The Third Step

LOOK

How to Be Aware of the Answers All Around You

In 1941 George de Mestral went on a hunting trip with his dog in the Swiss Alps. It was autumn, and the underbrush prickled with burrs—a kind of seed pod that sticks to an animal's fur. This is evolution's genius: animals carry the seeds far and wide, spreading the plant's offspring over a vast area. But the mechanism is annoying for dogs—and for their owners. Burrs were stuck all over de Mestral's dog, and also on his pants. Most dog owners never notice how cleverly burrs are designed; they just get annoyed when they bloody their fingers trying to remove them.

De Mestral was annoyed, too. But unlike decades of previous dog owners, he was also intrigued. He saved one of the burrs and looked at it closely under a microscope. At the end of each of its sharp spines, he noticed a tiny hook. These hooks snagged on fur and clothing, allowing the burr to hang on and travel.

Looking closely gave de Mestral an idea: if he could put spines with hooks on one side and tiny loops on the other, he could make a new kind of fastener, an improved version of the zipper. The result? Velcro. De Mestral retired as a multimillionaire.

Now let's switch to a failure that zig zagged into a success. Hasbro came up with a lollipop that played a song when you licked it. The trick was a newly invented technology that let a tune resonate through the teeth and jawbone. Alas, the singing lollipop cost ten dollars, and no self-respecting parent was going to spend that much for a piece of candy. The lollipop was a flop.

A few years later, around 2000, another team at Hasbro was trying to develop a new child's toothbrush, and they needed a gimmick. Someone looked in the “dead ideas” file and found the lollipop. The second team put the technology into the toothbrush, and had it play a two-minute song as long as it was touching the teeth—thereby making sure a child would brush for at least two minutes, the minimum recommended by dentists. Parents gladly paid ten dollars for healthy teeth, and the toothbrush was a singing success.

A final zig zag example. More than a century ago, two sisters—Mildred and Patty Hill—composed a song they titled “Good Morning to You.” Nobody bought it. The sisters kept tinkering, though, trying different lyrics until they arrived at a version that was just right. You've sung it countless times: it's called “Happy Birthday to You.”

These three examples are very different, but they have one important element in common: the discipline of looking. Simply by seeing the same thing in a new way, these inventors came up with ideas that resonated with millions of people.

How do we see? It seems obvious: the eyes scan the environment, a photographic image is projected onto the retina, and then that image is passed on to the brain. But this simple account is wrong, because seeing is as much about the brain as it is about the eye.

Rodolfo Llinas, a neuroscientist at NYU School of Medicine, says that what we see is, in large part, a projection created by our brain. Scientists used to think that visual information from our eyes was processed upward, from the eye to the visual cortex, and then on to the higher brain regions that are responsible for thinking and creativity. But recent studies indicate something very different: thousands of neurons are sending information from the higher brain regions back into the visual cortex.

By Llinas's estimate, only 20 percent of our perceptions are based on information coming from the outside world; the other 80 percent, our mind fills in. Neuroscientists don't yet fully understand exactly how the different pathways intersect to create what we see. But Llinas makes a surprising claim: that there is no essential difference between waking and sleeping. In both states, our brain actively constructs our view of the world.

Professor David Perkins of Harvard studied poets and painters while they were doing creative work. As they critically examined their own work in progress, they demonstrated an almost uncanny ability to notice problems, difficulties, and opportunities. This “noticing” then guided the next stage of their work, as they refined and improved what they'd done. In other words, much of their creative brilliance came from their ability to look at their work in just the right way.

Want to see how your mind's ability to notice things plays a role in creativity? Take out a watch with a second hand, grab paper and a pencil to write down your times, and try the these three exercises.

First, look through the following letters as fast as you can, and count the number of x's. Write down how long it took you to count the x's.

Second, look through the same block of letters, but this time, find any of the five letters r, x, v, s, and w—and not by looking through five separate times, but with just one scan. Write down your time again.

That's harder, but it doesn't take five times as long. That's because your mind has an amazing ability to create new categories that help you complete tasks. Psychologists have discovered that with enough practice, you can scan for a large set of targets almost as fast as you scan for just one. To see what I mean, try the third exercise: go to the group of letters that follows and scan for any of the five letters a, e, i, o, and u. Write down how long it takes.

Almost everyone finishes the vowel search much faster than the r, x, v, s, w search. In fact, many people can do this just as fast as looking only for x's. That's because our past experience and learning change the way we see. We don't need to keep checking our list, because we memorized those vowels back in first grade.

(By the way, there are twelve x's; twenty-three instances of r, x, v, s, and w; and fourteen vowels.)

In the last chapter, we talked about the huge role learning plays in successful creativity. Trained noticing is a form of learning, and it can speed up many processes. But the flip side of trained noticing is that it can also block you from seeing unexpected and surprising things. And it's those unexpected, random associations that often spark truly creative ideas.

So how do you free your well-trained mind to make unexpected associations? You go beyond your training and expertise by mastering the discipline of looking. Creative people are very good at finding exactly what they need to see to take the next creative step forward. Throughout the day, whether they're shopping for groceries or fixing a meal for their children, successful creators often notice possible paths to a solution. That's because their eyes are prepared to see potential solutions everywhere they look.

Psychologists are beginning to understand just how this creative seeing works. When you're working hard on a problem and then get stumped, you're left with what are called “failure indices”—stored memories of exactly where you were when you got stumped. These bookmarks keep your subconscious mind attuned to any potential solution. So first, you need to think about a problem until you get stumped. Second, set the problem aside, and trust that the lingering failure index will stay active in your subconscious mind. Then, most important of all, you need to look in a new way, to notice examples or bits of inspiration in your environment that can reactivate your failure index and move you past the block.

Here's an example. For my son, Graham's, ninth birthday, my wife and I gave him a huge airplane made of Styrofoam. It was over four feet long and had a wingspan just as large. The first time he took it outside to play, he broke the fuselage in half. (Like I didn't see that coming!) We tried to glue it back together, but no glue was strong enough, and it kept breaking right in the same spot. Graham was crushed. I was stumped. How could I fix this airplane?

The next week, at a conference, I was eating appetizers at an evening reception. While I was enjoying little cubes of cheese on toothpicks, suddenly my airplane failure index came to life: I realized I could take a couple of toothpicks and stick them into the center of the Styrofoam fuselage right across the break, to hold the two broken pieces in place. After the reception, I rushed home to try it. I inserted two toothpicks halfway into one of the broken pieces; then I added glue, and I lined up and squeezed the other broken piece onto the two exposed toothpick ends. It worked like a charm!

The way you look at the world determines how creative you can be. By looking more closely, more patiently, or from a different angle, you realize how your brain has shaped your previous perceptions and guided (or limited) your thinking. Once you understand how your mind and vision influence each other, you can begin to see the world afresh.

The Practices

When you've mastered the discipline of looking, you are constantly, quietly aware. You don't just see what you expect to see. You see the new, the unusual, the surprising. You see what others take for granted, and what they incorrectly assume. You are directly connected to your senses, so you perceive clearly and accurately. You expose yourself to new experiences eagerly, without hesitation; you regularly seek out new stimuli, new situations, and new information. You're constantly expanding your personal library of sights and sounds, behaviors and reactions, needs and wants.

I named this step look because our world is so visual now, but it also includes listening, and any other way of observing the world around you. To turn this open attention into creativity, you need to master three practices: Use Fresh Eyes, Grab New Sights and Cool Sounds, and Render It Visible.

The First Practice of Looking: Use Fresh Eyes

Use this practice if you're feeling stumped. You're stuck in a rut or spinning your wheels, your thoughts as trite as the clichés that describe them. You keep thinking of the same old solutions, the ones you already know don't work.

Using fresh eyes teaches you how to look at the world the way the most exceptional creators do. You begin to observe exactly what will move you forward on your creative journey. You find answers to your bookmarked failure indices, and the new ideas propel you forward, right over your writer's block or technical snag. Best of all, you recognize when your ways of seeing are part of the problem. You open your eyes a little wider and look beyond familiar, established patterns.

Become More Aware

Professor Ellen Langer of Harvard studies what she calls mindfulness, a state of active observation. Back in the 1970s she started noticing how often people do things without thinking. This “mindlessness” is an efficient way to get through the day: we shower the same way every morning; we drive the same route to work every day; and many of our work tasks are repetitive, so our brain can offload them to the unconscious mind. But mindlessness stops being efficient the minute something changes. When the regular routine no longer works, we fail.

You saw at the beginning of this chapter how knowing about vowels made a search task much easier. But sometimes these same mental categories lead to mindlessness. Without thinking, we plop new perceptions into old categories—forcing the new information to fit our expectations rather than using it to create new categories.

For example, many of us find a way to immediately categorize people we meet. Was that a Southern accent? Are they from our town, or somewhere else? Professional, graduate degree, blue collar? Where did they go to high school or college?

We're quick to do this with political or economic opinions—especially if we consider ourselves knowledgeable about politics. We hear one sentence and decide the person's “liberal” or “conservative.” We're often so busy assigning the label, we fail to hear what that individual is really saying.

How can we smash those rigid mental categories? By cultivating mindfulness, Langer says. She's identified four ways:

• Have an open and curious attitude.
• Interact with the world around you, and pay lively attention to changes in your environment.
• Actively create new categories rather than relying on existing, stereotypical categories.
• Look at your experiences from multiple perspectives, and use feedback to adapt behavior.

Langer believes that what distinguishes artists from others is their mindful state. You'll notice—if, that is, you're looking!—that many of the techniques in this chapter echo her work on mindfulness. For greater creativity, you have to stop living on autopilot and start paying attention.

Make Your Own Luck

Professor Richard Wiseman studied two groups of people. The first group described themselves as “exceptionally lucky”; the second group said they were extremely unlucky. What, he wondered, is the difference between lucky and unlucky people? Is there a way to make your own luck?

Wiseman found that there is. And one of the most important ways to increase your luck is by looking. Lucky people pay more attention to what's going on around them. They're also more open to opportunities that come along spontaneously. The unlucky people Wiseman studied were just the opposite: they were stuck in routine patterns, and so focused on their narrow goals that they failed to notice unexpected opportunities.

In one experiment, Wiseman gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and told them to look through it and tell him how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photos. The lucky people took just a few seconds. How were they so fast? Because on the second page of the newspaper, Wiseman had the printer insert the words “Stop counting—there are 43 photographs in this newspaper” in very large type that took up half the page. The unlucky people tended to miss it, and the lucky people tended to see it.

How could unlucky people not notice this huge, half-page message? They had defined their goal so tightly—“I am looking for pictures”—that they didn't see any text. Unlucky people miss opportunities because they're too focused on looking for something else. Lucky people don't fixate; they're skilled at creating, noticing, and acting on unexpected opportunities. The phrase “carpe diem” was invented for them—they seize the day, and any possibility it holds.

Lucky people also have two other characteristics. First, they talk to lots of people; they're always networking with others. Not with a specific, self-serving agenda, mind you; their sort of networking is usually unselfconscious, done purely for the fun of learning about other people's experiences.

Second, lucky people tend to have a more relaxed attitude toward life—when they encounter bad luck, their relaxed attitude helps them turn it into good luck. Unlucky people are more tense and anxious, Wiseman discovered, and that anxiety prevents them from noticing unexpected things. Because lucky people are relaxed, they observe more, and they reinterpret even negative events as positive opportunities.

Look for New Patterns

David Perkins's research shows how easy it is for us to create new categories—like r, x, v, s, w—and almost immediately use those categories to change the way we think. The following technique will exercise this ability, and it just might get you out in front of the latest new trend or social change.

What you're going to do is look for patterns where you wouldn't normally look for them. Take advantage of situations where you might otherwise be bored, or deep in a familiar routine:

• Waiting in the doctor's office, why not thumb through that stack of dated magazines, and look for trends in the graphic design of magazine covers?
• Stuck in traffic and listening to the radio, what trends do you notice in popular music?
• When you're shopping, look for trends in product packaging.
• Instead of surfing away from TV commercials, why not think about how they're changing over the years (the music, the speed of the edits, the words) and ask yourself why?
• Before you toss your junk mail every day, skim through it. Or, save it and flip through the pile at the end of each month. Look for trends in marketing, in values, and in what fears or desires sellers hope to tap.
• When driving, notice when three lanes merge down to two, or which highway exits are cloverleafs or instead have a single exit leading to a stoplight, and see if you can figure out why.

Cultivate Your Senses

See, hear, and taste with greater sensitivity and discrimination. Listen to inflections in the conversations around you and see how much you can intuit about the speakers' various emotional states. Taste a complicated new dish and try to identify every ingredient. Enter a room and notice where the lights are and how they affect the room's mood.

This technique is particularly good for enhancing your aesthetic judgment. Put yourself into an experience that you don't know much about:

• Visit an art museum.
• Attend a wine tasting.
• Listen to a jazz solo.
• Listen to a classical music station on the radio.

These are all fairly high-class activities, but you can do the same thing with more mainstream art forms. The key is to pick something that's very different from what you're used to. If you're already knowledgeable about art, wine, jazz, and classical music, then choose from the following list:

• Listen to a hip-hop or rap artist and try to figure out the rhyme patterns.
• Watch a Sunday morning children's cartoon and put yourself in the shoes of the animators—what decisions were they making as they created this?
• Stop by a fast-food restaurant you've never been to before. Before you order, look through the entire menu: all the item descriptions, the prices, the special combinations. What do you think is the target market? What's the strategy?
• Listen to a country music station on the radio.

At first, everything will be unfamiliar, and you won't know enough to judge the quality—or even to notice what's going on. It's important to embrace and welcome that feeling of unfamiliarity. Instead of letting it unsettle you or just deciding you don't like it, make an effort to figure out what's at play. What makes this work aesthetical? What knowledge would it take to make you an expert in this field?

Practice Ethnography

Ethnography is the approach anthropologists use to study another culture. It's the art of noticing ways of life in a particular culture that its people aren't consciously aware of, yet that they practice consistently, unthinkingly.

When you're an outsider, you naturally notice details that locals take for granted. The first time I left the United States, in 1988, I traveled to Paris on vacation. When I shopped, I was surprised to notice that every item was priced with an even number: 4.00 francs, or 20.00 francs (this was long before the Euro currency had been created). Tax was already included, so you never got back a handful of change. No Parisian would think anything of it, but I did—because in the United States, items are usually priced to end in 99 cents ($3.99 or $19.99), and tax is added, so every purchase is an odd number of cents and you always receive a handful of change.

It's relatively easy to notice differences in another country. But you can also train yourself to see familiar surroundings in this way. For readers in the United States, ask yourself: “Why do we have cheerleaders at sporting events?” “Why is it an accepted practice to hire a lawyer to ‘fix’ a speeding ticket, at the same time that bribes are illegal?” “Why do waiters introduce themselves by name, as if they intend to start a friendship?”

Look for Serendipity

“Luck,” it's said, “is when preparation meets opportunity.” Well, creativity happens when preparation meets a surprise.

The word “serendipity” means “happy accident”; it refers to the coincidence of finding something good or useful without looking for it. The word has a pretty strange history. The English writer Horace Walpole coined it after reading an old Persian fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip,” because, he said, the three heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.”

Be alert to valuable accidents. Without training yourself to look, you might just become annoyed by something unexpected and brush past it in a single-minded pursuit of your goal.

Many inventions have resulted from looking closely at accidents:

• The float process for making glass (while washing dishes, Sir Alistair Pilkington saw a film of soap form)
• Penicillin (Sir Alexander Fleming accidentally contaminated a laboratory bacterial culture with mold)
• Saccharin (in 1879 chemist Constantine Fahlberg noticed that his hand tasted sweet after working on coal tar derivatives)
• The Slinky toy (Richard and Betty James based it on a failed World War II military tension spring experiment)
• The microwave oven (the cooking potential of microwaves was first discovered when a radar prototype accidentally melted a nearby candy bar)
• Chewing gum (this was invented during an attempt to make a rubber substitute from chicle trees)

Langer did an experiment in which she simply asked people to draw a picture. The twist was, she secretly caused an accident that forced each person to make a mistake while drawing. Half of the people had been told in advance, “It is human to make a mistake … just incorporate it into your drawing.” Many of these people in fact did incorporate the mistake into what they were doing and kept drawing, and their sketches ended up being much more creative than those of the people who did not get this instruction. The point of the experiment? That it's pretty easy to change the way you think about mistakes.

Remember, unlucky people focus narrowly on their goal; lucky people work toward their goal but stay open to the unexpected. It's important to avoid making an overly specific, rigid plan ahead of time. If you're too fixed on where you think you're going, then you'll perceive an accident as an annoyance, and your first instinct will be to work around it. Start your work without too detailed a plan; expect valuable accidents to happen.

There's a tension here with the first step, ask, which is all about the importance of having a good question and a clear goal. Your goal must be clear, but it must stay general, because the greatest creativity happens when the goal isn't too detailed and specific. The most creative problems provide a general guide forward, yet leave room for improvisations in response to mistakes and surprises.

Spot the Spandrels

In architecture, a spandrel is the space at the top of an arched doorway. Spandrels are a necessary byproduct of putting an arched opening into a rectangular wall. More generally, a spandrel is any space that exists not by design, but as a necessary side effect of something else. Here are a couple I've noticed:

• The strip of grass between the airport parking garage and the taxi pickup lane
• The bit of floor between your toilet and the wall behind it

Come to think of it, these places always seem to either collect dirt or make ideal locations for shrubbery! Challenge yourself to find one tomorrow, and figure out why it's there. What design or architectural decisions caused it to be? Could you change something to get rid of it?

Switch Perspectives

Try to perceive things from a different perspective.

• As you walk down the street, imagine yourself sitting in a wheelchair. How would the world look different? What would you be more likely to notice—cracks in the sidewalk? Ramps up the curbs?
• Imagine yourself as a child four feet tall—how would grown-ups look different? What would you notice more?
• In an art gallery, sit down on the floor to see how Pablo Picasso's work would look to a toddler.

Take a problem you're trying to solve. How would you see and think differently about this problem if you were …

• A lawyer?
• A sculptor?
• A journalist?
• An electrician?
• An actor?

This technique sometimes works better if you can think of a specific person, like the actor Brad Pitt; the journalist Anderson Cooper; or your uncle Harry, who's a master electrician.

The Second Practice of Looking: Grab New Sights and Cool Sounds

Use these techniques if you're looking for some new image or object that will push you past an impasse and get you back on the path to creativity. These techniques help make that next zig zag possible.

This second practice shows you how to seek out new things to see, thereby creating more opportunities for unexpected connections, one of the most powerful sources of creativity. Because the first practice is more basic, it's best to start there. Mastering the first practice gets you up to the level of successful creators. But if you've mastered the first practice and you're still stumped, turn to this second practice—a series of advanced techniques that exceptional creators and artists use every day.

Start Tripping

Take a trip—to the zoo, train station, natural history museum, hobby and craft shop—anyplace, really, as long as it's crammed with physical objects.

Go to a yard sale or an antique store. Browse slowly; pay close attention even to the items that you'd never consider buying, those that you don't find very interesting. Why aren't they interesting? Be specific. Is it the material they're made of? Their shape, size, or color? Their fussiness or ordinariness? Their intended use?

Take a trip to a high-end mall, its expensive shops filled with the latest luxe styles. You're not looking to buy; you're looking for inspiration. What's surprising? What's really new? What makes you laugh?

Go to a trade show for an industry you know nothing about. As I write this, I live in the Midwest, near a lot of large farms, and one of my favorite trade shows focuses on farm equipment and seeds—something quite distant from my psychology research!

Relax and Listen

I've studied theatrical improv and played jazz, and those are interesting experiences, because when improvising, you have to act without knowing what your action means. When you improvise a line of dialogue, you don't know how it's going to be interpreted and where the scene will zig or zag. When you point up at the sky and say, “Did you see that?” your partner gets to decide what it is you actually saw—you won't know until you hear your partner's response. You have to trust the rest of the ensemble to catch what you toss.

Once you're good at improvisation, you get a special thrill from watching what somebody else does with what you've thrown out there. But for a novice, the uncertainty can be nerve-racking. I started taking classical piano lessons at the age of ten, and by high school I was good enough to play with the school choir and in the annual musical theater show—reading from a musical score, of course, and after lots of practice playing through each score over and over. One day, one of my friends told me that our high school's eighteen-piece big band jazz ensemble needed a pianist, and that I should play with them! I got pretty excited, but I didn't know anything about jazz. My first time in rehearsal, the band director handed me sheet music that wasn't like anything I'd seen before. There were no notes on the page! There were only harmonic chord symbols, and I had no idea what they meant. I learned very quickly that I was expected to create my own notes, within the loose structure provided by the chord symbols. And on top of that, I was supposed to listen to the other musicians while I played, and to make sure that what I was improvising aligned with the parts they were improvising. For a classical pianist like me, this seemed almost impossible. There was just no way I could listen and respond in an intelligent way to a new rhythmic pattern the drummer was playing; it was all I could do to figure out where my own fingers were going to go.

It took me the first year just to learn how to improvise my own parts. And then, soon after that, I gradually learned how to listen to what everybody else was doing. If the drummer hit the snare drum off-beat, then in the next measure I might play my chord off-beat in the same way—zig. And everyone in the band would hear our tiny interaction and then zag in a new direction with something else interesting, because that's just the way jazz is.

Whatever your field, improvise a little.

Play with Children's Toys

Back in the early 1980s, when I worked at a company that designed many of Atari's hit video games, we game designers all kept the latest wind-up toys on our desks. Even though I stopped designing video games long ago, I still keep as many toys on my desk as will fit, and I often take a handful into meetings. My favorites from the 1980s are clear plastic cubes made by Tomy, three inches on each side, which have miniature arcade games inside. (For example, when you wind one of them up, the basket inside starts moving from side to side, and you have to use a tiny lever to shoot equally tiny metal balls into the basket while it's in motion.) I'm not the least bit self-conscious about my toy collection: if you walk into just about any supercreative company, you'll find toys all over the place. If you have young children, you've no doubt already got a pile of toys lying around that they no longer play with; if you don't, go spend fifty dollars and buy yourself a collection.

Children at play are geniuses at making surprising new connections, and creativity comes from the zigs and zags that result. When children play, they constantly experiment with every object to see how it might combine with other objects. They combine marbles and spinner tops to invent a new game, for instance. When my son, Graham, was eight years old, he took the brightly colored disks from a donut-themed game and combined them with small magnets to create a new game. (He never once played the donut game itself!)

So don't just play with the toy in the way it's designed. Be like a child: try out new ways of playing, new ways of combining toys to invent your own game. Playfulness isn't silly at all; it helps us reach more creative solutions.

Shape Your Day

Wiseman found that lucky people are more likely to notice unexpected things. But he noticed something else, too: lucky people make a conscious effort to introduce change into their lives, or to put themselves in situations in which they're more likely to see something unexpected.

In the morning, select a basic geometric shape: a circle, triangle, or square (or even a zig zag!). Let's say you select a square. Consciously focus on finding instances of that shape throughout your day, and try to make connections between those objects and the challenge you face. As you drive to work, you might see a street sign that's square. In the office, some of the pictures on the wall might be squares. Look for square patterns in the carpets you're walking on. Force yourself to connect these shapes to your creative challenge, no matter how far you have to reach to do so. (That wild, long reach is part of the point; creativity's not supposed to be obvious.)

Remember to Look at Bad Examples

This technique will sound crazy, but it's a great way to get your confidence up. Read some purple prose, really bad writing. Wince over lurid paintings, preferably on velvet, or a stack of blurry, poorly cropped photographs. Examine some gadget that's awkwardly engineered and bound to break the first time you use it.

Normally it's best to look at the finest examples in your creative domain, but every once in a while looking at a few that are really awful will erase any insecurities that are still plaguing you. You know you can do better, and the ideas start flowing right away.

Flip Through Strange Magazines

Buy a magazine you would normally never read, one that's far removed from any of your interests. There are hunting magazines, hot rod magazines, and magazines for writers and for artists. If you're a man, buy Cosmopolitan or Elle. If you're afraid of getting anywhere near a body of water, buy Sailing magazine. Buy the tattoo magazine Skin and Ink; or buy Guitar World, a magazine for professional and amateur guitarists.

Absorb New Media

If you read the New York Times every morning, try reading the colorful New York Post for a couple of days. If you read the National Enquirer, switch to the Wall Street Journal.

Listen to NPR or your city's most popular pop-rock station, whichever you'd normally not hear. If you're really feeling brave, turn the dial to talk radio you don't agree with.

Watch a different TV news channel.

Browse the Huffington Post or Drudge Report online.

Read, listen to, or watch this new media with the eyes of an editor: How is the selection of stories different from what you're used to? What about the tone of the language? Are the advertisements different? Try to explain why—is this done to respond to a different readership? A different editorial mission? Look closely for the subtle ways in which this new media alternative is different from your regular source of information. Don't just look for differences that reinforce your existing prejudices; look for new insights.

The next time you're in a bookstore, make sure to walk through a section you never visit. Skim the titles, look through some tables of contents, read the back covers.

If you want a new book, don't just read it online with Google Books or download it to your e-reader. Go to a library, go to the shelf, and find the book. Then spend a minute or two scanning the titles of all of the books on the same shelf and on the shelf above and on the shelf below. Countless researchers throughout history have told stories of going to find a particular book, and then happening on another one right next to it that they never knew existed … and that contained the answer they were seeking.

Go Walkabout

Walk around your neighborhood as though you're on your own private scavenger hunt. Pay close attention to the slight rises and dips in the street, gentle enough that you'd normally not notice them—but that you'd feel if you were using a wheelchair. Look at every chimney. Is it on the left or right side of the house? Why isn't it at the front or back? Is it brick? What color is it? How many chimneys are there for each house?

A few years back the wooden front door of our old house rotted completely through, and rain started leaking in. We needed a new door, fast. I quickly learned that there are a huge number of options for new doors, and I had no idea what I wanted. I walked around my neighborhood and looked at every door—seeing it for the first time. Did it have a storm door? Did it have a window? Were the panes separated by black or brass? I knew I would have to go home, thumb through a gigantic catalog, and choose from among hundreds of options. Gradually the choice became clear: I didn't want a storm door, because it covered up the artful window design, and I didn't want windows that were easy to see through, because I cherish my family's privacy. I also noticed that a lot of doors were the same color as the window shutters—but some weren't—and I liked the different ones better. After logging all those miles, the choices came easily, and I even thought up some creative modifications that never would have occurred to me. The result? We have a door that's not like any other door in our neighborhood—but that could never have happened without my looking at the other doors first.

If you live in a city, there's a lot more going on for you to notice. So take advantage of it. Go for a walk down a busy sidewalk—and make sure you're not in a hurry. Notice kids playing hopscotch, an elderly guy smoking a cigar at a newsstand, a schnauzer glaring at a Great Dane. Take about five times longer than you normally would; stop occasionally, pause in a doorway or lean against a parking meter, and take a few seconds to absorb the passing scene.

As you're walking, look for objects, situations, or events that you can connect to the problem you're hoping to solve. Take a notepad or a digital voice recorder with you, and keep a list. When you get back home, examine each item on your list and look for additional connections.

Travel

Traveling is a time-tested way to enhance your ability to see. The key is to go somewhere noticeably different from where you live.

Paris? Bangkok? Sure, if you have the time and money. But if you can't afford to travel the world right now, that doesn't mean you can't go to a new place. Just travel a few hours to a very different town or city. I live in a big city, and I often take day trips to small country towns.

The Third Practice of Looking: Render It Visible

Use these techniques to translate what you see into creative action. Creative people don't just notice things; they notice, and then they act. They immediately jot down or record what they've observed, and their mind begins working with it.

The techniques of the second practice help get you into situations where you'll see new sights. The third practice's techniques help you act on what you've seen, instead of keeping it tucked inside your head or letting it float away again. By externalizing and expressing it, you move directly into creativity. You'll start to see more clearly, once you get used to describing what you're seeing. And when you become skilled at looking, you'll see so much every day that if you don't keep a record, you'll forget most of it.

The techniques that follow are used by artists and creators in just about every profession.

Keep an Idea Log

Children's author Judy Blume always keeps a notebook with ideas that don't fit the section she's currently working on: ideas for names of characters, descriptive details of scenes, bits of dialogue. “I keep things I don't want to lose,” she explains. Writer Thomas Mann did the same, keeping “scribbled notes, memory props, external details, colorful odds and ends, psychological formulations, fragmentary inspirations.” Now Pinterest lets you save electronic images that inspire you, too—and peek at other people's electronic scrapbooks.

Keep a notebook, sketchbook, iPad, or voice memo recorder with you at all times, and write down, draw, or record anything you notice that interests you. This kind of notebook, whether paper or digital, is sometimes called a “seed file” because it contains seeds that might one day grow into successful creativity. Use your notebook to keep all of the ideas that seem somehow to have potential, even though you don't yet know exactly how.

Go back to your notebook every three or six months and skim through it. Each time, you'll see your old notes differently, through the eyes of your current situation. And more often than you'd think, one of those old notes or sketches will be just what you need to move forward on your creative path.

Start an Idea Box

Collect a box of interesting things. It's best if they're small and inexpensive. One of your child's broken old toys, for example, or a piece of odd-shaped wood you found lying next to a construction site. My own box contains a metal nutcracker; a pillbox with seven compartments, one for each day of the week; and a bunch of strange items from the hardware store, like replacement faucet handles and a piece of large pipe.

The idea box is a three-dimensional version of the idea log, and it serves the same purpose: to store interesting sights and objects so that you can look back at them later, from a different perspective.

Just thinking about what might be good to put in my box has helped me look in a new way—when I'm at the hobby or craft store or the hardware store, or even when I come across a pile of old junk. I've created a new category for myself: “things that would be interesting to have in my idea box.”

Set a Google Alert

Sign up for Google Alerts on a phrase related to your problem. It's free, and Google sends you a daily e-mail with all of the Web pages that have used that phrase each day. You have to define your problem carefully, because if you choose something too broad—like “career advancement” or “finding a mate”—you'll get thousands of hits every day. Try to narrow your phrase enough that you get no more than ten hits each day, so it stays relevant and doesn't become overwhelming.

Create a Personal Hall of Fame

Your personal hall of fame is a group of famous people you like and respect. It should have at least ten people; and make sure they're from all different walks of life, not a single profession.

When you face a creative challenge, use an Internet search to find famous quotations from these ten people that are connected to your challenge. There are tons of Web sites that collect such quotations; just pick one from each hall of famer. Then group them all together—maybe cut and paste them into a word processing document—and look for connections. Sit for at least five minutes and think about ways the quotes combine, themes that run through all of them, unexpected juxtapositions and what they might mean. See if this cross-fertilization prompts a new idea related to your challenge.

Appoint a Personal Board of Directors

The personal board of directors is similar to your hall of fame, but this time the people should be the most successful individuals in your own field, the ones you'd love to talk to about your problem. Select about five. Do some research about them, and read at least a little bit of biographical information about each person. Post photos of them on the wall as an inspiration. When you read stories about them, pay close attention to how they ask questions and solve problems, and what daily practices they use.

Onward …

Now you've learned about the three practices that successful creators use to observe the world. When you master the discipline of looking, you begin to see in ways that move your creative process forward. You'll find yourself returning to the techniques in this chapter, because looking is so essential to the entire creative process. It can help you identify good problems (ask) and help you come up with great ideas (think).

Now we continue our journey with the fourth step. Everything you've done in the first three steps prepares your mind to begin working on creative solutions. The fourth step, play, happens when your mind takes advantage of all of that effort and works its magic, bringing together different ideas, memories, and images to generate surprising new solutions.