|
|
Volume 8 |
|
Strategies Fostering Thinking |
I once asked Carl Ally (founder of Ally & Gargano, one of the more innovative advertising agencies on Madison Avenue) what "makes the creative person tick." Ally responded, "The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six months or six years down the road. But he has faith that it will happen.
I agree whole-heartedly. Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Nonetheless, knowledge alone won't make a person creative. I think that we've all known people who knew lots of stuff and nothing creative happened. Their knowledge just sat in their crania because they didn't think about what they knew in any new ways. Thus, the real key to being creative lies in what you do with your knowledge. Creative thinking requires an attitude or outlook which allows you to search for ideas and manipulate your knowledge and experience. With this outlook, you try various approaches, first one, then another, often not getting anywhere. You use crazy, foolish, and impractical ideas as stepping stones to practical new ideas. You break the rules occasionally, and hunt for ideas in unusual outside places. In short, by adopting a creative outlook you open yourself up to both new possibilities and to change.
A good example of a person who did this is Johann Gutenberg. What Gutenberg did was to combine two previously unconnected ideas, the wine press and the coin punch, to create a new idea. The purpose of the coin punch was to leave an image on a small area such as gold coin. The function of a wine press was, and still is, to apply a force over a large area in order to squeeze the juice out of the grapes. One day Gutenburg, perhaps after he'd drunk a glass of wine or two, playfully asked himself, "What if I took a bunch of these coin punches and put them under the force of the wine press so that they left their images on paper?" The resulting combination was the printing press and movable type.
Another example is Nolan Bushnell. In 1971, Bushnell looked at his television and thought, "I'm not satisfied with just watching my TV set. I want to play with it and have it respond to me." Soon after, he created, "Pong," the interactive table tennis game which started the video game revolution.
Still another example of a person who did this is Picasso. One day, Picasso went outside his house and found an old bicycle. He looked at it for a little bit, and then took off the seat and the handle bars. He then welded them together to create the head of a bull.
Each of these examples illustrates the power the creative mind has to transform one thing into another. By changing perspective and playing with our knowledge and experience, we can made the ordinary extraordinary and the unusual commonplace. In this way, wine presses squeeze out information, TV sets turn into game machines, and bicycle seats become bull's heads. The Nobel Prize winning physician Albert Szent-Gyorgyi put it well when he said:
"Discovery consist of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different."
Thus, if you'd like to be more creative, just look at the same thing as everyone else and "think something different."