Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques

by Michael Michalko

The majority of us feel an emptiness and incoherence in our lives, which is why we think of ourselves as blanks or squiggles instead of diamonds. We know the

diamond-shaped dot was what we wanted to select but, in some way, our sense of self made us feel unworthy, and so we rationalized why we selected the squiggle or the blank. It is the same way in life.

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 artist, but others might tell you that you have no talent, training, or temperament to be an artist.

“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.

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 f...

Richard Cohen is the subject of his life and controls his own destiny. People who live as subjects are wonderfully alive and creative. Once, on a rainy Sunday afternoon in a café in Old Montreal, I saw a woman rise from her table and, for no apparent reason, start to sing opera. She had a certain smile, and I knew she was perfectly at home with herself as she sang. She was wearing a great wide hat, her arms were flung out in an e...

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 narro...

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.

But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live: with purpose or adrift, with joy or with joylessness, with hope or with despair, with humor or with sadness, with a positive outlook or a negative outlook, with pride or with shame, with inspiration or with defeat, and with honor or with dishonor. We decide what makes us significant or insignificant. We decide to be creative or to be indifferent. No matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices and

decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make. We decide. We choose. In the end, our own creativity is decided by what we choose to do or what we refuse to do. And as we decide and choose, so are our destinies formed.

By changing your perspective, you expand your possibilities until you see something that you were unable to see before.

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.

intuition and imagination.

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. Become more productive. Be the “idea person” in your organization. Know where to look for the “breakthrough idea.” Become indispensable to your organization.

“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.”

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. The third chapter, “Challenges,” shows how to word problem statements so that the final statement has the feel of a well-hit golf ball.

“To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands.” SUN TZU

This chapter contains some very simple exercises that will help you overcome your fears, doubts, and uncertainties, affirm your self-worth, and cultivate a creative attitude.

Nothing is more harmful to a positive creative attitude than fears, uncertainties, and doubts (FUDS); yet, most people let FUDS control their lives.

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.

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.”

To increase your self-affirmation, get in the habit of remembering your successes, your good qualities and characteristics, and forgetting your failures. It doesn’t matter how many times you have failed in the past; what matters is the successful attempt, which should be remembered and reinforced. A successful salesperson, for example, must be willing to fail in closing an order several times before succeeding once.

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 ...

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 uniq...

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”). Take a few minutes and write down several different affirmations about your creativity.

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.

“Anciently the skillful warriors first made themselves invincible and awaited the enemy’s moment of vulnerability.” SUN TZU

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. If you want to be an artist, and actually go through the motions of being one, you will become at least an adequate artist. You may not become another van Gogh, but you will be much more of an artist than someone who has neither had the intention nor gone through the motions. There is no way of knowing how far intention and action can take you. 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. This chapter contains eleven exercises that will encourage you to behave like an idea person.

Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents. He was a great believer in exercising his mind and the minds of his workers and felt that without a quota he probably wouldn’t have achieved very much. His personal invention quota was a minor invention every ten days and a major invention every six months. To Edison, an idea quota was the difference between eating beefsteak or a plateful of Black Beauty stew.

Most probably you found some letters and numbers. If I told you your quota was to find all twenty-six letters of the alphabet and the numerals 0 through 9, chances are you would search the puzzle until you located them all. And you will find them all because they are all there. Similarly, you can stretch your mind to find ideas to fill idea quotas.

Fighter pilots say, “I’ve gone tone” when their radar locks onto a target. That’s the point at which the pilot and plane are totally focused on the target. “Getting tone” in everyday life means paying attention to what’s happening around you.

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. Did you see anything unexpected in the below illustration? If not, look again.

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.

This exercise is designed to help you pay pure attention to the world around you. It was developed by Minor White, who taught photography at MIT.

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 winter. Change your reading habits. If you normally read nonfiction, read fiction. Change your break habits. If you usually drink coffee, drink juice. Change the type of restaurants you go to. Change your recreation. Try boating instead of golf, and so on. Take a bath instead of a shower. Watch a different television news broadcaster. FEEDING YOUR HEAD 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.” Here are some ideas to pump your mind when you read: Select carefully. Bef...

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...

Read biographies. Biographies are treasure-houses of ideas.

content analysis.” He adapted this notion from methods used in a book he read about the Civil War. The historian who wrote the book, in turn, adapted content analysis from an article he had read about the CIA’s intelligence-gathering methods.

Your own content analysis will be infinitely more valuable to you than any of the available services, some of which charge clients $25,000 a year to provide them with this type of information. When you perceive trends and patterns of interest, begin to pump your mind for ideas, opportunities, and business possibilities. Look for connections and relationships between your content analysis and your business challenges.