p.8 1. Knowing How to See. Genius often comes from finding a new perspective that no one else has
taken. Leonardo da Vinci believed that to gain knowledge about the form of problems, 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 toward his usual way
of seeing things. He would restructure his problem by looking at it from one perspective and move to another perspective and
still another. With each move, his understanding would deepen, and he would begin to understand the essence of the problem...
In order to creatively solve a problem, the thinker must abandon the initial approach that stems from past experience
and reconceptualize the problem. By not settling with one perspective, geniuses do not merely solve existing problems...
[t]hey identify new ones.
p.9 2. Making Your Thought Visible. The explosion of creativity in the Renaissance was intimately tied to
the recording and conveying of a vast knowledge in a parallel language; a language of drawings, graphs, and diagrams - as,
for instance, in the renowned diagrams of da Vinci and Galileo. ...geniuses... seem to develop a skill in visual and
spatial abilities that gives them the flexibility to display information in different ways.
p.13-14 Creative geniuses are geniuses because they know "how" to think instead of "what" to think...
If you have the intention of becoming more creative in your work and personal life and apply the thinking strategies in this
book, you will become more creative. You may not become another da Vinci or Einstein, but you will become much more creative
that someone without the intention or knowledge.
p.21 Subjects who framed the challenge as "In what ways might I evaluate the statement as given?"
and looked at it from different angles were most likely to solve it.
Genius often comes from finding a new perspective on a problem by restructuring it in some way...
The important thing is not to persist with one way of looking at a problem.
p.23 Before you brainstorm any problem, restate the problem at least five to ten times to generate
multiple perspectives. The emphasis is not so much on the right problem definition but on
alternate problem definitions.
p.32 [Richard] Feynman [American physicist, b. 1918 d. 1988]... proposed teaching
students how to rephrase what they learn in their own language, without using definitions... Always try to rephrase
the problem in your own words, without using definitions.
p.34 Examine your problem statement, identify the key words, and change them five to ten times to see what
results.
p.42 Leonardo do Vinci equated comprehension of the deeper structure of his subject with having
multiple perspectives, specifically, from at least three different points of view. This seems to be a very fundamental
and key part of Leonardo's strategy - multiple points of view are synthesized together. Leonardo
believed that until one perceived something from a minimum of three different perspectives, one did not yet have a basis for
understanding it. A true and complete knowledge comes from the synthesizing of these views.
p.46 Try to imagine yourself as some part of the problem and try to see the situation from its perspective.
p.46, 47 Certainly, a key characteristic of all geniuses is their intense childlike curiosity and
a high degree of inquiry. Leonardo da Vinci wrote many questions to himself in his notebooks, seeking, like Aristotle,
to find first principles... In fact, genius comes more from asking bold questions than finding "right" answers.
p.53 The notebooks of Einstein, Martha Graham [a creative genius in modern dance - JLJ], da Vinci, Edison,
and Darwin suggest that one of the primary reasons they achieved greatness was their ability to represent their subjects visually
by diagramming and mapping.
p.55 Everyone who thinks at all has noticed that language is practically useless for describing
anything that goes on in the brain. Pure thinking is a dynamic, shifting, active thing. It is condensed and telegrammatic,
and only when it is expanded in form and made communicable to others does it lose its active, volatile, and creative character.
p.82 Creativity implies a deviance from past experience and procedures... When you break out of
your established patterns and ignore the conventional wisdom, you'll discover that there are many solutions.
p.88 The secret to deferring judgment while generating a lot of ideas is to separate your thinking
into two stages: possibility thinking and practicality thinking.
p.106-107 Following are guidelines for keeping a written record:
1. Collect all interesting ideas that you encounter from brainstorming sessions, ideas
you read about, or ideas you create.
2. Record them thematically in a notebook, in your computer, or note cards, and file them
by subject... indicate the source where you found the idea...
3. Once you have developed a fairly extensive idea base, use it to glean insight when you have a
problem.
p.111 Geniuses are fluent thinkers because of the the following practices. They
- Defer judgment when looking for ideas
- Generate as many ideas as possible
- List their ideas as they occur and keep a written record
- Constantly elaborate or improve their ideas
- Allow their subconscious to generate ideas by incubating their subject
Geniuses are flexible thinkers because they extend their thinking by incorporating random, chance, and unrelated
factors into their thinking processes.
p.114, 115 Like the highly intelligent child with pailfuls of Legos building blocks, a genius is
constantly combining and recombining ideas, images, and other various thoughts... These new combinations give you
different ways to focus your attention and different ways of interpreting what you are focusing on that lead to new insights,
original ideas, and creative solutions.
p.123 Creative thinking is often a matter of forming new associations, new syntheses, or new combinations
of elements of existing knowledge, rather than producing something that is new in every respect.
p.125 The notion that geniuses combine items of existing knowledge because they become aware of some similarity
or overlap between them has been favored for some time.
p.126 We possess an abundance of thoughts about most of our problems. By organizing our thoughts
efficiently, we can systematically create combinations that will generate multiple solutions to problems.
p.129 Sigmund Freud's interest in fields that were unrelated to psychology was a key to his uncommon
insights... His ability to synthesize elements of information from different fields contributed to his ability to
see things differently from his contemporaries.
When looking for original ideas, try combining subjects from unrelated fields.
p.133 J. Bronowski, the author of the book The Ascent of Man, claimed that "a genius is a person
who has two great ideas." The work of genius arises from the person's ability to get them to fit together.
p.134 Leonardo da Vinci believed that to really know how things work, you should examine them under
critical conditions. He believed in pushing concepts to the extreme in his imagination.
p.134-135 Genius comes from a passionate commitment to the integration of multiple perspectives.
When one excels in several different areas and then is able to synthesize them, one begins to approach genius. Through the
integration of multiple perspectives, the deeper structures of ideas become revealed to us. The discovery of the deep structure
beneath the many and varied surface structures is the core criterion of genius.
p.172 By shuffling through a set of possible relationships and then having the wit to recognize
a solution when you see one, you can successfully solve problems.
p.261 One of Walt Disney's greatest secrets was his ability to draw out he inner child
in his business associates and combine it with their business acumen. Because he made the work playlike,
his associates worked and played together with a missionary zeal... Disney got the creative collaboration
he needed by consciously creating a humorous and playful environment... When we play, we become childlike and begin to behave
in spontaneous creative ways. Play and creativity have much in common. In particular, play often
involves using objects and actions in new or unusual ways, similar to the imaginative combinations of ideas involved in creative
thinking.
p.285 The creative genius will always look for alternative ways to think about a subject.
Even when the old ways are well established, the geniuses will invent new ways of thinking. If something
doesn't work, they look at it several different ways until they find a new line of thought. It is this willingness
to entertain different perspectives and alternative ideas that broadens their thinking and opens them up to new information
and the new possibilities that the rest of us don't see.
