p.14 Creative thinking requires an outlook that allows us to search for ideas and play with our
knowledge and experience.
p.19 Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking
something different.
p.61 One of my recent favorites [the subject being discussed is metaphors] was concocted by the American
biologist Leigh Van Valen, who was inspired by the Red Queen character from Lewis Carrol's Through the Looking Glass.
She's the one who runs hard but never gets anywhere because everything else in the landscape is also running. As she tells
Alice, "it takes all the running you can do to keep in place!" Van Valen used the Red Queen as a metaphor for his
evolutionary principle that regardless of how well a species adapts to its current environment, it must keep evolving to stay
up with its competitors and enemies who are also evolving. Thus the "Red Queen" effect: do nothing and fall
behind, or run hard to stay where you are. This is also found in business, sports, new technology development, and arms races."
[JLJ - when playing a game against a tough opponent, we often must struggle as hard as we can to maintain equal chances,
to obtain winning chances we might have to try even harder than that]
p.62 Exercise: Make a metaphor for a current problem. Simply compare your concept to something
else and then see what similarities you can find between the two ideas. Basically, you're using one idea to highlight
another.
p.77 I have a friend I go to whenever I have a really tough problem to solve. After I explain it to him,
invariably his first question is, "What rules can we break?" He knows that I have assimilated so
many rules into my thinking that after a while they become blind assumptions. It's difficult to be innovative if
you're following blind assumptions.
p.79 "Creative thinking may simply mean the realization that there is no particular
virtue in doing things the way they have always been done." - Rudolph Flesch, Educator
p.101 When you judge new ideas, focus initially on their positive, interesting, and potentially
useful features. This approach will not only counteract a natural negative bias, it will also enable you to develop more
ideas.
p.108 As we said in the opening chapter, a playful attitude is fundamental to creative thinking.
p.110 "Those who approach life like a child playing a game, moving and pushing pieces, possess the
power of kings." - Heraclitus, Philosopher
p.114,115 Constraints can be a powerful stimulant to the creative process... [Limits] force
us to think beyond conventional solutions and find answers we might not otherwise have discovered... it can be argued the
product of almost every activity... can be made more creative if we'd take some time to playfully add a few constraints at
the beginning of the project.
p.122 The second assault on the same problem should come from a different direction.
p.137 often the best ideas come from cutting across disciplinary boundaries and looking
into other fields for new ideas... nothing will make a field stagnate more quickly than keeping out foreign ideas.
p.138 "All art is a series of recoveries from the first line. The hardest
thing to do is to put down the first line. But you must."
p.138 I once asked computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs why some people are more creative than others.
He replied, "Innovation is usually the result of connections of past experience... For example,
I went to Reed College in Portland. At Reed, most of the men took modern dance classes from a woman named Judy Massey. We
did it to meet the women. I didn't realize how much I learned about movement and perception from that class until a few years
later when I worked for Nolan Bushnell at Atari. I was able to relate how much resolution of movement you need in terms of
perceiving things for video games.
p.141 As the philosopher Heraclitus put it twenty-five centuries ago: "Lovers of wisdom must open
their minds to very many things."
p.142 It's not surprising that inventor Thomas Edison gave his colleagues this advice: "Make it
a point to keep on the lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others have used successfully. Your idea has
to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you're currently working on."
p.163 this act of making new connections lies at the heart of the creative process. As
the philosopher Heraclitus put it two-and-a-half millennia ago: "A wonderful harmony is created when we join together the
seemingly unconnected."
p.180 The American General George S. Patton had similar ideas on how to stimulate people's creativity. He
said, "If you tell people where to go, but not how to get there, you'll be amazed at the results." He knew
that posing a problem in an ambiguous way would give more freedom to the imaginations of the people who were working
on it.
p.202 That which opposes produces a benefit.
p.208 "A man's errors are his portals of discovery." - James Joyce, Author
p.218 "What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are." - Epictetus,
Philosopher
