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September 28 - September 30, 2025
Our brain is wired to look for the right answer, and once it finds one, it stops looking beyond. This is known as The Right Answer Syndrome.
you have to consciously work on The Right Answer Syndrome to rewire your brain, else it will block your creativity. “Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it is the only one you have.” ― Emile Chartier Alain
Why does the human mind always look for The Right Answer? There are two reasons. The first reason starts with our upbringing. As I said earlier, we are brought up in The Right Answer society. As a child, you learned that ‘an acceptable’ right answer is appreciated and rewarded.
You quickly learn that you score marks only when you give an answer expected by the teacher. You also get conditioned to multiple-choice questions, wherein you are supposed to choose the right answer from the four options given. Once you check the box corresponding to the right answer, what happens to the remaining ones?
By the time you complete your studies, the mold of The Right Answer is permanently formed. As an adult, for every situation or challenge, you keep searching for the right answer. And the moment you find one, you stop looking for more answers because you have learned that the remaining ones are obviously wrong once you find the right one.
low threshold towards ambiguity, uncertainty, and paradoxes. Whenever we are confronted with such situations, we try to bring clarity as fast as possible by quickly finding the right answer.
To overcome this creativity block, you will be required to do a lot of unlearning. First, you need to let go of your strongly held The Right Answer Syndrome. Next time, when you think you have found the right answer, continue looking for more-right answers. Eventually, you need to develop a new mind that can live in peace with multiple ideas, even if some of them could even be conflicting with each other. You need to apply the same unlearning process even during the idea generation stage.
“Most people stop looking when they find the proverbial needle in the haystack. I would continue looking to see if there were other n...
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When you shift your mindset from The Right Answer to Many Right Answers, you open the door to a flow of creative ideas. You will notice a big change in your creative ability. Whenever a creative idea flashes, you will remind yourself not to get married with the first best ideas. As you will know that even better ideas are on the way.
What is half of thirteen? Is your answer 6.5? That’s the first right answer. Now, your challenge is to find out the more-right answers. You can find the answers at the end of the book.
The majority of creative ideas get killed by someone even before they are presented to a larger group. And that someone is you. We tend to get too critical or judgmental with our own creative ideas. As a result, most of them don’t even see the light of the day. If you critically judge the ideas too early, you may end up throwing some unpolished diamonds out of the window, believing them to be ordinary stones.
—1. Ideas are born ugly. 2. Some ideas will eventually connect with other ideas.
Ed Catmull puts it quite candidly about Pixar movies in his book, Creativity Inc, “Early on, all of our movies suck.” He further adds that it is our job to take them “from suck to non-suck.” All of you are familiar with the word brainstorming. “Let’s brainstorm” is the common lingo used in corporates whenever a group of people wants to ideate on something.
During the initial stage of ideation, follow these two commandments— 1. You will not judge (any idea) 2. You will not discard (any idea)
Most of the time, stand-alone ideas may not sound great, but cross-pollination or fusion with other ideas brings the magic. This is why you should not discard any ideas at the initial stage.
Our world is full of people who want creative ideas but are unwilling to move out of their comfort zone.
Don’t apply the measure of practicality to reject at least your own ideas in the beginning. At the idea generation stage, you need to focus on generating creative ideas. Only towards the end, you need to figure out ways to make it practical.
“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough.”
Einstein had said, “If your ideas at first aren’t absurd, there’s no hope for them.”
https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/culture-magazines/pet-rocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock#:~:text=Pet%20Rock%20is%20a%20collectible,with%20straw%20and%20breathing%20holes.
In order to be creative, ideas must add value, make a difference, enable progress, open the door of opportunities, and do many more things that bring fulfillment to our lives.
“Creativity is the process of having original ideas which have value.” — Ken Robinson
Every artist gets asked the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” The honest answer, “I steal them.”
“Art is theft.” - Pablo Picasso
“The only art I’ll ever study is stuff I can steal from.” - David Bowie
If you are confused with this contradiction and not feeling too happy about it, I urge you to get used to it. You are learning one more lesson in creativity, which is to master creativity. You must learn to be at peace with contradictions and paradoxes.
Dots include everything that goes into the making of a new innovative idea. Dots could be past experience, knowledge, skills that you have learned, and innumerable small ideas — your own or of others. Dots also include successful as well as failed experiments carried out in the past by you or others.
When people talk about stealing ideas, they are basically referring to dots. And when they talk about original ideas, they refer to a completely new idea created by connecting the existing dots.
Every creative idea, every innovation, and every new invention is built on d...
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If you connect the same dots in the same way you had been connecting, you will get the same, run-of-the-mill ideas that you had been getting.
The originality of the idea lies in its connections. “Originality often consists in linking up ideas whose connection was not previously suspected,” wrote W.I.B. Beveridge2 in The Art of Scientific Investigation.
“The role of the imagination is to create new meanings and to discover connections that, even if obvious, seem to escape detection.”
titled The Innovator’s DNA, Jeff Dyer,
The authors of this book have identified five key skills associated with innovative and creative entrepreneurs.
“Creative minds connect the dots to make unexpected connections. They combine pieces of what may seem disparate pieces of information to get innovative new ideas.”
“Creativity is all about connecting the dots and creating a wow by connecting them in a way no one ever did.”
https://www.amazon.com/Steal-Like-Artist-Things-Creative-ebook/dp/B0074QGGK6/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3VDEDRMZPBT97&dchild=1&keywords=still+like+an+artist&qid=1622562271&s=digital-text&sprefix=still+like+an+ar%2Caps%2C806&sr=1-1 https://www.amazon.com/Art-Scientific-Investigation-W-I-B-Beveridge-ebook/dp/B075XDTKYW/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1622562180&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-DNA-Updated-New-Introduction-ebook/dp/B07FW898C1/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Creative geniuses are master connectors of dots. But before that, they are master collectors of dots.
Always be collecting dots
“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” ― Thomas A. Edison
compared to the majority of people, Edison had a different way of looking at failure. In his scientific mind, failure didn’t exist. For him, every failed experience was just feedback.
Collecting the dots is always a continuous, ongoing process. You may never know, they could be handy to you any time, the way it happened with Steve Jobs.
In the 2005 Stanford Commencement Address, Steve Jobs recalls1, “None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.” He then goes on to make an important point, “…of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college…you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future…”
Maria Popova, in her popular blog, brainpicking, uses the analogy of LEGO building blocks to describe dots2. She states, “The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our castles will become.”
You must have read somewhere that to become more creative, people recommend you make a conscious shift from your daily routine. This includes watching a different movie, watching a different TV serial, reading a book related to a completely different genre, talking a different route, etc. This is because, following the same routine, you are getting exposed to the same set of dots. The different experiences will help you to create a different set of dots. Besides, it will also make your brain more flexible, and therefore rewiring it will be much easier.
Michael J. Gelb extensively studied the life of Leonardo da Vinci and published a book3: How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day. One of the powerful lessons learned from Leonardo da Vinci is “Connect the unconnected.”
In the words of Peter Fisk, the author of Creative Genius: An Innovative Guide for Business Leaders, Border Crossers and Game Changers,4 “Leonardo was a master of cross-over. He combined ideas from animal and plant studies with psychology and fashion, anatomy, and architecture. From this, he formed his understanding of mechanics, and everything from hydraulic pumps to new musical instruments emerged. He used analogies; for example, he wrote short fables like Aesop, stories that seemed to be to entertain children but were, in fact, to communicate to adults the danger of greed and so on.”
The ‘Zen connection’ of Steve jobs and its impact on the business decisions of Apple is nicely brought to light by Jeff Yang in this article in Wall Street Journal. He speaks about the concept of Ma which loosely translates as ‘void’ or ‘gap’ or ‘space’. As explained by Jeff Yang “Ma states that a thing is defined not just by what it is, but what it is not — that a sculpture is beautiful because of both the rock taken away and the rock left behind, and a ring is useful because of both the hollow at its center and the metal strip that surrounds it.”
The influence of Ma was not just limited to eliminating certain product features but also choosing NOT to launch countless products in the market. Given below is an excerpt from his interview with Betsy Morris published in Fortune magazine5. You can read the full interview here. “Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we’ve got less than 30 major products. I don't know if that’s ever been done before. Certainly, the great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products. We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But
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In an interview6 with Dezeen magazine, Dan Wieden, the executive behind the famous slogan of Nike, offered a first-hand account of the genesis of “Just do it.” He recalls his struggle to crack a creative tagline to form a common thread to connect seemingly unrelated TV commercials ready to be aired. That’s when the name of Gary Gilmore popped up in his mind. Gary Gilmore was a murderer who was to be executed by a firing squad. In the words of Dan Wieden, “They asked him if he had any final thoughts, and he said: ‘Let’s do it’. I didn’t like ‘Let’s do it’, so I just changed it to ‘Just do it’.
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