2.
Be More Líke a Chíld

A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are more bores around than when I was a boy.

Fred Allen

Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

George Bernard Shaw

Insanity is hereditary—you get it from your children.

Sam Levenson

Charles Baudelaire described genius as childhood recovered at will.

He was saying that if you can revisit the wonder of childhood you can taste genius.

And he was right; it is the child in you who is creative, not the adult.

The adult in you wears a belt and suspenders and looks both ways before crossing the road.

The child in you goes barefoot and plays in the street.

The adult punches the ball to right.

The child swings for the fences.

The adult thinks too much and has too much scar tissue and is manacled by too much knowledge and by too many boundaries and rules and assumptions and preconceptions.

In short, the adult is a poop. A handcuffed poop.

The child is innocent and free and does not know what he cannot or should not do. He sees the world as it actually is, not the way we adults have been taught to believe that it is.

“In physics, as elsewhere,” wrote Gary Zukav in The Dancing Wu Li Masters, “those who most have felt the exhilaration of the creative process are those who best have slipped the bonds of the known and venture far into the unexplored territory which lies beyond the barrier of the obvious. This type of person has two characteristics. The first is a childlike ability to see the world as it is, and not as it appears according to what we know about it.” *

Mr. Zukav continued:

“The child in us is always naive, innocent in the simplistic sense. A Zen story tells of Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era who received a university professor. The professor came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself.

“ ‘It is overfull. No more will go in!’

“ ‘Like this cup,’ Nan-in said, ‘you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?’ ”

Mr. Zukav then said: “Our cup is usually filled to the brim with the ‘obvious,’ ‘common sense,’ and ‘the self-evident.’ ”

“If you would be more creative,” wrote the psychologist Jean Piaget, “stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.”

J. Robert Oppenheimer agreed: “There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago.”

Thomas Edison agreed too: “The greatest invention in the world is the mind of a child.”

So did Will Durant: “. . . the child knows as much of cosmic truth as Einstein did in the ecstasy of his final formula.”

Which is curiously close to what Albert Einstein himself said: “I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of time and space. These are things that he has thought of as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.”

Perhaps Dylan Thomas put it best, though, when he wrote:

The ball I threw while playing in the park

Has not yet reached the ground.

Adults don’t play in the park; children do.

Adults tend to do what they or other people did the last time.

To children there is no last time. Every time is the first time. And so when they go exploring for ideas they explore a land that is fresh and original, a land without rules, a land without borders or fences or walls or boundaries, a land infinite with promise and opportunity.

Remember the story in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about the girl who couldn’t think of anything to say when asked to write a 500-word essay about the United States? The teacher said to write about Bozeman, Montana, the town where the school was, instead of the entire United States. Nothing. Then he said to write about the main street in Bozeman. Still nothing.

Then he said, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”

The next class the girl turned in a 5,000-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman.

“ ‘I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,’ she said, ‘and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop.’ ”

She was initially blocked, wrote Pirsig, “because she was trying to repeat, in writing, things she had already heard. . . . She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.”

Children don’t have such blockages because children don’t know about before. They only know about now. And so when searching for a solution to a problem they look and see freshly for themselves. Every time.

They break rules because they do not know the rules exist. They do odd things that make their adult parents uneasy. They stand up in the boat and rock it. They shout in church, play with matches, and pound the piano with their fists.

They constantly see the new relationships among seemingly unrelated things. They paint trees orange and grass purple, and they hang fire trucks from clouds.

They study ordinary things intently—a blade of grass, a spoon, a face—and have a sense of wonder about the things that most of us take for granted.

They ask and ask and ask.

“Kids are natural-born scientists,” said Carl Sagan. “First of all, they ask the deep scientific questions: Why is the moon round? Why is the sky blue? What’s a dream? Why do we have toes? What’s the birthday of the world? By the time they get into high school, they hardly ever ask questions like that.”

“Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods,” agreed Neil Postman.

Become a question mark again.

Whatever you see, ask yourself why it is the way it is. If you don’t get an answer that makes sense, perhaps there’s room for improvement.

Why is your production line set up the way it is?

Why does your receptionist sit behind a desk? Why do you?

Why do you come to work and leave when you do? Why does your office or plant open and close when it does?

Why do your business cards, your stationery, your presentation books all look the way they do?

Why does your product look the way it does?

Why is your product packaged the way it is?

Why do your bills and invoices look the way they do?

Why are kitchen counters and bathroom sinks the height that they are?

Why don’t kitchen faucets have foot pedals?

Why don’t refrigerators have pull-out drawers?

Lots of banks have their customers form one long line so that no customer ever gets stuck in a slow line. Why don’t supermarkets and other stores do that?

Why is the word “Milk” so often the biggest or the second biggest word on milk cartons? Everybody knows it’s milk. Why isn’t that space put to better use?

Why don’t they put gasoline caps on both sides of your car, so that no matter which side of the gasoline pump you park on, you’ll never have to pull the hose around to the other side?

All of us have mental pictures of ourselves. How old is the person you see in your mental image? When I put that question to one of the most creative people I know (the illustrator of this book), he said, “Six.”

Imagine. When he thinks of himself, he thinks of a six-year-old.

No wonder he continually comes up with fresh solutions and ideas. He unconsciously thinks like a six-year-old much of the time, seeing things through a six-year-old’s eyes.

Once when we were working on a cat food commercial he wondered what the world looked like from a cat’s point of view—when the cat was running, what did the walls and stairs and furniture look like to it? What did it dream about? What did its food look like? Did its canned “Salmon Dinner” look to it like a salmon dinner looks to us? The questions went on and on.

Another almost-as-young friend of mine was working on a Smokey Bear commercial and wondered what it would be like if the animals in the forest came into our backyards every summer and left their still-smoldering campfires burning when they left, in the same way that we leave our fires still smoldering in their backyards.

Still another friend wondered what it was like after hours in the produce department of a grocery store. Did the Sunkist lemons tell the broccoli they’d make a beautiful twosome?

Let the child in you come out. Don’t be afraid.

Most businesses reward people who come up with new ideas. And one of the ways to come up with new ideas is to be more like a child.

So next time you have a problem to solve or an idea to come up with, ask yourself: “How would I solve this if I were six years old?” “How would I look at this if I were four?”

Loosen up. Run down the hall someday at work. Eat an ice cream cone at your desk. Take everything out of your desk drawers and put it on the floor for a couple of days. Rearrange your office furniture. Take a nap after lunch. Draw pictures on your window with a felt-tip pen. Write notes with crayons. Sing out loud in the elevator. Pound the piano. Stand up in the boat. And then rock it.

Have fun. (See chapter 1.)

Forget what was done before. Break the rules. Be illogical. Be silly. Be free.

Be a child.