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October 20 - October 25, 2024
Think about the trees along a wild and windblown lake. The pattern of these trees is so made that when the wind blows they all bend in concert, and all of the forces in the system stay in balance. The pattern of the bending trees, plants, and roots makes them all self-maintaining and whole.
Nature doesn’t care if patterns are creative or destructive. What matters to nature is the way things self-organize, the way they cooperate to form coherent patterns. When you look at nature’s patterns, contents aren’t contained anywhere but are revealed only by the dynamics. With the trees, form and content are inextricably connected and can’t be separated. The healthy pattern of trees bending in concert creates harmony and beauty, whereas the other pattern is destructive and ugly.
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It is the same with people. With the trees, it is the wind, rain, roots and erosion that form the patterns; with people, it is a common body of human behaviors from which patterns blend together to create the person. A positive self-image is like the pattern of the trees and wind and is self-maintaining and creative; a poor self-image is like the pattern of the gullies and rain and is self-destructive.
We are tacitly taught that we exist and just are the way we are. We have been taught that all people are true to their own genes, environment, and nature. We are conditioned to be objects. We are taught to be “me,” instead of “I.” When you think of yourself as “me,” you are limited. The “me” is always limited because it is a passive object, rather than an active subject. The “me” doesn’t act; it is acted upon by outside forces. When you see yourself as an object, you believe how others (parents, teachers, peers, colleagues, and so on) describe you. You become that. You might want to be an
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“The one thing that’s always in my control is what is going on in my head. The first thing I did was to think about who I am and how I could prevail. By choosing my feelings on a conscious level, I am able to control my mood swings and feel good about myself most of the time.” He cultivated a positive attitude toward life by interpreting all of his experiences in a positive way.
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He said his life is like standing on a rolling ship. You’re going to slip. You’re going to grab onto things. You’re going to fall. And it’s a constant challenge to get up and push yourself to keep going. But in the end, he said, the most exhilarating feeling in the world is getting up and moving forward with a smile.
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As you read this, you may be thinking of people you know who are alive and people who are, in comparison, lifeless. This woman was wonderfully alive and self-creating. When you meet people like Richard Cohen or the woman in Montreal you get a vague feeling that you “ought to be” something more. You already know this feeling. You get this feeling when you recognize the thing in others that you long to be. The feeling that you ought to be like that seems so trivial, so fundamental that you dare not admit it to others. You long to become more alive and creative in your personal and business
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It is not easy to put this feeling into words. The person who believes he is a subject is frank, open-minded, sincerely going ahead, facing the situation freely, and looking for ways to make things work and get things done. The person who believes she is an object is inhibited, pushed, driven, acting by command or intimidation, has a one-track mind, and is always looking for reasons things can’t be done or why things can’t work. They cannot deal with life as free and happy people; they are narrowed and enslaved by their attitude.
Creators are joyful and positive. Creators look at “what is” and “what can be” instead of “what is not.” Instead of excluding possibilities, creators include all possibilities, both real and imagined. They choose to interpret their own world and do not rely upon the interpretations of others. And most importantly, creators are creative because they believe they are creative.
It’s impossible to be creative if you are negative. Most people presume that our attitudes affect our behavior, and this is true. But it’s also true that our behavior determines our attitudes. You can pretend or act your way into a new attitude. We choose to be positive or to be negative. 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.
Observing other’s 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. We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live: with purpose or adrift, with joy or with
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What would you think of someone who said, “I would like to have a cat, provided it barked”? The common desire to be creative, provided it’s something that can be easily willed or wished, is precisely equivalent.
Creativity is not an accident, not something that is genetically determined. It is not a result of some easily learned magic trick or secret, but a consequence of your intention to be creative and your determination to learn and use creative-thinking strategies.
By changing your perspective, you expand your possibilities until you see something that you were unable to see before.
Thinkertoys train you how to get ideas. They are specific hands-on techniques that enable you to come up with big or small ideas; ideas that make money, solve problems, beat the competition, and further your career; ideas for new products and new ways of doing things.
This book will change how you perceive your own creativity, while stripping creativity itself of its mystique. You will, perhaps for the first time, see endless possibilities stretching before you. You will learn how to: Generate ideas at will. Find new ways to make money. Create new business opportunities. Manipulate and modify ideas until you come up with the most innovative and powerful ideas possible. Create new products, services, and processes. Improve old products, services, and processes. Develop solutions to complex business problems. Revitalize markets. See problems as opportunities.
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Each Thinkertoy is a specific technique for getting ideas to solve your challenges. Each chapter contains a blueprint that gives precise instructions for using the technique and an explanation of why it works—including anecdotes, stories, and examples of how real heroes used each technique to produce ideas and breakthroughs. I call them heroes because they left behind a mark, a sign, an idea, an enterprise, a product, or a service that reminds us of their innovation.
Each chapter begins with an inspirational quote from The Art of War by the legendary master, Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu wrote his extraordinary book in China more than 2,400 years ago, but his principles are as applicable to creativity in business as in warfare.
A friend of mine, Hank Zeller (an executive, entrepreneur, inventor, and poet), once described creativity this way: “When you realize that you just came up with an idea that betters anything that has been done, well, your hair stands up on end, you feel an incredible sense of awe; it’s almost as if you heard a whisper from God.”
To be creative, you have to believe and act as if you are creative.
If you believe you are creative and act as if you are creative, you will begin to create ideas, like the third line, out of anything. The worth of the ideas you create will depend in large part upon the way you define your problems.
When you are depressed, your thoughts are quite different than when you are happy. When you feel rich and successful, your thoughts are quite different than when you feel poor and unsuccessful. Similarly, when you feel you are creative, your ideas are quite different than when you feel you are not.
Nothing is more harmful to a positive creative attitude than fears, uncertainties, and doubts (FUDS); yet, most people let FUDS control their lives.
Following this incident, you do not look at the oil pressure gauge continuously when you’re driving, allowing the gauge to monopolize your thoughts. To do so would mean slow and erratic driving, if you had the courage to drive at all. So it is with your fears and doubts. You need to acknowledge them, and then replace them with positive thoughts.
Lecky found that there were two powerful levers for changing beliefs and overcoming fears, convictions that are strongly felt by nearly everyone. These are: The belief that one is capable of doing one’s share, holding up one’s end of the log, exerting a certain amount of independence. The belief that there is something inside one that makes one equal in talent and ability to the rest of the world, and that one should not belittle oneself or allow oneself to suffer indignities.
The important thing to remember is that you do not have to change your personality or your life, or somehow make yourself into a new and better person in order to understand and replace your negative thoughts. General George Patton was once asked if he ever experienced fear or uncertainty before battle. He replied that he often experienced fear before, and even during, a battle, but the important thing was “I never take counsel of my fears.”
Tick-Tock is a very powerful exercise based on Lecky’s work that is designed to help you overcome your fears, doubts, and uncertainties.
BLUEPRINT Zero in on and write down those negative thoughts that are preventing you from realizing your goal. Write them under “Tick.” Sit quietly and examine the negatives. Learn how you are irrationally twisting things and blowing them out of proportion. Substitute an objective, positive thought for each subjective, negative one. Write these under “
The psychologists recommended instituting a simple two-part program designed to change the belief systems of those who thought they were not creative. The CEO agreed, and within a year, the uncreative people became many more times creative than the original creative group. Once their attitudes changed, they began to pay attention to small and large challenges and to flex their creative muscles in extraordinary ways. The following year, this group generated many innovative programs and blockbuster books. These people regained their original spin and began to transform themselves and the world
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To increase your self-affirmation, get in the habit of remembering your successes, your good qualities and characteristics, and forgetting your failures.
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Success breeds success. Small successes are stepping-stones to greater ones. The first exercise is to write and maintain a self-affirmation list. Record all the things you like about yourself—your positive qualities, characteristics, and traits. Include the successes you have had in every area of your life: work, home, school, and so on. Keep adding to this list as you think of more things and as you accomplish more. Acknowledging yourself, your abilities, and your own unique qualities will encourage you to get moving.
If you make a practice of remembering your successes and good personal qualities and paying less attention to your failures, you will begin to experience more success than you would have thought possible.
The second technique the psychologists used is a deceptively simple yet incredibly powerful technique that uses written affirmations to cultivate and reinforce the belief that you are a creative person. Human beings act, feel, and perform in accordance with what they imagine to be true about themselves and their environment. What you imagine to be true becomes, in fact, true. Hold a given picture of yourself long and steadily enough in your mind’s eye and you will become that picture. Picture yourself vividly as defeated and that alone will make victory impossible. Picture yourself vividly as
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To visualize yourself as creative, affirm that you believe it to be true. An affirmation is a positive statement that something is already so. It can be any positive statement, general (“I am creative”) or specific (“I am always in the right place at the right time, engaged in the right activity in order to get ideas”
Write your affirmations about being creative every day for five days. During this period, the negatives will almost certainly stop; at that point just continue writing the positive affirmations, until you no longer feel the need.
In the same way, when you expect to be creative you will influence your brain to be creative. Once you believe you are creative, you will begin to believe in the worth of your ideas, and you will have the persistence to implement them.
Each one of us must affirm our own individual creativity. Although many facets of human creativity are similar, they are never identical. All pine trees are very much alike, yet none is exactly the same as another. Because of this range of similarity and difference, it is difficult to summarize the infinite variations of individual creativity. Each person has to do something different, something that is unique.
The monk may be thinking about dinner, his religious future, or something else while he is spinning his prayer wheel. Similarly, there are priests who go through the motions of celebrating Mass without feeling a connection to the liturgy. When the monk and priest assume the role of “religious person” and make it obvious to themselves and others by playing that role, their brains will soon follow. It is not enough for the monk or priest to have the intention of being religious: the monk must rotate the wheel; the priest must say the Mass. If one acts like a monk, one will become a monk. If one
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If you act like an idea person, you will become one. It is the intention and going through the motions of being creative that counts.
This world offers no guarantees, only opportunities and vicissitudes. When you reach for the stars you may not get one, but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.
Set yourself an idea quota for a challenge you are working on, such as five new ideas every day for a week. You’ll find the first five are the hardest, but these will quickly trigger other ideas. The more ideas you come up with, the greater your chances of coming up with a winner.
Set an idea quota. Get tone. Don’t be a Duke of Habit. Feed your head. Do a content analysis. Create a Brainbank. Be a travel junkie. Capture your thoughts.
Ordinarily we do not make the fullest use of our ability to see. We move through life looking at a tremendous quantity of information, objects, and scenes, and yet we look but do not see. Paying attention to the world around you will help you develop the extraordinary capacity to look at mundane things and see the miraculous.
Really paying attention to what you see will enable you to develop a kind of binary vision, with which you perceive what others see, but notice something unexpected as well.
An idea can be found anywhere. Maybe it’s up in the hills, under the leaves, or hiding in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it will never be found. But what you find by paying attention, whatever you find, will always lead to something.
Deliberately program changes into your daily life. Make a list of things you do by habit. Most of the items will probably be those little things that make life comfortable but also make it unnecessary for you to think. Next, take the listed habits, one by one, and consciously try to change them for a day, a week, a month, or whatever. Take a different route to work. Change your sleeping hours. Change your working hours. Listen to a different radio station each day. Read a different newspaper. Make new friends. Try different recipes. If you normally vacation in the summer, vacation in the
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Creative thinkers read to feed their minds new information and ideas. As Gore Vidal put it, “The brain that doesn’t feed itself eats itself.”
“The brain that doesn’t feed itself eats itself.”
Here are some ideas to pump your mind when you read: Select carefully. Before you read a book ask: “How good an exercise for my creative mind will this provide?” Make the most of your reading time by sampling broadly and reading selectively.
My life. I use this as a method for finding seeds to plant in the minds of the people in my life. The way I think of it, if I find a new idea or aphorism from each book that I read and share it with a friend or co-worker, we can collectively come up with new ideas or a new perspective on initiatives that we’re working on. It’s a nice way to enrich each other’s lives.
Take notes. In Albert Paine’s biography of Mark Twain, Paine wrote: “On the table by him, and on his bed, and on the billiard-room shelves, he kept the books he read most. All, or nearly all, had annotations—spontaneously uttered marginal notes, title prefatories, or comments. They were the books he read again and again, and it was seldom that he had nothing to say with each fresh reading.”
