by Peter Lloyd
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Not true. That's not to disparage Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a matter of fact, the old saw about the mousetrap attributed to Emerson has been debased.
On the moon there’s a crater named Gassendi, one of the undersung heroes of science and creativity. Billed as one of the first philosophers to formulate and take a scientific approach to his thinking and writing, Pierre Gassendi, a keen observer, published his observations of the transit of Mercury. He argued with Descartes and named the Aurora Borealis.
Both Mohammad Shahbazi and Mississippi can be abbreviated MS. How appropriate. Shahbazi has worked with Dr. Aaron Shirley—a pediatrician, McArthur Foundation genius, and former 60s civil rights activist—to reform Mississippi’s care of its rural poor.
Known in Greek mythology as a skillful craftsman and artisan, Daedalus was an innovator and inventor. He gets credit for the invention of carpentry and with that the invention of the axe, plumb-line, drill, glue, and isinglass. Mythological credit, that is.
So I’m listening to Car Talk one Saturday on my NPR radio station. Click and Clack are laughing out car and life advice as usual. This time, however, I notice something. It has to do with the caller. She’s funny, too. It’s always been that way, I recall. Could Car Talk callers be beneficiaries of comedic contagion?
Much is made of the fact that great contemporary creative leaders such as Steve Jobs did not finish college. But then neither did Charles Manson or Starpoint Central High School’s “most promising computer programmer,” Timothy McVeigh. And if you think about the people you know, chances are those you would consider successful probably hold degrees. For every dropout success story, I’m sure you can find many more dropouts limited by their unfinished education.
What will Earth do when it realizes it’s a creative creature? Now that most of us are connected electronically, our brains have become part of a world brain. The Internet and social media tools like Twitter and Facebook now behave like dendrites that connect my thoughts to you and yours to me. We are like neurons in a vast, connected collection of a few billion other neurons. Not quite as well organized and synchronized as a human brain yet, but we’re getting there.
The term comes to us from Karl Marx by way of Joseph Schumpeter, who argues that innovation in the capitalistic economic cycle results from the accumulation and annihilation of wealth. Call it boom and bust or creative destruction. Free-market advocates, strange Marxist bedfellows, indeed, use the term to justify the temporary pain of things like downsizing to improve the efficiency an organization.
Franca Leeson just happens to be one of the most creative people I know. In addition to teaching meditation, Franca is a consulting partner at ThinkX Intellectual Capital and one of the organizers of the Mindcamp Creativity Weekend in Geneva Park, near Toronto. So when I learned that she teaches meditation as a creativity technique, I was determined to find out more.
Andrew Jackson and Mark Twain have both been credited with saying something along the lines of, “I have no respect for a man who can spell a word only one way.” I have to agree. But that’s not the problem. Most of us can spell a word any number of ways. The challenge is to do so creatively.
In a working paper titled, The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can be More Dishonest, a pair of Harvard Business School researchers propose the glaringly obvious proposition that, possibly, “creative thinking may also have a hidden cost in the form of increased dishonesty.” All together now... Well, duh!
The best ideas seem to have been kicking around longer than you might think. So it makes sense that a question like, “Will computers ever think or create?” and a concept like artificial intelligence might be found hanging around with the earliest versions of computers.
Back when I named these essays Right Brain Workouts, creative people called themselves right-brainers. They called the knuckleheads who gave them any guff left-brainers. After all, Roger Sperry had just grabbed a Nobel Prize for giving us his split-brain model. It was clearly us vs. them.
Anyone watching TV in the 70s could not help seeing at least a few episodes of Columbo. Having just viewed a few seasons on Netflix—frumpy clothes, bad hair, and all—I’m reminded: What an outstanding problem solver was the lieutenant! And not just the character. The creators of the program also had to use all their creative resources to protect what would become a television classic from those masters of mediocrity, television executives.
An Erdös 1 mathematician declared to me, “I can’t do arithmetic.” This from a man with a left-brained list of publications on lattices, arithmetic mean ideals, trace extensions, and infinite dimensional Schur-Horn theorem and majorization theory. How does this compute? Well, he also informed me, “I think of myself an artist.”
When Alex Trebek says, “He wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey,” your response, of course, should be, “Who is Homer?” Nevertheless classical scholars still argue over the identity and even the existence of the legendary poet. A plausible and timely conjecture even suggests that the epics may have been crowdsourced.
One of the secrets to successful creative problem solving is asking the right questions. How much more important becomes creative questioning when grappling with the world’s biggest problems. They call for the biggest possible questions.
In an earlier Right Brain Workout, I gave examples of how cross pollination works from The Backyard Astronomer to The Cheerios Effect. Here are some practices and resources you can use to cross pollinate.
The creative problem-solving process is as old as humanity—make that primate-ity. Creativity, as in the ability to solve problems, arose in primates like us millions of years ago. The way to solve problems hasn’t changed much since our ancestors began rubbing stick together to make fire. That’s why some of the oldest advice on the subject holds true today.
The brilliant creator, co-star, and co-author of Fawlty Towers and the front-and-center member of the Monty Python team appears in a video titled John Cleese WCF speaking to a Flemish audience about creativity. From his talk I‘ve gleaned three recommendations, plus an explanation of why bad leaders discourage creativity.
In marketing circles folks talk about transparency, collaboration, invitation, engagement... reaching consumers where they live with ideas so powerfully persuasive that we consumers are compelled to buy them. This requires more that just listening to us in focus groups. We've forced marketers to collaborate with us to create not just products but also the way they present those products on the shelf and in the messages they send us.
I went after the word pecha kucha the same way I would any other word I'd never seen before. I'm well trained. "Look it up," my mother used to say whenever I asked what a word meant. In those days, I went to the dictionary. This time I went straight to Wordnik. It came back with, "You're the first person to look up this word on Wordnik!"
The Rukiga word gotwantdo, pronounced gah-WAHN-doo, summarizes the three steps necessary to perform a creative act. Such as composition, invention, innovation, and so on. Okay, I made up the Rukiga word but, made up or not, it contains a solid creativity concept. Let's break it down into its component parts to understand it better.
Back when I considered myself in competition with a creativity guru who entertained his clients on his own ranch with a pool, go carts, volley ball court... you name it, I brainstormed a bit and stumbled upon an alternative: “I’ve got the Cincinnati Zoo!” Lots of stimuli and fun possibilities there.
In a productive brainstorming session, ideas can flow faster than anyone can transcribe them. In contrast, an online brainstorming session like brainline captures every idea, but you forfeit some of the advantages of a live session.
Inventors, artists, scientists, and other creative people often set out to do one thing or to solve one problem only to end up solving or discovering the unexpected. The famous example of Christopher Columbus setting out to find a westward route to the Far East only to stumble upon the New World still reigns as the most striking, I think, even if it has become a cliché.
Author Paul Lockhart speaks to me where I live. He's written a book titled A Mathematician's Lament. I only read about the book in an article, "Rock Groups" by Steven Strogatz. But I've had rocks in my head ever since. That is, I've been thinking about numbers in a fascinating new way.
Boy, did I think I was clever. "I'll watch the invisible-gorilla passing-ball video," I told myself, "and this time I won't be fooled, because I've seen it before." Since I saw the original, however, an update has been listed in the New Scientist "Best Illusions of 2010." Still I felt so smug because I was already familiar with the video that so graphically demonstrated how easy it is to miss something so obvious.
Nothing puts the spurs to invention like a good, solid, unrelenting, no-exceptions deadline. And perhaps nobody knows this better than the teams who compete every year in the 48-Hour Film Project competition.
How would you like to take a trip, deep into the uncharted wilds of your unconscious? May I suggest you invite along someone like Christina Wehling. She's a sculptor and an art therapist. With her help, your trip becomes a process of creative self-discovery.
I believe that the principal guide in our lives has to be our inner guide. That we all have within us the capacity to be our own best friend or our own worst enemy. And that nature speaks to us through this unconscious that we have, through our inner person. It isn't coming from outside, it's coming from inside.With Christina as your guide, you'll soak up a treasure of rich, visual images. And upon your return, begin drawing vivid pictures from recent memory.
You're holding a paint chip called Oriental Silk thinking, this looks an awful lot like Ivory. And you're right. Every so often crayon makers and paint formulators update the names of their colors.
Was Christopher Columbus a bold adventurer, expanding human horizons? Or more like a venture imperialist, who happily threw open the doors to an orgy of genocide?
To make a real honest mistake, you have to go in earnest after one thing and be open to whatever you actually find. Like Christopher Columbus. He set out to find a new route to the Indies. And he failed. But he made do with a new world, even though today's flat-Earthers would eventually mock him.
A woman in Fort Worth, Texas, makes funeral fashions. Dresses and suits made in case you come to your final resting place with nothing to wear.
Why in the world is the word creative monopolized by one department of the typical advertising agency. The creative department it's called. As if all the other departments are un-creative.
If you've already read about Robert McCoy, in the previous Right Brain Workout, then you know he's the professional skeptic and founder of the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices. He listed a number of worthless products on the market today. Products that would never last without a lot of people faithfully dialing flashing 800 numbers.
There's a museum in Minneapolis dedicated to good ideas gone bad. It's called the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices. It's founder, Robert McCoy, a professional skeptic, has collected 150 examples of medical devices that do absolutely nothing. Let's take a quick tour with McCoy as our guide.
Why is English the most widely spoken, richly worded language in the world? One reason is an open door. According to the PBS series, The Story of English, our language has never stationed guard dogs at its gate.
Do humans have an art instinct? Well, you're asking the wrong person if you want an objective look at both sides of this question. Having written about creativity and innovation for so many years, I rolled my eyes and sighed, "Oh, really?" when I read, "'Art Instinct' theorizes we may be hard-wired by nature to create."
Everybody has a customer. Or as Bob Dylan sang, "You're gonna have to serve somebody." So it's no surprise that innovative market researchers have replaced dry, objective, hard-knuckled research with creative forms of product play. It's sort of like collaborating with rather than examining your customer.
Why wouldn't the Cincinnati Reds pick up William Ellsworth "Dummy" Hoy from the Boston Beaneaters in 1894? He couldn't hear and he didn't speak, but he was a great ball player. His last play with the Boston team clinched them the pennant. A spectacular outfield grab in thick, San Francisco fog.
When I was about nine years old I thought that if the world would just make me their dictator, I would kill all the bad guys. But even back then I realized that in order to carry out my plan, I would need a lot of bad guys.
In the Turing Test humans face off with a few computer terminals. The human subjects type a line which appears on the terminal, and in a matter of seconds a reply appears. They continue, back and forth, just as if they were conversing.
There's no shortage of experts willing to tell you, for a fee, what it is that will make your employees generate more and better ideas. Be careful. It's a lot easier than you think. I say, if you just listen to your people and start putting their ideas into practice, you'll do just fine.
Last week in "More Idea Sources," I posted the comments of five writers who told us how they get their ideas. Clear to me was how similar their path followed the ways of Socrates, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Goethe, Mozart, Poe, Amy Lowell, Dostoyevsky, and Walter Lantz that I published last November.
Ann Piening McMahon was one of 11,000 workers laid off by McDonnell Douglas in St. Louis some years ago. For ten years she worked as a laser communications satellite specialist. Not a job that's easy to find.
Anyone who's ever said, "I'm not creative," please read carefully. Yes, you are. And I can prove it.
In his seminal book on the nature of creativity The Act of Creation, polymath Arthur Koestler coined the word bisociation to describe what we less eloquently call a combination or connection of ideas. Koestler would say, "bisociation—an association between two or more previously unconnected elements."
In 1990, Scott Anderson was an Indiana elementary school teacher just plain fed up with the bone-headed bureaucracy, administrative apathy, and the contempt for creativity he felt was frustrating his attempts to teach.
In 1532 Francisco Pizarro came before the court of the Inca, seemingly in peace, but set on conquest. He noticed that certain members of the Incan court wore knotted ropes around their waists. Assuming these ropes were rosaries, he ordered his men to ambush the men who wore them.
Want to tap the world's greatest renewable source of creative energy?They're already on your payroll. Your people are full of ideas. All you have to do is encourage creative thinking, and listen.
This is the last in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to escaping the Four Cages of Context, the principal impediments to greater creativity, innovation, invention, problem solving, and human progress. Today we'll escape the cage of Success.
Success is 99-percent failure.
Don Winkler says, "The dumber the question, the more people laugh at you, the more likely it will lead to a breakthrough." And he should know. Don does lots of things backwards, not necessarily on purpose. He has a dyslexic brain.
This is the third in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to escaping the Four Cages of Context, the principal impediments to greater creativity, innovation, invention, problem solving, and human progress. Today we'll escape the cage of Order.
The line it is drawn/The curse it is cast
This is the story of two monsters, Dafi (below, left) and Haneen (below, right)
, who have discovered that they share at least one thing in common—love for their favorite foods. "Hummus! Falafel!" they squeal with delight.You've seen the signs on the backs of semis. "How am I driving? Call 1 800 EAT DIRT." Or something to that effect. Those signs are inspired by a cruder version with a real 800-number. How do you feel about being asked to be a snitch?
This is the second in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to escaping the Four Cages of Context, the principal impediments to greater creativity, innovation, invention, problem solving, and human progress. Today we'll escape the cage of Affinity.
It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
I asked a group of single, middle-aged adults to write a personal ad about themselves. Then we talked about creativity, after which I asked them to write another personal ad. Here's what happened:
I've been taken to task more than once for stating that anybody can be creative. Sorry, I won't take it back. But I will elaborate.
This is the first in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to escaping the Four Cages of Context, the principal impediments to greater creativity, innovation, invention, problem solving, and human progress. Today we'll escape the cage of Knowledge.
I had no fixed idea derived from long-established practice
I want to pass along the gist of an article by Stanley Bing in Across the Board. It classifies five types of crazy bosses.
How do you feel about this statement? "A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical."
It seems the Hippocratic Oath has become an endangered species. No "save the oath" groups rising to its defense, though. How in the world did it last this long? I wonder.
Dick Summer helps people motivate themselves. He's a man so full of ambitions, abilities, and ideas, that, when you talk with him, you have to listen.
In "Life Is a Highway: Study Confirms Cars Have Personality," Innovations Report summarizes research that concludes, "many people see human facial features in the front end of automobiles."
The Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes, has attributed the success of capitalism over Soviet socialism to the West's "constant self-criticism."
A long time ago, I took a History of Broadcasting course at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. Jack, our instructor, spent a good deal of time on the story of the great inventor Thomas Edison.
More than 30 years ago a study published in the Harvard Business Review determined that white-collar workers could have ten times more time by not wasting time. Part of that waste is unproductive innovation—time spent re-inventing the wheel.
The Supreme Court in a unanimous decision some time ago ruled that there is not a lick of creativity in the white pages of the phone book. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor went so far as to say they are "devoid of even the slightest trace of creativity."
We would never expect America's C-Span to win awards for the creativity or innovation of their television productions. That's not what they're after. But it wouldn't take much for C-Span to liven up its sleepier moments and at the same time attract, perhaps, a wider audience.
The inventors of Breathe Right adhesive strips were much better designers than the designer of the nose. It was George Carlin, if I remember correctly, who observed that the nose, a runny, open orifice is situated right above the mouth.
A limitation of our eyes enables us to see movies as fluid motion, when we're actually looking at a series of dozens of images each second. It's called Persistence of Vision. A similar phenomenon might be called Persistence of Ignorance.
If you hate to be told, "I told you so," you should be able to identify with the following innovators, inventors, and dreamers.
The record shows that our greatest creations have been done either in accordance with or in defiance of tradition.
Back when I was a young and spirited public relations whipper-snapper, the New York PR agency, Porter Novelli, impressed me in a big way when it conducted a survey of 100 executives from America's top companies.
When Chuck Francis was down to his last six cents, he decided to become a millionaire. And he did. Sound familiar? Well, you won't find full-page newspaper ads asking you to send money to Mr. Francis.
Mozart was not a stodgy prodigy. His childhood travels often brought him to the tavern, where he would head for the spittoon and amuse the locals with spitting games.
The great German conductor, Michael Gielen, wrote a letter to his season subscribers that offers very helpful advice to those of us who are turned off by modern music, or for that matter, anything foreign.
Every important innovation travels in uncharted territory. To propel your new idea through uncharted territory, you always have to make and break the rules. To get comfortable with rule-breaking, it helps to develop a good deal of creative arrogance.
Any innovator who wants to break new ground should never hesitate to question authority. This is not a call to rebellion but a call to common sense--authorities are so often wrong. And if they happen to be right, they're usually way behind.
According to an old article in Discover magazine, Russian scientist and intrepid innovator Andrei Linde has set his creative sights on nothing less than understanding what life is. His method is to study the boundaries of the irrational with the tools of rationality.
In a letter to a friend suffering from "lack of creative power," Friedrich Schiller writes, "it hinders the creative work of the mind--if intellect examines too closely the ideas already pouring in... at the gates."
As a child, Jerry McLaughlin sampled the fruit of the paw-paw tree, sometimes called the Indiana banana. It made him sick. But cancer patients may one day thank Jerry, because many years later, as a chemist looking for plants that might kill cancer cells, he remembered the paw-paw.
I picked up A. J. Jacobs's The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible and found it to be one of the most innovative works of research I've ever read.
Great innovators can be arrogant, impatient, moody, unpredictable, surly, sarcastic, supercilious... And not just because they're smarter than you and me. No, some of them get that way. Take Ludwig van Beethoven.
Steve Allen has written a book I call a must-read for everyone interested in strengthening their creative-thinking muscles. It was published in 1989 as Dumbth: And 81 Ways to Make Americans Smarter and in 1998 as Dumbth: The Lost Art of Thinking with 101 Ways to Reason Better & Improve Your Mind.
This is the seventh and last in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to the Seven Creative Juices. Using the Seven Deadly Sins as my starting point, I've audaciously re-positioned them as the natural forces that drive creativity, innovation, invention, the arts, and human progress. Today we meet Sloth.
This is the sixth in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to the Seven Creative Juices. Using the Seven Deadly Sins as my starting point, I've audaciously re-positioned them as the natural forces that drive creativity, innovation, invention, the arts, and human progress. Today we meet Anger.
This is the fifth in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to the Seven Creative Juices. Using the Seven Deadly Sins as my starting point, I've audaciously re-positioned them as the natural forces that drive creativity, innovation, invention, the arts, and human progress. Today we meet Envy.
Forty-one percent of workers want to quit their jobs because they are dissatisfied with company training. So says Business Week/Up Front, "Why your workers might jump ship."
Don't you just love nitpickers? The horseflies of life's hike through the woods. And they think they're so helpful. You've just put a precious part of your life into a piece of creative work, when along come the bright-eyed, ever so helpful nitpickers, who actually think they can make it better in minute or two!
This is the fourth in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to the Seven Creative Juices. Using the Seven Deadly Sins as my starting point, I've audaciously re-positioned them as the natural forces that drive creativity, innovation, invention, the arts, and human progress. Today we meet Lust.
This is the story of the original bat man. People called him bat man, not because he protected them from harm, which he did, but because they thought he was crazy.
This is the third in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to the Seven Creative Juices. Using the Seven Deadly Sins as my starting point, I've audaciously re-positioned them as the natural forces that drive creativity, innovation, invention, the arts, and human progress. Today we meet Greed.
"The most insolent monstrosity ever perpetrated in the history of music." That's what one critic called Bolero. Beethoven's Symphony No. 9, was greeted with, "...stupid and hopelessly vulgar music!" by another. Yes, he was writing about one of music's most creative and revolutionarily innovative composers of all time!
This is the second in a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to the Seven Creative Juices. Using the Seven Deadly Sins as my starting point, I've audaciously re-positioned them as the natural forces that drive creativity, innovation, invention, the arts, and human progress. Today we meet Gluttony.
Men and women need no more reasons to bicker. They have no trouble creating their own bones of contention. So as a public service, I would like to eliminate one source of confrontation among many heterosexual couples--the battle over whether to leave up or put down the toilet seat.
This is the first installment of a series of Right Brain Workouts devoted to the Seven Creative Juices. Using the Seven Deadly Sins as my starting point, I've audaciously re-positioned them as the natural forces that drive creativity, innovation, invention, the arts, and human progress. Today we meet Pride.
We all know pi--the transcendental number you get when you divide the circumference of a circle by its diameter. This most monumental and incredibly ennobling invention came to us from the Greeks. But the idea (that the ratio of the circumference of a circle and its diameter comes out to a little more than 3) goes back even further--to the innovative geometers of ancient Egypt, Babylonia, India, and again, those creative Greeks.
John Poco of Lawrence Livermore Labs in Livermore, California, works with the lightest solid material ever made--
What would you call the familiar, plastic packaging device that holds your six-pack together? Koko the gorilla speaks with the help of a word board--a tool that lets her point to icons that represent words. It's said that she used her word board to describe the six-pack holder as "bottle necklace."
About 20 minutes into their December 2005 Charlie Rose television interview, Edward O. Wilson and James D. Watson agreed that "Charles Darwin was the most important person who ever lived on Earth." Watson explained to Charlie that "Darwin was the first person, using observation and experience, to really put man in his place in the world."
Maybe we'd all have a little more respect for our planet if it had a nobler name. Something other than Earth anyway. The word comes from roots that mean "base." Even today, earthy implies low or common. And why not? What's more common than earth?
At age 11, Emily Rosa staged a rather simple science project which ended up in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association. In doing so, she became the youngest person to land a research paper published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Not bad for a fourth-grader. How did such a young girl make such a big splash?