Seventeen Greatest Ideas for Creative Thinking Skills

Idea 48: Four phases of the creative thinking process

The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why.

Albert Einstein, German physicist

1 Preparation

The hard work. You have to collect and sort the relevant information, analyze the problem as thoroughly as you can, and explore possible solutions.

2 Incubation

This is the depth mind phase. Mental work – analyzing, synthesizing and valuing – continues on the problem in your subconscious mind. The parts of the problem separate and new combinations occur. These may involve other ingredients stored away in your memory.

3 Insight

The Eureka moment (see Idea 49). A new idea emerges into your conscious mind, either gradually or suddenly, like a fish flashing out of the water. These moments often occur when you are not thinking about the problem but are in a relaxed frame of mind.

4 Validation

This is where your valuing faculty comes into play. A new idea, insight, intuition, hunch or solution needs to be thoroughly tested. This is especially so if it is to form the basis for action of any kind.

Although it is useful for you to have this framework in mind, remember that the actual mental process is a lot more undy than the above framework suggests.

Idea 49: The Eureka moment

Eureka (Greek heureka) means ‘I have found it’. Today we use it as an exclamation of delight at having made a discovery. Archimedes, the Greek mathematician and inventor, originally uttered it when he discovered how to test the purity of Hiero's crown.

The story is that Hiero, the king of Syracuse, gave some gold to a smith to be made into a crown. On receiving it back he felt its weight and his suspicions were aroused. Had the smith fraudulently alloyed it with an inferior metal? But he couldn't prove anything. So he asked Archimedes to devise a test for its purity.

The philosopher did not know how to proceed. He gave it a great deal of thought, but still a solution eluded him. Then one morning he got into his bath, which was full to the brim. He noticed at once that some of the water spilled over. Immediately the principle came to him that a body as it is immersed must displace its own bulk of water.

Now silver is lighter than gold, he reasoned. Therefore a pound weight of silver is bulkier than a pound weight of gold and would consequently displace more water. Thus he found out how to work out a simple method to establish if the crown was deficient in gold! As an early writer recorded:

Idea 50: Use the stepping stones of analogy

I invent nothing; I rediscover.

Auguste Rodin, French sculptor

One characteristic of creative thinkers that you can learn from is the use they make of analogy, the resemblance in some particulars between things that are otherwise unlike. Most of us see the differences, but we miss the underlying principle and its possible transferability to other uses. Natural analogies are often rich in these hidden uses.

There are other later stages, of course, but let us stop here. The point is that the model you have reached may well have been suggested by an analogy from nature.

Indeed, you could look on nature as a storehouse of analogies just waiting to be used by inventors. Radar, for example, came from studying the uses of reflected sound waves from bats. The way a clam shell opens suggested the design for aircraft cargo doors. The built-in system weakness of the pea pod suggested a way of opening cigarette packages, a method now widely used in the packaging industry.

The answers are in the Appendix.

What these exercises show is that the models for the solutions to our problems do not necessarily have to be created from nothing, because they probably already exist. The same fundamental principle can be applied to all creative thinking, not just to inventing new products.

Take human organization as an example. Most of the principles involved can be found in nature: hierarchy (baboons), division of labour (ants, bees), networks (spiders' webs) and so on.

If you are trying to create a new organization you will find plenty of ready-made models in human society, past or present. Remember, however, that these are only analogies. If you copy directly you are heading for trouble.

Unlike literature where analogies – in the form of metaphors and similes – are used for literary ornament, in creative thinking you will be using comparisons or analogies as tools of thought. They are good can-openers.

Idea 51: Case study – The Buddha's statue

Soichiro Honda was an engineer who excelled in creative thinking and innovation. Early in his career, while he was building his first four-cylinder motorcycle, he gradually realized that although the engine was fine, his designers had made the whole machine look squat and ugly.

Honda decided to take a week's break for meditation and quiet reflection in Kyoto, the old imperial capital of Japan. One day, sitting in an ancient temple, he found himself fascinated by the face of a statue of the Buddha. He felt that he could see a resemblance between the look of Buddha's face and how he imagined the front of his new motorbike should be.

Having spent the rest of the week studying other statues of the Buddha in Kyoto's temples, Honda returned refreshed and inspired to his factory. Here he worked with his team of designers to produce a truly harmonious style that reflected the beauty he had glimpsed on the statue of the Buddha's face.

You can see that thinking by analogy – or analogizing, as it is some-times called – plays a key part in all imaginative thinking. This is especially so when it comes to creative thinking.

Nature sometimes suggests to the curious and alert mind models and principles for the solutions of problems. But there are other models or analogies to be found, for example in existing man - made products and various forms of human organization. Some simple research may save you the bother of thinking a solution out for yourself.

Idea 52: Make the strange familiar

The process of understanding anything or anyone unfamiliar, foreign, unnatural, unaccountable – what is not already known, heard or seen – is best begun by relang it by analogy to what we know already.

Often you cannot get where you need in one jump. But if you can hit on a good analogy, you are halfway there, like crossing a stream on stepping stones.

When, for example, indigenous inhabitants of New Guinea saw an aircra for the first me, they called it the ‘big bird’. Birds were familiar to them. Their first step towards comprehending something totally strange or unfamiliar was to assume it was an unusual example of something already known to them.

Notice that we tend to apply this principle of seeking to understand the strange or unfamiliar by comparing it to what is familiar in our social life. As the American novelist John Steinbeck said, ‘No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.’

As a form of reasoning, analogy has to be handled carefully. All analogies break down at some point. You need to know when to jump off the train. In the story above, for example, Mark certainly is analogous to Jack in two respects. But there are no grounds for believing that the analogy will hold in the other respects menoned.

Idea 53: Make the familiar strange

The aspect of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.

Ludwig Wigenstein, Austrian philosopher

If you see things or people repeatedly you hardly observe them at all unless there is some change from the familiar or predictable, some deviation from the norm, which forces itself on your attention. As Roman philosopher Seneca said, ‘Familiarity reduces the greatness of things.’

However, seeing something as strange, odd, problematic, unsatisfactory or only half-known restarts the engines of your mind. Remember the proverb ‘God hides things (and people) from us by putting them near to us.’

When we say we know someone we usually mean that we have a hazy no on of their likes and dislikes, together with a rough idea of their personality or temperament. We believe we can predict more or less accurately how the person will react. We think we know when our relative or friend is deviating from their normal behaviour. But take yourself as an example. Does anyone know everything about you? Could you in all honesty say that you fully know yourself?

‘We do not know people – their concerns, their loves and hates, their thoughts,'said the late novelist Iris Murdoch in a television interview. ‘For me the people I see around me every day are more extraordinary than any characters in my books.’ The implication is that below the surface of familiarity there is a wonderful unknown world to be explored.

This morning you may have made a cup of tea or coffee and had your breakfast, the same as yesterday. But was it? You will never even brush your teeth in precisely the same way as yesterday. Every day, every hour, every minute is unique. As French author Proust reminds us: ‘Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.’

Idea 54: Widen your span of relevance

It is the function of creative people to perceive the relations between thoughts, or things or forms of expression that may seem utterly different, and to combine them into some new forms – the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.

William Plomer, South African author

Farming in his native Berkshire in the early eighteenth century, the Brish agriculturalist Jethro Tull developed a drill enabling seeds to be sown mechanically, and so spaced that cultivation between rows was possible in the growth period.

Tull was an organist, and it was the principle of the organ that gave him his new idea. What he was doing, in effect, was to transfer the technical means of achieving a practical purpose from one field to another.

The essential ingredients of the story are as follows. Tull was confronted with a problem and dissasfied with the exis ng solu ons to it. Suddenly a spark jumped between the problem and his knowledge of another technology. He found a model or analogy. Then it was a question of applying the principle and developing the technology for the new task in hand. The less obvious the connection between the two fields, the more we are likely to call it creative thinking.

Therefore it is not surprising that inventors and other creative thinkers have knowledge in more than one field. They may even work in a quite different sphere from the one in which they make their names as discoverers or inventors.

So the transfer of technology from one field to another, usually with some degree of alteration and adaptation, is one way in which you can make a creative contribution.

You may be familiar with a body of knowledge or technical capability unknown to others in your field because you have worked in more than one industry. Or it may come about as a result of your travels to other countries.

Sir Barnes Wallis, the British aeronautical engineer who helped to develop the Concorde supersonic airliner and the swing-wing aircraft, failed his London matriculation examination at the age of 16. ‘I knew nothing,’ he said in a television interview, ‘except how to think, how to grapple with a problem and then go on grappling with it until you had solved it.’

When you are grappling with a problem remember to widen your span of relevance. Look at the technologies available in fields other than your own, possibly in those that may appear to others to be so far removed as to be irrelevant. They may give you a clue.

‘Experience has shown,’ wrote Edgar Allan Poe, ‘that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.’

People with a narrow span of relevance are thinking within the tramlines and boundaries of their own industry. Leap over the wall! Develop a wide span of relevance, for there are connections between every other industry in the world and yours – if only you could see them.

It comes down to your ‘power to connect the seemingly unconnected’, or at least the things that hitherto have not been brought together in a new and interes ng relation.

Idea 55: Keep your eyes open

If a man looks sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune; for though she is blind yet she is not invisible.

Francis Bacon, English philosopher

‘I am fascinated by the principle of growth: how people and things evolved,'said the portrait painter Graham Sutherland in an interview at the age of 73. He aimed to pin down the atmosphere and essence of the people he painted: ‘I have to be as patient and watchful as a cat.’ He could see in the human face the same sort of expression of the process of growth and struggle as he found in the rugged surfaces of boulders or the irregular contours of a range of hills. ‘There are so many ideas I want to get off my chest. The days aren't long enough,’ he added.

It may seem odd to think of painng a picture as a means of geng an idea off your chest. But for the artist the act of careful, analytical observation is only part of the story. Ideas and emotions are fused into the paint in the heat of inspiration. What the artist knows and feels is married to what he or she sees, and the picture is the child of that union.

‘Painng is a blind man's profession,'said Picasso. ‘He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.’ That principle holds true not only for the kind of art for which Picasso is famous, but also for the more realistic work of painters such as Graham Sutherland.

An observation made through the eyes will undergo transformation to varying degrees in the creative mind as it is combined with other elements into a new idea, bubbling away in a cauldron of animated interest. As William Blake put it, ‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.’ But the observation itself needs to be clear, accurate and honest. Like a good cook, a creative thinker should work from the best materials.

Observation is a skill. ‘You see, but you do not observe,’ comments Sherlock to his assistant Dr Watson in one of their cases. At the lowest level it implies the ability to see what is really in front of you. Laurence Olivier added to that skill a retentive memory for what he had observed with interest.

Notice, too, how Olivier was able to combine elements in his memory into a coherent whole – a new stage character. What may give you this kind of inspiration?

Idea 56: Observational skills

If I ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent.

Isaac Newton, English scientist

One of the best forms of training in observation is drawing or sketching.

A great pioneer in the importance of teaching drawing, John Ruskin, once told his students at the Working Men's College in London in the 1850s, ‘I am only trying to teach you to see.’

Seeing, for Ruskin, was the fundamental way in which to acquire knowledge of the world, and he believed it was a talent that few possessed. As he wrote in Modern Painters:

Would you like to try it for yourself?

Observation implies attempting to see a person, object or scene as if you had never seen it before in your life. What it really teaches us is not experience, but observation.

Idea 57: Test your assumptions

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German author

Albert Einstein is famous for making one assumption and thinking out its implications. ‘Let me assume,’ he said to himself, ‘that I am riding on the back of a sunbeam, travelling through the universe with the speed of light. How would things look to me?’ The eventual result was the General Theory of Relavity!

It was by formulating this theory that Einstein led us to the knowledge that planets and stars move not because they are influenced by forces coming from other bodies in the universe, but because of the special nature of the world of space and time in the neighbourhood of matter.

Light-rays may travel straight, for example, in the vast interstellar spaces, but they are deflected or bent when they come within the field of influence of a star or other massive body.

Making conscious assumptions like the one that Einstein made – as if thinking – is a key tool in the tool chest of a creative thinker. You are deliberately and temporarily making a supposition that something is true.

It is like making a move in a game of chess but still keeping your hand on the piece, so that you can replace it if you do not like the implications of the half-made move. ‘No great discovery is made without a bold guess,’ said Isaac Newton.

I have emphasized the words conscious, deliberately and temporarily because this kind of exploratory thinking does need to be sharply distinguished from thinking based on unconscious assumptions or preconceptions.

We have all had the experience of taking something for granted as the basis for opinion or action, and then subsequently finding that we had made an erroneous assumption – probably an unconscious one – that was unwarranted.

Watch out for these preconceptions! They are like hidden sandbanks outside the harbour mouth. Develop your awareness of the tangled misconceptions, preconceptions and unconscious assumptions within you. Welcome others when they challenge or question your assumptions.

Think outside the box! Don't allow yourself to be constrained by the mental limitations or straitjackets that are sometimes imposed on situations without any warrant or truth.

Making an assumption is more like taking a tentative step. ‘Supposing we did it this way – how would it work? What would the consequences be?’ It is not an answer, even a guessed answer, but it is a step that you can take if you are baffled, which might open up new possibilities.

Louis Pasteur compared assumptions to ‘searchlights which illumine the path of an experimenter and serve him as a guide to interrogate nature’. He added: ‘They become a danger only if he transforms them into fixed ideas.’

Remember always that suppositions are to be made without commitment, like trying on new clothes in a shop before buying (or not buying) them.

Idea 58: Do not wait for inspiration

Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labour.

Leonardo da Vinci, Renaissance artist and inventor

‘I can call spirits from the vastly deep,’ boasts Owen Glendower in Shakespeare's Henry IV. Hotspur puts down the fiery Celt by replying: ‘Why so can I, or so can any man, but will they come when you do call for them?’ Doubtless Shakespeare is writing here from personal experience. The comings and goings of inspiration are unpredictable.

In creative work it is unwise to wait for the right mood. English author Graham Greene once said:

Thriller writer Leslie Thomas agreed:

It can seem impossible, like trying to drive a car with more water in the tank than petrol. But you just have to get out and push. Better to advance by inches than not to advance at all.

As we saw in Idea 47, Thomas Edison, inventor of the electric light bulb among many other things, gave a celebrated definition of genius as ‘1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration’.

Creative thinking, paradoxically, is not very creative for 99 hours out of every 100. What it is can be described as endlessly varied combinations of analyzing, synthesizing, imagining and valuing. The raw materials are sifted, judged, adapted, altered and glue together in different ways until something creative results.

When Queen Victoria congratulated the world-renowned pianist Paderewski on being a genius he replied: ‘That may be, Ma'am, but before I was a genius I was a drudge.’

Not all intellectual drudges are geniuses, however. Something more is needed. That lies beyond the willingness to start work without tarrying for inspiration and to keep at it day in and day out.

Idea 59: Leave a candle in the window

Inspiration seldom hits you with the force of a sledgehammer. It is more like a butterfly that may alight within reach aer you have abandoned the chase with your net. But if your eyes are shut, you won't even notice the uninvited yet beautiful guest.

We all need inspiration every day. Therefore, in order to experience it, be awake and alert, always ready for the faint stirring in the air, with the doors of your mind open and a candle in the window to guide it home.

In other words, you need a peculiar kind of sensitivity, as if you were standing still and waiting, prepared and ready with all your senses alert, for the faintest brush of the wind in the treetops.

Your inner ear or eye may trace some delicate motion in your deeper mind, some thought that stirs like a leaf in the unseen air. It is not the stillness, nor the half-thought that only stirred, but these three mysteries in one that together constitute the experience of inspiration.

German poet Goethe used a more homely image:

We have all been given a mind capable of creative thinking and there is no going back on that. So we are more than halfway there. We just have to believe that there are words and music in the air, if we tune in our instruments to the right wavelengths. They will come in their own me and to their own place.

Idea 60: Case study – James Watt

One should never impose one's views on a problem; one should rather study it, and in time a solution will reveal itself.

Albert Einstein, German physicist

James Watt, the celebrated Scottish engineer and inventor, found that the condenser for the Newcomen steam engine, which he studied closely at the University of Glasgow, was very inefficient.

Power for each stroke was developed by first filling the cylinder with steam and then cooling it with a jet of water. This cooling action condensed the steam and formed a vacuum behind the piston, which the pressure of the atmosphere then forced to move.

Watt calculated that this process of alternately heating and cooling the cylinder wasted three-quarters of the heat supplied to the engine.

Therefore Watt realized that if he could prevent this loss, he could reduce the engine's fuel consumption by more than 50 per cent. He worked for two years on the problem with no solution in sight. Then, one fine Sunday afternoon, he was out walking:

Five practical lessons

1. Do not wait for inspiration or you will wait for ever. Inspiration is a companion that will appear beside you on certain stretches of the road. ‘One sits down first,'said the French dramatist, novelist and film director Jean Cocteau, ‘one thinks afterwards.’
2. ‘The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery,'said Albert Einstein. ‘There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why.’
3. Develop an inner sensitivity or awareness, so that your spiritual eyes and ears are open to the slightest movement or suggestion from outside or inside, from above or below, which hints at a way forward. Listen to your inklings!
4. You cannot quite control the process that leads to genuine creative work. But having the right attitude of expectancy, together with a measure of hope and confidence, certainly seems to pay off.
5. ‘Like a long-legged fly upon the stream, her mind moves upon silence.’ These evocative words of Robert Frost underline the need for silence and solitude in creative thinking, such as you find on a country walk. James Watt was walking alone when his inspired idea came to him.

Somebody once asked Anton Bruckner: ‘Master, how, when, where did you think of the divine motif of your Ninth Symphony?’

‘Well, it was like this,’ Bruckner replied. ‘I walked up the Kahlenberg and when it got hot and I got hungry, I sat down by a little brook and unpacked my Swiss cheese, and just as I open the greasy paper that tune pops into my head!’

The best advice is not to focus too strongly on any single aspect of a problem in the early stages. You should learn to think generally or holistically about it, like a scientist scanning a problem area for flaws. Let the problem speak to you.

‘Whatever the ultimate object of his work,’ wrote Hazel Rossottin Introducing Chemistry, ‘the experimental chemist's immediate aim is to ask suitable questions of the sensible bodies he is studying and to let them answer for themselves. It is the chemist's job to observe and report the answers with minimal distortion; only then can he attempt to interpret them.’

Patient analysis and restructuring of the parts, taking up different perspective points in your imagination from which to view them: all these will deepen your understanding of the problem. If you're lucky, fairly soon they will release within you, like a cash dispenser, the right solution or at least the right direction in which to advance.

Idea 61: Working it out

There is an old saying ‘Well begun is half done.’ ‘Tis a bad one. I would use instead, ‘Not begun at all till half done.’

John Keats, English poet

Don't wait until you have a fully formed idea in your mind before you start work. Creative thinking continues after you have begun to work.

Remember that creative thinking and creativity are not quite the same. Creative thinking leads you to the new idea; creativity includes actually bringing it into existence.

There are some cases, indeed, where an idea or concept appears initially in its finished and fully fledged form, but they are the exceptions. What you are given is usually far less than that. You have to work it out.

In the process of working it out the idea may be developed, adapted or changed, and new ideas or materials will be added to the melting pot. Products and services are made in the making.

This approach rather goes against the grain for those who have been indoctrinated to seek finished ideas before going to work. But it adds greatly to the interest and excitement of work if you do not know what is coming next. ‘I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew,'said Robert Frost. Creative thinking has to be an adventure.

Knowing when to stop thinking and start trying to work out an idea is an important act of judgement. If you are premature, you will waste a lot of time fruitlessly chasing ideas that are not right. But if you have a working clue, don't wait too long!

Working it out – actually trying to make or produce something – is a way of continuing the process of creative thinking. Therefore it is not necessary to have a fully formed picture or crystal clear idea of where you are going before you start work.

Because so little is given to you by way of initial inspiration, you may follow false trails, get lost and feel frustrated, even to the point of despairing. But if you haven't worked on the edge of failure you haven't worked on the edge of real success.

As implementation is part of creative thinking you have to develop the product yourself, at least up to a certain point. Beyond that point it obviously has to be much more of a team effort, especially if you wish to take the idea into the marketplace.

Remember that exhilaration is that feeing you get after a great idea hits you, and just before you realize what's wrong with it!

Idea 62: Drift, wait and obey

When your creative spirit is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait and obey.

Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book

Although creative thinking requires sustained attention, sometimes over a period of years, it does not always have to be conscious attention. Indeed, it often seems that the longer you are consciously wrestling with a difficulty or problem, the less likely you are to solve it.

Try switching off your attention – ‘drift, wait and obey’ on the tide of thought. Wait for your unconscious mind to whisper to you: ‘Hey, have you thought of this?’

What your depth mind can do for you is to connect things in unexpected or unusual ways. For Leonardo da Vinci, for example, the worlds of science and art were deeply interconnected. His notebooks were filled with pictures, colours and images; his sketchbooks for paintings abounded with geometry, anatomy and perspective. He wrote:

Not a bad prospectus for a creative thinker!

Obviously some vocations – inventors, playwrights, scientists and composers, for example – call for more depth mind activity than others. But the ability to make such connecons, to grow new ideas or wholes, is present in all of us in varying degrees.

Remember that creativity doesn't require superhuman powers or extra-sensory perception. What happens is that your depth mind is at work, interpreting natural signs, picking up hints that invade your senses below the conscious threshold, and piecing together the paucity of information in the shape of guesses, hints or clues.

The first step is to understand that your mind does have this creative dimension. With a degree of simple awareness, understanding and skill, you can work with its holistic capability of growing ideas as if they were seeds connecting or integrating apparently unrelated materials, creating order out of chaos.

Skill? Yes, because there is an art in knowing when to stand back and let your depth mind do its work.

Idea 63: Sleep on the problem

Another gem from Leonardo da Vinci: ‘It is no small benefit on finding oneself in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the main lines of the forms previously studied, or other noteworthy things conceived by ingenious speculation.’ The reason, of course, is that your depth mind may then get to work while you are asleep.

Of course, you might actually dream of a solution. Dreams are extraordinary creations of our imagining faculty in the inner brain. They also give us clues to how the depth mind works, not least in the language of visual imagery.

The man who invented the Singer sewing machine, for example, reached an impasse when he could not get the thread to run through the needle consistently. When he was at his wit's end he dreamed one night that he was being chased by natives carrying spears. As they came closer, he noced that every spear had a hole at the bottom of the blade. The next morning, he made a needle with its eye near the point, instead of at the top. His machine was complete.

Quite why sleep plays such an important part in helping or enabling the depth mind to analyze, synthesize and value is still a mystery. Dreams suggest an inner freedom to make all sorts of random connections between different constellations of brain cells. There may be some sort of shaking up of the kaleidoscope, resulting in new patterns forming in the mine shafts of the mind. We just do not know.

This ignorance of how the depth mind works does not matter very much. What does matter is that it does work.

There is an element of mystery about the creative work that can go on in our sleep. Author Robert Louis Stevenson spoke of ‘those little people, my brownies, who do one half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself’.

‘When I am completely myself,’ wrote composer Mozart to his father, ‘entirely alone or during the night when I cannot sleep, it is on these occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how these come I know not nor can I force them. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successfully, but I hear them at the same me altogether.’

You most probably have experienced the beneficial effects of sleeping on a problem, and awakening to find that your mind has made itself up. Use that principle by programming your depth mind for a few minutes as you lie in the dark and before you go to sleep.

Your dreams may occasionally be directly relevant. It is much more likely, however, that some indication, clue or idea will occur to you aer ‘sleeping on it’. Perhaps during your waking hours, for instance while you are shaving or washing the dishes, the idea will dart into your mind.

Do you remember Francis Bacon's advice from Idea 30 ? ‘A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought are commonly the most valuable and should be secured, because they seldom return.’ To follow Bacon's wise words, always keep a pad and pencil by your bedside: when a brief idea comes, write it down.

Idea 64: Think creatively about your life

Creativeness and a creative attitude to life as a whole is not man's right, it is his duty.

Nikolai Berdyaev, Russian religious philosopher

You may not be an author of books, but you are writing the book of your own life. Your life is not being dictated to you from a pre-recorded script. You can make at least some of it up as you go along. ‘When the creative urge seizes one – at least, such is my experience – one becomes creative in all directions at once,'said novelist Henry Miller.

If you decide to take a creative approach to life it does change your perspective. You will seek out first some ‘given’ ideas about yourself. What are your distinctive strengths? These are not easy questions to answer. Self-discovery lasts a lifeme, and even then it may not be completed. Seek to identify what you are born to excel at, and make sure you are working in the right area.

Even when some conscious self-analysis and some imaginative thinking, supplemented by intuition, have given you some clues, insights or bold guesses about yourself, you still have to try to work out these ideas in real life. That involves an element of trial and error, periods of frustration and despair, and moments of excitement and joy.

For gradually, the creative pattern of your life begins to emerge before your eyes on the loom of experience, with change and continuity as its warp and weft.

Life is a usually interesting, occasionally exciting and sometimes painful journey forwards into an unknown future. As you try to make something of it in a creative way, working things out as you go along, new ideas will come to you. Even in the desert stretches there are wells and springs of inspiration, but they are not to be had in advance.

‘Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do,’ wrote Mark Twain. ‘So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade wind in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.’

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