4.
GIVE THEM MORE THAN ONE PROBLEM AT A TIME

One of the best ways to get an idea is to put your unconscious to work on it.

That’s what creative people in advertising agencies do all the time. If they’re having trouble coming up with, say, ideas for a television commercial on a car and it isn’t due until next week, they shift gears and start working on ideas for a newspaper ad on a restaurant, or a billboard on a beer.

Einstein did the same thing. So did Helmholtz and Bertrand Russell and Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov and Thomas Wolfe and Rollo May and A. E. Housman and just about everyone else who ever wrote about getting ideas.

So if the people you work with are having trouble coming up with great ideas on a problem, tell them to forget about it and work on something else.

When they come back to the problem later, doors that were closed before will be open, barriers will be down, roads that did not exist will suddenly appear. They’ll see new relationships and connections and possibilities, they’ll feel new hope.

That’s because, according to Michael Guillen, CBS Morning News’ science expert, “... the human mind can be induced to create thoughts that come seemingly out of nowhere… Carl Friedrich Gauss recalled that he tried unsuccessfully for years to prove a particular theorem in arithmetic, and then, after days of not thinking about the problem, the solution came to him ‘like a sudden flash of lightning.’ Henri Poincaré, too, reported working futilely on a problem for months. Then one day while conversing with a friend about a totally unrelated subject, Poincaré recalled that ‘… the idea came to me without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it.’”90

But remember: The people you work with can’t work on something else unless they have something else to work on.

Give it to them.