Book Summary Preview : Thinkertoys

The Big Idea

In hindsight, every great idea seems obvious. The idea itself is a simple thing. The process of generating the idea, however, is what can be both tough and circuitous. How then can you make yourself capable of coming up with noteworthy ideas?

This book reveals creative-thinking techniques for approaching and solving problems in unconventional and thought-provoking ways. In addition, it also teaches you to create original ideas to improve both your personal and business lives.

Why You Need This Book
People’s business attitudes determine their potential for innovation, creativity, success in their chosen fields – and even genius. This book is most useful for people who know that they need to develop out-of-the-box thinking skills to solve problems, but who don’t know where to start. More importantly, this book also provides tools to allow people to work on themselves to develop their business creativity and make themselves into the sort of people who can come up with innovative ideas.

The book provides specific hands-on techniques for coming up with big or small ideas to make money, solve problems, beat the competition, further your career, and any and all of those sorts of objectives.

A Bit of an Introduction
Creativity is not an accident or something that’s genetically determined. It’s a consequence of an intention to be creative and a corresponding determination to learn and use creative-thinking strategies.

The techniques discussed in this book are divided into linear techniques, which allow for the manipulation of information to generate new ideas, and intuitive techniques, which show you how to find ideas by using intuition and imagination.

It is not enough to simply read the book. To actually create your own ideas, you have to put the techniques to actual use; merely reading the ideas will only go so far as to give you a suggestion of how to use them, and no more.

Original Spin and Mind Pumping
Before using the techniques in this book, you need first to overcome your fears, doubts and uncertainties about being creative. This is extremely significant: when you feel you are creative, your ideas are quite different than when you feel you are not.

Believe that you are capable of doing your share and exerting a certain amount of independence. You must also believe that there is something inside you that makes you equal to the rest of the world, talent- and ability-wise – do not belittle yourself.

You can try the following simple exercises to overcome your doubts:

• Tick-tock. Write out your fears, confront them head-on by examining the negatives and learn how you are irrationally twisting things and blowing them out of proportion, and substitute positive factors for the negative ones.
• Self-affirmation.  Recognize and remember your successes, your good qualities and characteristics; forget your failures.
• Creative affirmation.  Write down several different affirmations that state that you are creative. Take one of these affirmations and write twenty variations of it. Write negative thoughts on a different piece of paper or the other side of the sheet you’re using. Write additional, specific affirmations to counter these negatives. Repeat the process daily for five days.

Exercises to ‘pump your mind’ and encourage you to behave like an idea person:

1. Idea Quota. Set an idea quota for each challenge you are working on, such as three new ideas daily for a week.
2. Get tone. Pay attention to what’s happening around you.
3. Don’t be a duke of habit. These are people who are slaves to their routines and are thus limited problem-solvers.
4. Feed your head. Read to feed your mind new information and ideas
5. Do a content analysis. Try to discern new trends in advertising and marketing by scanning junk mail before discarding it, reading local newspapers and shopping news giveaways, observing pop culture, listening to different radio stations and the like.
6. Make a brain bank. Collect interesting ads, quotes, designs, ideas and the like that might trigger ideas by association.
7. Be a travel junkie. Go around, pick up something at random and create connections and relationships in your mind with the object.
8. Capture your thoughts. If you think it, write it – memory doesn’t always serve.
9. Think right.  Work to make your thinking more fluent and flexible.
10. Keep an idea log. Capture your ideas to see how they might be related to different areas of your life and review them periodically

 

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