How to Get Ideas
Language: English
Pages: 214
ISBN: 1576754308
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
a magazine you've never H heard of. Check out something on the Internet you think you'll dislike. See a play or a movie you think you'll dislike. Rent a video you've never heard of. Touch the bark of three different trees in your neighborhood. Learn to tell which is which simply by how it feels. Learn to tell which is which simply by how it smells. Go to lunch with someone different. Listen intently to music you don't like. Ride the bus for a week. Learn to read music. Learn sign language.
world of reality" and see how it fares. Helmholtz, the German philosopher, said he used three steps to get new thoughts. The first was "Preparation," the time during which he investigated the problem "in all directions" (Young's second step). The second was "Incubation," when he didn't think consciously about the problem at all (Young's third step). The third was "Illumination," when "happy ideas come unexpectedly without effort, like an inspiration" (Young's fourth step). Moshe F.
rules on what a flower should look like. Picasso broke the rules on what a woman's face should look like. Freud broke the rules on how to treat illness. Pasteur broke the rules on how to treat diseases. n$ ISAM Ro\J w cottflrfi Lobatchewsky broke the rules of Euclidean geometry. Dick Fosbury broke the rules on how to high jump. Hank Lusetti broke the rules on how to shoot a basketball. Pete Gogolak broke the rules on how to kick a football. Perry O'Brian broke the rules on how to put the
asking: "How can I get the groceries faster for my customer?" Then somebody invented the supermarket by asking: "How can the customer get the groceries for me?" i£l pcfUe tMc Uo?ui\ "The greatness of the philosophers of the scientific revolution," writes Arthur Koestler, "consisted not so much in finding the right answers but in asking the right questions; in seeing a problem where nobody saw one before; in substituting a 'why' for a 'how.' " Jonas Salk agreed: "The answer to any
the possibilities of new combinations. This is the type that includes, as Young put it, "all those persons in any field who . . . cannot let well enough alone and who speculate on how to change it." The Rentier, on the other hand, includes "routine, steady-going, unimaginative, conserving people whom the Speculator manipulates." Young agreed with Pareto that those two types exist and—that being the case—concluded "that there are large numbers of people whom no technique for producing ideas