Ask the most creative person you know.
20. Ask the least creative person you know. 21. Make up new words that describe the problem. E.g., Warm hugs to describe a motivation problem and Painted rain to describe changing customer perceptions. 22. Doodle 23. What is the essence of the problem? Can you find parallel examples of the essence in other worlds? 24. Go for a drive with the windows open. Listen and smell as you drive. 25. Combine your ideas? 26. How can a bee help you solve the problem? 27. Write your ideas on index cards. One idea per card. 28. Give yourself an idea quota of 40 ideas. 29. What can you combine? 30. Can you substitute something? 31. Which of two objects, a salt shaker or a bottle of ketchup, best represents your problem? Why? 32. What can you add? 33. What one word represents the problem? 34. Draw an abstract symbol that best represents the problem. 35. Think of a two-word book title that best represents the problem. 36. Write a table of contents for a book about the problem. 37. Ask the person you like least for ideas. 38. What is the opposite of your idea? 39. Imagine your idea and its opposite existing simultaneously. 40. Daydream. 41. Draw abstract symbols to describe the problem. 42. Think out loud. Verbalize your thinking out loud about the problem. 43. List 20 objects into two columns of 10. Randomly connect objects from column 1 to column 2 to see what new products develop. 44. How would Abraham Lincoln approach the problem?
45. Write the alphabet backwards. 46. How would a college professor perceive it? 47. How would an artist perceive it? A risk-taking entrepreneur? A priest? 48. Imagine you are at a nudist beach in Tahiti. How could talking with nudists help you with the problem? 49. Can you find the ideas you need in the clouds? 50. Eat spaghetti with chopsticks. 51. Make the strange familiar. 52. Make the familiar strange. 53. What if you were the richest person on earth? How will the money help you solve the problem? 54. If you could have three wishes to help you solve the problem, what would they be? 55. Wear purple underwear for inspiration 56. Write a letter to your subconscious mind about the problem. 57. How would George Clooney solve the problem? 58. Forget the problem. Come back to it in three days. 59. Look at the problem from at least three different perspectives. 60. Imagine the problem is solved. Work backwards from the solution to where you are now. 61. How would the problem be solved 100 years from now. 62. Think about it before you go to sleep. 63. When you wake, write down everything you can remember about your dreams. Next, try to make metaphorical-analogical connections between your dreams and the problem. 64. Imagine you are on national television. Explain your ideas on how to solve the problem. 65. What one object or thing best symbolizes the problem? Keep the object on your desk to constantly remind you about the problem. 66. List all the words that come to mind while thinking about the problem. Are there any themes? Interesting words? Surprises?
67. What if ants could help you solve the problem? What are the parallels between ants and humans that can help? 68. Create a walk that physically represents your problem. 69. Talk to a stranger. 70. Keep a written record of all your ideas. Review them weekly. Can you crossfertilize your ideas? 71. How would an Olympic gold medal winner approach the problem? 72. Read a poem and relate it to the problem. What new thoughts does the poem inspire? 73. What associations can you make between your problem and an oil spill? 74. If your problem were a garden, what would be the weeds. 75. Change your daily routines. If you drink coffee, change to tea. 76. List your assumptions and then reverse them. Can you make the reversals into new ideas? 77. Make something that symbolizes the problem and bury it. 78. Draw the problem with your eyes closed. 79. Create a dance that represents your problem. 80. Mind map your problem. 81. Become a dreamer and create fantasies that will solve the problem. 82. Become a realist and imaginer your fantasies into workable ideas. 83. Complete How can I _____? Then change the words five different ways. 84. Suspend logic and think freely and fluidly. 85. Learn to tolerate ambiguity. 86. What have you learned from your failures? What have you discovered that you didnt set out to discover? 87. Make connections between subjects in different domains. Banking + cars = drive in banking. 88. Immerse yourself in the problem. Imagine you are the problem. What would you feel? 89. What are the parallels between your problem and the Viet Nam war.
90. Hang out with people from diverse backgrounds. 91. Create a funny story out of the problem. 92. Make analogies between your problem and nature. 93. Imagine you are the opposite sex. Now how do you perceive the problem? 94. Force yourself to smile all day. 95. Use mashed potatoes to make a sculpture of the problem. 96. Sit outside and count the stars. 97. Walk through a grocery store and metaphorically connect what you see with the problem. 98. How would you explain the problem to a six year old child? 99. Cut out interesting magazine and newspaper pictures. Then arrange and paste them on a board making a collage that represents the problem. 100. Write a six word book that describes your progress on the problem. present all thoughts are gray, I am still not seeing everything. E.g. At
101. Still cant find the answer? Buy a copy of Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques.
I have always been impressed by Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection and have always been fascinated with
scholastic attempts to apply Darwinian ideas to creativity and genius. My own outlook about genius has roots in Donald Campbells blind-variation and selective-retention model of creative thought which he published. Campbell was not the first to see the connection between Darwinian ideas on evolution and creativity. As early as 1880, the great American philosopher, William James, in his essay Great Men, Great Thoughts, and the Environment, made the connection between Darwinian ideas and genius. According to Darwin, nature creates many possibilities through blind trial and error and then lets the process of natural selection decide which species survive. In nature, 95% of new species fail and die within a short period of time. Genius is analogous to biological evolution in that it requires the unpredictable generation of a large quantity of alternatives and conjectures. From this quantity of alternatives and conjectures, the genius retains the best ideas for further development and communication. To discover a good idea you have to generate many ideas. Out of quantity comes quality. It took Thomas Edison 50,000 experiments to invent the alkaline storage cell battery and 9,000 to perfect the light bulb. For every brilliant idea he had there were countless duds like the horse-drawn contraption that would collect snow and ice in the winter and compress it into blocks that families could use in the summer as a refrigerant, his plan to run electric power lines underground, or his perpetual cigar, which consisted of a hollow metal tube with a spring clip that moved the tobacco forward as it burned. An important aspect of this Darwinian theory of creativity is that in addition to quantity, you need some means of producing variation in your ideas and for this variation to be truly effective, it must be blind. To count as blind, the variations are shaped by random, chance, or unrelated factors. In nature, a gene pool totally lacking in variation would be unable to adapt to changing circumstances, with consequences which would be fatal to the species survival. In time the genetically encoded wisdom would convert to foolishness. A comparable process operates within us. Every individual has the ability to create ideas based on his or her existing patterns of thinking, on the way he or she were taught to think. But without any provision for variations, ideas eventually stagnate and lose their adaptive advantages. Typically, we think reproductively that is, on the basis of similar problems encountered in the past. When confronted with problems, we fixate on something in the past that has worked before. We ask, What have I been taught in life, education, or work on how to solve the problem? Then we analytically select the most promising approach based on past experiences, excluding all other approaches, and work within a clearly defined direction toward the solution of the problem. In contrast, geniuses are willing to explore as many approaches as they can, including the least obvious as well as the most likely. Geniuses delight in looking at problems in many different ways and in inventing unconventional approaches. When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, NASA was embarrassed to discover that its mirror had been ground improperly and it looked liked the telescope was destined to become a colossal failure. Engineers worked feverishly round the clock searching for a way to fix the problem. One NASA engineer, James Crocker, while taking a shower in his hotel
room, was playing with the shower head while thinking about the problem. The shower head could be extended to the users height. Suddenly he made a connection between the adjustable plumbing fixture and NASAs problem. He invented the idea of placing corrective mirrors on automated arms that would reach inside the telescope and adjust to the correct position. The final device, COSTAR (corrective optics space telescope axial replacement), which consisted of eight motors attached to five metal arms holding ten coinsized mirrors, was installed while Hubble orbited 330 miles above the earth and turned Hubble from a debacle into a spectacular triumph. The point is that by introducing something random into his thinking, the engineer disturbed his conventional thinking patterns and he came up with an unconventional approach. In nature, a genetic mutation is a variation that is created by a random or chance event which ignores the conventional wisdom contained in parental chromosomes. Nature then lets the process of natural selection decide which variations survive and thrive. An analogous process operates within geniuses. Creative geniuses produce a rich variety of original ideas and solutions because in addition to their conventional way of thinking, they will look for different ways to think about problems. They deliberately change the way they think by provoking different thinking patterns which incorporate random, chance and unrelated factors into their thinking process. These different thinking patterns enable them to look at the same information as everyone else and see something different.
Our attitudes influence our behavior, and this is true. But its also true that our behavior can influence our attitudes. Tibetan monks say their prayers by whirling their prayer wheels on which their prayers are inscribed. The whirling wheels spin the prayers into divine space. Sometimes, a monk will keep a dozen or so prayer wheels rotating like some juggling act in which whirling plates are balanced on top of long thin sticks. Many novice monks are not all that emotionally or spiritually involved at first. At first, it may be that the novice is thinking about his family, his doubts about a religious vocation or something else while he is going through the motions of spinning his prayer wheel. When the novice adopts the pose of a monk and makes it obvious to himself and others by playing a role, his brain will soon follow the role they are playing. It is not enough for the novice to have the intention of becoming a monk: the novice must act like a monk and rotate the prayer wheels. If one has the intention of becoming a monk and goes through the motions of acting like a monk, one will become a monk.
If you want to become an artist and all you do is go through the motions of painting a picture every day, you will become an artist. You may not become another Michelangelo but you will become more of an artist than someone who has never tried. The Greek philosopher Diogenes was once noticed begging from a statue. His friends were puzzled and alarmed at this behavior. Asked the reason for this pointless behavior, Diogenes replied, I am practicing the art of being rejected. By pretending to be rejected continually by the statue, Diogenes was beginning to understand the mind of a beggar. Every time we pretend to have an attitude and go through the motions, we trigger the emotions we create and strengthen the attitude we wish to cultivate. Another example is the personal experience of the great surrealist artist Salvador Dali. Dali was described by his fellow students at the Madrid art academy as morbidly shy according to his biographer Ian Gibson. He had a great fear of blushing and his shame about blushing drove him into solitude. It was his uncle who gave him the sage advice to become an actor in his relations with the people around him. He instructed him to pretend he was an extrovert and to act like an extrovert with everyone including his closest companions. Dali did just that to disguise his mortification. Every day he went through the motions of being an extrovert and, eventually, he became celebrated as the most extroverted, fearless, uninhibited and gregarious personalities of his time. He became what he pretended to be. Michelangelo was another artist who believed he was the greatest artist in the world and could master any form of art by going through the motions and learning the skills needed. His rivals persuaded Junius II to hire him to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel because they knew Michelangelo had seldom used color or painted in fresco. They were sure he would turn down the commission due to his inexperience. They planned to use his refusal as proof of his lack of talent. If he did accept it, they were convinced the result would be clownish and planned to use the result to point out his inadequacies to the art world. Michelangelo accepted the commission. He practiced with colors and painting in fresco until he was satisfied with his results. He executed the frescos in great discomfort, having to work with his face looking upwards, which impaired his sight so badly that he could not read save with his head turned backwards for months. By going through the motions of practicing painting with color and fresco, he created the masterpiece that established him as the artist of the age. EMOTION CAN ALSO GO FROM THE OUTSIDE IN Think, for a moment, about social occasions-visits, dates, dinners out with friends, gatherings, birthday parties, weddings, etc. Even when youre unhappy or depressed, these occasions force us to act as if we were happy. Observing others faces, postures, and voices, we unconsciously mimic their reactions. We synchronize our movements, posture, and tone of voice with theirs. Then by mimicking happy people, we become happy. Conversely, when you are in a happy mood and attend a funeral mimicking sad people you become sad and depressed.
CIA researchers have long been interested in developing techniques to help them study facial expressions of suspects. Two of the researchers began simulating facial expressions of anger and distress all day, each day for weeks. One of them admitted feeling terrible after a session of making those faces. Then the other realized that he felt poorly, too, so they began to keep track. They began monitoring their body during facial movements. Their findings were remarkable. They discovered that a facial expression alone is sufficient to create marked changes in the nervous system. In one exercise they raised their inner eyebrows, raised their cheeks, and lowered the corner of their lips and held this facial expression for a few minutes. They were stunned to discover that this simple facial expression generated feelings of sadness and anguish within them. The researchers then decided to monitor the heart rate and body temperatures of two groups of people. One group was asked to remember and relive the most sorrowful experience in their life. The other group in another room was simply asked to produce a series of facial expressions expressing sadness. Remarkably, the second group, the people who were pretending, showed the same physiological responses as the first. Try the following thought experiment. THOUGHT EXPERIMENT Lower your eyebrows. Raise your upper eyelid. Narrow the eyelids. Press your lips together.
Hold this expression and you will generate anger. Your heartbeat will go up ten or twelve beats. Your hands will get hot, and you will feel very unpleasant. The next time youre feeling depressed and want to feel happy and positive, try this. Put a pen between your teeth in far enough so that its stretching the edges of your mouth back without feeling uncomfortable. Hold it there for five minutes or so. Youll find yourself inexplicably in a happy mood. Then try walking with long strides and looking straight ahead. You will amaze yourself at how fast your facial expressions can change your emotions. Emotion doesnt just go from the inside out. It goes from the outside in.
Archimedes got his sudden insight about the principle of displacement that became a law of physics while daydreaming in his bath. According to legend, he was so excited by his discovery that he rushed naked through the streets shouting, Eureka! (Ive found it.) Henri Poincare, the French genius, spoke of incredible ideas and insights that came to him with suddenness and immediate certainty out of the blue. Charles Darwin could point to the exact spot on a road where he arrived at the solution for the origin of species while riding in his carriage and not thinking about his subject. Other geniuses offer similar experiences. Like a sudden flash of lightning, ideas and solutions seemingly appear out of nowhere. A well-known physicist once said that all great discoveries in science were made by scientists who were not thinking about a specific problem. Frank Wilczek of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, deduced how the nuclei of atoms stay together, one of those rare knowing the mind of God discoveries. His breakthrough occurred when he was reviewing a totally different problem in fact, a different force of nature. He suddenly experienced an Aha and realized that a failed approach in one area would be successful in another. Similarly, Bertrand Russell wrote in The Conquest of Happiness: I have found, for example, that, if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic, the best plan is think about it with very great intensity the greatest intensity of which I am capable for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. This is a commonplace phenomenon with creative thinkers in art, science, liberal arts and business. A majority of creative thinkers reported that they got their best ideas and insights when not thinking about the problem. Ideas came while walking, recreating, or working on some other unrelated problem. This suggests how the creative act came to be associated with divine inspiration for the illumination appears to be involuntary. For, in other words, how can ideas be created from nothing? Where Divine Inspiration Comes From?
The Rockefeller University physicist Heinz Pagels in his book The Cosmic Code, wrote that quantum physics is a kind of code that interconnects everything in the universe. There are, for example, remarkable similarities between the mysteries of how our creative mind works and what quantum physicists have observed in their studies of the universe. Thoughts in our subconscious minds behave remarkably like subatomic particles in quantum physics which simultaneously exist and dont exist until observed and eventually collapse into what physicists call a collapse of the wave function. This may be the same mental process that creates the Aha experience or divine inspiration that creative thinkers report. One of the discoveries of quantum mechanics is that something can simultaneously exist and not exist; if a particle is capable of moving along several different paths, or existing in several different states, the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics allows it to travel along all paths and exist in all possible states simultaneously. However, if the particle happens to be measured by some means, its path or state is no longer uncertain. The simple act of measurement instantly forces it into just one path or state. It is as if the physical world wants to explore many alternative pathways before collapsing into a settled state by the interaction of an observer. Physicists call this a collapse of the wave function. An example in physics is Werner Heisenbergs uncertainty principle that demonstrated that light can be seen as a wave or as a particle depending upon the interaction of the observer. Renowned physicist David Bohm suggested parallels between this activity of quantum physics with subatomic particles and how the creative mind processes thought. The Mind is Like the Universe The mind is like the universe. You have billions of bits of thoughts, observations, and information floating around in your conscious and subconscious mind, totally unobserved, with each bit presenting a multitude of possibilities which evolve and change over time. These thoughts are in multiple states such as words, phrases, metaphors, images, feelings, dreams, symbols, abstractions, voices, and so on. Particles of thought pop up out of nothingness and become entangled with other thoughts influencing each other instantaneously. Just as subatomic particles do not exist unless observed, your subconscious thoughts do not exist until observed. In other words, there is no thought independent of you, the observer. When you are brainstorming for ideas and have a thought, the value of that thought depends upon how you interact with it. If you are an analytical thinker and automatically classify thoughts as irrelevant or unrelated, you are crippling your potential for creative ideas and solutions. We are educated to be critical, judgmental, logical thinkers and to instantly evaluate and judge thoughts based on our past experiences. If there is any ambiguity, the judgment is invariably negative and the thought dissipates back into nothingness. The ordinary mind has no tolerance for ambiguity because it is conditioned to simplify the complexities of life. We are taught to be exclusionary thinkers, which means we exclude anything that is not
immediately related to our subject. If there is any ambiguity, the average person will invariably censor it and the thought dissipates back into nothingness. This exclusionary way of thinking is how we lost our natural capacity to spontaneously generate ideas. This is why the average person produces only a handful of ideas when brainstorming; whereas, a creative genius will produce great quantities of ideas. Thomas Edison, for example, created 3000 different ideas for a lighting system before he stepped back to evaluate them for practicality and profitability. All geniuses produce great quantities of ideas because they uncritically search for all possible alternatives. If you ask the average person to find a needle in a haystack, he or she will stop when they find a needle. Creative thinkers, on the other hand, will go through the entire haystack looking for all the possible needles. You give value to your thoughts when you interact with them and accept them uncritically. Once observed and accepted, thoughts become loose and move freely around in your subconscious mind. The more work you put into thinking about a problem, the more thoughts and bits of information you set in random motion. Your subconscious mind never rests. When you quit thinking about the subject, your thoughts keep colliding, combining, recombining and making associations. Eventually bits of thoughts and information will become entangled and create a novel idea which will bubble up into your consciousness when you least expect it. Charles Darwins richness of imagination was equaled only by his willingness to consider what others did not consider worthwhile. His colleagues would compare new ideas and theories with their existing patterns of experience. If the ideas didnt fit, they would reject them out of hand. Conversely, Darwin would consider all ideas and theories to see where they led. Darwins colleagues called him a fool and his work the experiments of a fool. His willingness not to judge what others called fools experiments filled his subconscious mind with billions of colliding thoughts that eventually led to his epiphany about biological evolution. The Key to Creative Thinking The key to productive creative thinking is to harvest the quantum wave-like proliferations of thoughts which abound in our subconscious mind. We make these real by observing and accepting them without judgment of any kind. After a conscious preparation to produce new ideas, list every thought, particles of thoughts, hunch, and, in short, everything that comes to mind without categorizing, evaluating or judging. My favorite technique to generate ideas is to give myself an idea quota. A quota will focus your energy in a way that guarantees fluency of thought. Suppose I ask you to list alternative uses for the common brick as fast as you can. No doubt, you would come up with some cases, but my hunch is not very many. The average adult comes up with three to six. However, if I asked you to come up with sixty uses for the common brick as fast as you can, this forces you to come up with 60 ideas. By forcing yourself to meet a quota, you put
your internal critic on hold and write everything down, including the obvious and weak. To meet your quota, you find yourself listing all the usual uses (build a wall, fireplace, outdoor barbeque and so on) as well as listing everything that comes to mind (anchor, projectile in riots, ballast, a tool for leveling dirt, material for sculptures, doorstop, device to hold down newspapers, a portable step to carry with you so you can stand on it in crowds, stone crab cracker and so on) as you stretch your imagination to meet your quota. A quota allows you to generate more imaginative alternatives than you otherwise would. Pillow Quota Two designers wanted to create a new unique pillow and decided to have a free-wheeling brainstorming session with a quota of 120 ideas. They listed every idea that popped into their minds. Pillows made of grass, pillows with different scents, pillows which played lullabies, pillows that recorded night sounds such as snoring and talking, pillows that move gently like rolling waves, pillows that woke you by being timed to wake you with a dim glow that grows brighter and brighter as more time goes bylike waking up to the rising sun, pillows with text devices so you say good night to your loved one miles away, and so on. After they reached 120 ideas, they walked away from the problem. Three days later they met and agreed to produce a novel pillow. They decided to have electroluminescent wire woven into the textile pattern of two pillows. When you touch or hug one the other starts glowing correspondingly even if it is located somewhere else in the world. The two pillows are connected wirelessly via a communication platform on the Internet and thus you can experience a sense of closeness over long distances. The designers produced a number of uncensored ideas to meet their quota, recorded them and then left the thoughts to incubate in their subconscious minds. The thoughts collided, combined, and recombined in a million different ways until the most likely combination of pillows glowing by touch via the internet surfaced as the idea they decided to pursue. In each and every experience there is a multitude of other experiences lying in wait. Once you chose one you marginalize the others. To say it very simply, the moment we call something a we have marginalized all of its other possible states (b, c, d, e, etc) into nothingness because we dont see them. By not marginalizing any of their ideas from brainstorming, the pillow designers multiplied their possibilities. Instead of just a, to work with, they had a, b, c, d, e, f, and so on and ended up combining three or four of their possibilities into a new, novel and creative idea. If you spend your time and energy looking for reasons why things cant work or cant be done, you end up with nothing. You cant create something out of nothing. You need to persistently work on your challenge and uncritically feed quantities of thoughts, ideas, opinions and observations into your subconscious mind so it has something it can actively create into the new and novel ideas you need for your personal and business lives.
Language profoundly shapes the way people think. Benjamin Lee Whorf, a renowned linguist, used the Hopi Indian language as an example. Whorf believed the Hopi had no grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call time. Consequently, Hopi speakers think about time in a way that is very different from the way most of the rest of us with our obsession with past, present, and future think about it. To the Hopi, said Whorf, all time is now. There is no past or future, only now. Play at Being Rich There is a curious, extremely interesting term in Japanese that refers to a very special manner of polite, aristocratic speech known as play language, (asobase kotoba), whereby, instead of saying to a person, for example, I see that you have come to Tokyo, one would express the observation by saying, I see that you are playing at being in Tokyo the idea being that the person addressed is in such control of his life and his powers that for him everything is a play, a game. He is able to enter into life as one would enter into a game, freely and with ease. What a glorious way to approach life. What has to be done is attacked with such a will that in the performance one is literally in play. I am playing at being fired from my job. My wife is playing being mad at me for not helping her paint the room. This attitude that play language cultivates is the attitude described by Nietzsche as love of ones fate. War or Peace Ralph Summy, who directs the Matsunaga Institute for Peace, is well aware of the influence of language and encourages students to replace violent emotions by replacing violent expressions with nonviolent language. Instead of describing someone as shooting a hole in an argument, he suggests, that this person could be described as unraveling a ball of yarn. Summy also recommends that the expression to kill two birds with one stone be replaced by to stroke two birds with one hand. Dressed to kill, he adds, might become dressed to thrill. Substituting new language, Summy concludes, arrests peoples attention and paves the way for discussion on a range of peace topics. His work with language suggests that by paying attention and substituting nonviolent for violent words can change attitudes and make for a kinder dialogue. You can also use language to prime how an individual thinks. In a pair of studies about the influence of language, researchers at the University of British Columbia had participants
play a dictator game. The game is simple: youre offered ten one one-dollar coins and told to take as many as you want and leave the rest for the player in the other room (who is, unbeknown to you, a research confederate). The fair split, of course, is fifth-fifty, but most anonymous dictators play selfishly, leaving little or nothing for the other player. In the control group the vast majority of participants kept everything or nearly everything. In the experimental condition, the researchers next prompted thoughts of God by using a well-established priming technique: participants, who again included both theists and atheists, first had to unscramble sentences containing words such as God, divine, love, and sacred. That way, going into the dictator game again, players had God on their minds without being consciously aware of it. Sure enough, the God prime worked like a charm, leading to fairer splits. Without the God prime, only a few of the participants split the money evenly, but when primed with the religious words, 62 percent did. Thou The language you use can even change your relationship with animals. We typically regard ourselves as superior to other animals, which we see as lower forms of life. We see them as its. Look a bear. It is looking for food. In contrast to our relationship to animals, the Native American Algonquin and Lakota Sioux regarded the animals as equal to humans, and in many ways superior, as expressed in their language. They addressed all life anything animate or dynamicas thou, as objects of reverence: the trees, the rivers, the buffalo, the snake were all thou. You can address anything as a thou. The ego that perceives thou is not the same ego that perceives it. Whenever you see an animal, silently think the words thou dog, thou bird, or whatever term fits and so on. Try it for a day or so to see for yourself. You will be amazed at how a simple word change can make a dramatic change in your perception of all life. This One has a Story to Tell Try another exercise that demonstrates the power of words. Write a long story about something that has happened to you. Do not write I or me, but instead write this one or this body to represent you, and that body or that person, to represent other people in the story. For example, This one remembers a Christmas with other bodies when this one was young that was the most disappointing Christmas of this ones life. This body received no gifts from the other bodies which made this one sad and depressed. The words you use will have let you feel you are writing a story about someone else, even though its about you. You will feel strange and start thinking thoughts about yourself that you have never thought before.
Language patterns affect our perception, attitude, behavior and how we live our lives. Words convey certain qualities of subjective experience that makes them unique and indispensable in understanding the current psychodynamics out of which an individual is operating. These subtle, yet utterly compelling differences are immediately evident when you apply different verbs to the same content. For example, you ask six people if they believe they can become creative. They each respond differently. Here are the six responses: I want to be creative. I can be creative. Im able to be creative. I should be creative. I need to be creative. I will be creative.
Which of the six has the best chance of becoming a creative thinker? I think you will agree with me that it is the one who said, I will be creative.
Pablo Picasso once said: Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist after he grows up. Many creative geniuses tend to return to the conceptual world of childhood as catalysts for either their work or their ideas. Our ability to learn new things is a characteristic we lose over time, says Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. Children are designed by evolution to be extremely good learnersto be able to learn about anything thats interesting and important in the world around them, she says. When you look at their brains, theyre extremely flexible, so they can change what they think based on new evidence very quickly and easily. * There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago. Robert Oppenheimer The average adult never seems to question the mysteries of the universe? Instead of being attracted to and exploring anything new and exciting in our environments, the average adult begins to focus only on those things that are relevant to them. We become close-minded and oblivious to the possibilities that surround us. The mind becomes so set and so organized that we seem to lose the ability to create new ideas or even to recognize ideas developed by others. This is what Picasso meant when he described the problem as how to remain an artist after we grow up. Picasso certainly had a point, and now researchers at North Dakota State University think they may have found an answer. Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson, who carried out a US study into adult creativity have discovered that the more an adult acts and thinks like a child, the more imaginative he or she becomes. Thinking like a child is entirely possible for adults, says Robinson. And we found that doing so is beneficial for certain types of creative activities. This exercise is designed to help you achieve a childlike state of mind even if you do it for as little as 10 minutes a day.
* It Takes a Lifetime to Paint Like a Child..Pablo Picasso To get ideas, think like a kid. Get in touch with the child in you. Take a few moments, relax yourself as deeply as you can and perform the following exercise: (1) Close your eyes and relax. (2) Select the age that you think you were at your most creative. E.g., age 12. (3) Regress yourself back to that age in phases. If you are 30 years of age, go back in time, skipping some years. E. g., 29, 25, 23, 17, 15, 12. (4) Allow each phase to make its impression on your mind before going further back to your selected age. Allow your memory to deepen as you go back in time. Give yourself time to allow remembrances to come forth. Relax and enjoy your trip back in time. (5) When you arrive at your age, reconstruct the details of that age as much as possible. Experience again the Christmas, July fourth, birthdays, vacations, friends, teachers, and school terms you experienced when you were 12. Feel as if you are back in time. Deepen the experience as much as you can. Remember being in school instead of remembering being in school. Remember playing with your best friend, instead of remembering playing with your best friend. (6) Think of your problem. How do you see the problem at age 12? What questions would you ask? What solution would you propose? * If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.. ~Jean Piaget It has been theorized by some that play is an integral form of learning. It allows people to practice skills they might need later down the line. But play goes beyond such life skills. When we play, we gain practice manipulating things and controlling the outcome of events. We also devise new solutions for old problems and create new endings for our experiences. A good way to start thinking like a child is to abandon your judgment and knowledge of what is practical and start asking playful questions. 1. Try seeing and thinking about your problem as if it were alive. What would your problem be? (E.g., the problem of getting a promotion might appear as a small fish trying to avoid hungry predator).
2. Suppose problems were reincarnated as people or things. Think of the past reincarnations of your problem. What was it? (The problem of improving office morale reincarnated as Joseph Goebbels.) 3. What if your project were an animal? What would it look like? Draw an animal that metaphorically represents your problem. 4. Can you imagine the likely past and future of your problem? 5. Look at the problem as the top of something. Can you imagine what the underground portion looks like. Can you describe it? 6. View the world from the perspective of the problem. What does the world look like to the problem? 7. Imagine your problem is a movie. Describe it? Is it a drama, thriller, comedy? What is the story line? Who are the actors? How would the movie be advertised and marketed? 8. If you were a hundred years in the future, how would you solve your problem? What if you were a caveman? Would the problem still exist? If it didnt, what would be a related problem? 9. If you were the problems psychotherapist, what would the problem confide to you? What is the problems biggest concern? What would be your counsel? 10. Can you draw or describe the house your problem would reside it if it were a living being? Geniuses are childlike because they are able to wed a more advanced understanding of a subject with the kinds of questions, problems, issues and sensibilities that most characterize a wonder-filled child. Geniuses, like children, are willing to ask the obvious questions. An example is a recent conversation I had with Justin a nine-year old neighbor. He asked me what was here before the world existed. I said, Nothing. Nothing, he said, Where did the world come from? I replied Scientists say it was created by a Big Bang. A gigantic explosion. If there was nothing, he said, How can nothing cause an explosion? How can something come from nothing? Can you answer that? I cant. Maybe thats why Albert Einstein once said that the ordinary person could learn all the physics we will ever need to know if we could understand the mind of a three-year old child.