"Even if you're not a genius, you can use the same
strategies as Aristotle and Einstein to harness the power of your
creative mind and better manage your future."
The following eight strategies encourage you to think
productively, rather than reproductively, in order to arrive at
solutions to problems. "These strategies are common to the
thinking styles of creative geniuses in science, art, and industry
throughout history."
1. Look at problems in many different ways,
and find new perspectives that no one else has taken (or no one else has
publicized!)
Leonardo da Vinci believed that, to gain knowledge about
the form of a problem, you begin by learning how to restructure it in
many different ways. He felt that the first way he looked at a
problem was too biased. Often, the problem itself is reconstructed
and becomes a new one.
2. Visualize!
When Einstein thought through a problem, he always found
it necessary to formulate his subject in as many different ways as
possible, including using diagrams. He visualized solutions,
and believed that words and numbers as such did not play a significant
role in his thinking process.
3. Produce! A distinguishing
characteristic of genius is productivity.
Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents. He guaranteed
productivity by giving himself and his assistants idea quotas. In
a study of 2,036 scientists throughout history, Dean Keith Simonton of
the University of California at Davis found that the most respected
scientists produced not only great works, but also many "bad"
ones. They weren't afraid to fail, or to produce mediocre in
order to arrive at excellence.
4. Make novel combinations. Combine,
and recombine, ideas, images, and thoughts into different combinations no
matter how incongruent or unusual.
The laws of heredity on which the modern science of
genetics is based came from the Austrian monk Grego Mendel, who combined
mathematics and biology to create a new science.
5. Form relationships; make connections
between dissimilar subjects.
Da Vinci forced a relationship between the sound of a
bell and a stone hitting water. This enabled him to make the
connection that sound travels in waves. Samuel Morse
invented relay stations for telegraphic signals when observing relay
stations for horses.
6. Think in opposites.
Physicist Niels Bohr believed, that if you held
opposites together, then you suspend your thought, and your mind moves
to a new level. His ability to imagine light as both a particle
and a wave led to his conception of the principle of complementarity.
Suspending thought (logic) may allow your mind to create a new form.
7. Think metaphorically.
Aristotle considered metaphor a sign of genius, and
believed that the individual who had the capacity to perceive
resemblances between two separate areas of existence and link them
together was a person of special gifts.
8. Prepare yourself for chance.
Whenever we attempt to do something and fail, we end up
doing something else. That is the first principle of creative
accident. Failure can be productive only if we do not focus on it
as an unproductive result. Instead: analyze the process, its
components, and how you can change them, to arrive at other results.
Do not ask the question "Why have I failed?", but rather
"What have I done?"
Adapted with permission from: Michalko,
Michael, Thinking Like a Genius: Eight strategies used by the
super creative, from Aristotle and Leonardo to Einstein and Edison
(New
Horizons for Learning) as seen at http://www.newhorizons.org/wwart_michalko1.html,
(June 15, 1999) This
article first appeared in THE FUTURIST, May 1998
Michael Michalko is the author of Thinkertoys
(A Handbook of Business Creativity), ThinkPak (A
Brainstorming Card Set), and Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of
Creative Geniuses (Ten Speed Press, 1998).
Feedback to improve
this page
(please specify which page)
The Study Guides and Strategies web site was created and is
maintained by Joe
Landsberger,
academic web site developer at the University
of St. Thomas (UST), St. Paul, Minnesota. It is collaboratively
maintained across institutional and national boundaries, and last revised
September 04, 2002 .
Permission is granted to freely copy, adapt, print,
transmit, and distribute
Study Guides in settings that benefit learners. On the WWW, however, please link
rather than put up your own page since pages are frequently modified and
improved in consideration of educational research. No request to link is
necessary. Additional contributions and translations are warmly
received.
|
