A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative

Flexibility is a requirement for survival.

It's difficult to get your creative juices flowing if you're always being practical, following rules, afraid to make mistakes, not looking into outside areas, or under the influence of any of the other mental locks.

By the time the average person finishes college, he or she will have taken over 2,600 tests, quizzes, and exams. The right answer approach becomes deeply ingrained in our thinking. This may be fine for some mathematical problems where there is in fact only one right answer. The difficulty is that most of life isn’t this way. Life is ambiguous; there are many right answers- all depending on what you’re looking for. But if you think there is only one right answer, then you’ll stop looking as soon as you find one.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who divide everything into two groups, and those who don’t.

Life is ambiguous; there are many right answers — all depending on what you are looking for. But if you think there’s only one right answer, then you’ll stop looking as soon as you find one.

Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Thus, the real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge.

That’s because people find what they’re looking for. If we look for beauty, we’ll find beauty. If we look for conspiracies, we’ll find conspiracies. It’s all a matter of setting our mental channel.

For example: How do you keep a fish from smelling? Cook it as soon as you catch it. Freeze it. Wrap it in paper. Leave it in the water. Switch to chicken. Keep a cat around. Burn incense. Cut its nose off.

Whenever an error pops up, the usual response is “Jeez, another screwup, what went wrong this time?” The creative thinker, on the other hand, will realize the potential value of errors, and perhaps say something like, “Would you look at that! Where can it lead our thinking?” And then he or she will go on to use the error as a stepping stone to a new idea. Indeed, the whole history of discovery is filled with people who used erroneous assumptions and failed ideas as stepping stones to new ideas. Columbus thought he was finding a shorter route to India. Johannes Kepler stumbled on to the idea of interplanetary gravity because of assumptions which were right for the wrong reasons. Thomas Edison knew 1,800 ways not to build a light bulb. Freud had several big failures before he developed psychoanalysis. One of Madame Curie’s failures was radium.