A Guide For Creative Thinking PART 2

Your success in life will be determined largely by the quantity of ideas that you generate. It seems that the quality of ideas is secondary to the quantity and that if you have enough
ideas, one or more of them will turn out to be prizewinners. You can begin building your creative muscles with focused questions. Some that you might think of are the following: What are we trying to do? How are we trying to do it? What are our assumptions? What if our assumptions are wrong? All improvements begin with questioning the current, existing circumstances. If you are not making progress for any reason, stop and think, and begin asking yourself the hard questions that will stimulate your mind to consider other possibilities. When they were doing the research to land a man on the moon, scientists were stumped for months and even years. They could not figure how to send a rocket to the moon with enough fuel to land on the moon, blast off, break the moon’s gravity and come back to earth. The problem was that if the rocket had that much fuel to start with, it would be too heavy to take off from the earth in the first place. Finally, they began to question the assumption that the lunar rocket ship had to land on the moon. When they questioned that assumption, the scientists concluded that a main rocket could orbit around the moon while a smaller module dropped to the surface of the moon and then rejoined the orbiting rocket for the trip back to earth. The mental logjam was broken, and the rest is history. Asking focused questions-hard questions that penetrate to the core of the matter-is the real art of the creative person. The next step is to have the courage to deal with all the possible answers. Once you have come up with a possible solution, ask yourself, "What else could be the solution?" If your current method of operation were completely wrong, what would be your backup plan? What else would you or could you do? What if your current procedure or plan turned out to be a complete failure? Then what would you do? And what would you do after that? All of those questions will force you to think further and come up with better answers. The second way to build your mental muscles is with intensely desired goals. The more you want something and the clearer you are about it, the more likely it is that you will generate ideas that will help you to move toward it. That is why the need for clearly written goals and plans for their accomplishment is repeated over and over. Any intense emotion, such as desire, stimulates creativity and ideas to fulfill that desire. And the more you write down your goals and plans, and review them, the more likely it is that you will see all kinds of possibilities for achieving those goals. The third generator of creative-thinking muscles is pressing problems. A good question to ask is "What are the three biggest problems that I am facing in my life today?" Write the answer to this question quickly, in less than 30 seconds. When you write the answer to a question in less than 30 seconds, your subconscious mind will sort out all extraneous answers and give you the three most important ones.