"Even if you're
not a genius, you can use the same strategies as Aristotle
and Einstein to harness the power of your creative mind
and better manage your future."
The following eight
strategies encourage you to think productively, rather
than reproductively, in order to arrive at solutions to
problems. "These strategies are common to the
thinking styles of creative geniuses in science, art, and
industry throughout history."
1. Look
at problems in many different ways, and find new
perspectives that no one else has taken (or no one else has
publicized!)
Leonardo da Vinci
believed that, to gain knowledge about the form of a
problem, you begin by learning how to restructure it in
many different ways. He felt that the first way he
looked at a problem was too biased. Often, the
problem itself is reconstructed and becomes a new one.
2.
Visualize!
When Einstein
thought through a problem, he always found it necessary to
formulate his subject in as many different ways as
possible, including using diagrams. He
visualized solutions, and believed that words and numbers
as such did not play a significant role in his thinking
process.
3.
Produce! A distinguishing characteristic of genius is
productivity.
Thomas Edison held
1,093 patents. He guaranteed productivity by giving
himself and his assistants idea quotas. In a study
of 2,036 scientists throughout history, Dean Keith
Simonton of the University of California at Davis found
that the most respected scientists produced not only great
works, but also many "bad" ones. They
weren't afraid to fail, or to produce mediocre in
order to arrive at excellence.
4. Make
novel combinations. Combine, and recombine, ideas,
images, and thoughts into different combinations no matter
how incongruent or unusual.
The laws of heredity
on which the modern science of genetics is based came from
the Austrian monk Grego Mendel, who combined mathematics
and biology to create a new science.
5. Form
relationships; make connections between dissimilar subjects.
Da Vinci forced a
relationship between the sound of a bell and a stone
hitting water. This enabled him to make the
connection that sound travels in waves.
Samuel Morse invented relay stations for telegraphic
signals when observing relay stations for horses.
6. Think
in opposites.
Physicist Niels Bohr
believed, that if you held opposites together, then you
suspend your thought, and your mind moves to a new level.
His ability to imagine light as both a particle and a wave
led to his conception of the principle of complementarily.
Suspending thought (logic) may allow your mind to create a
new form.
7. Think
metaphorically.
Aristotle considered
metaphor a sign of genius, and believed that the
individual who had the capacity to perceive resemblances
between two separate areas of existence and link them
together was a person of special gifts.
8.
Prepare yourself for chance.
Whenever we attempt
to do something and fail, we end up doing something else.
That is the first principle of creative accident.
Failure can be productive only if we do not focus on it as
an unproductive result. Instead: analyze the
process, its components, and how you can change them, to
arrive at other results. Do not ask the question
"Why have I failed?", but rather "What have
I done?"
