How to Get Ideas: Nothing is More Difficult Than Coming Up with That Original Idea - Softcover

Foster, Jack

 
9781576750063: How to Get Ideas: Nothing is More Difficult Than Coming Up with That Original Idea
Softcover
ISBN 10: 157675006X ISBN 13: 9781576750063
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler, 1996

Inhaltsangabe

How to Get Ideas shows you--no matter your age or skill, your job or training--how to come up with more ideas, faster and easier. You'll learn to condition your mind to become "idea-prone," utilize your sense of humor, develop your curiosity, visualize your goals, rethink your thinking, and overcome your fear of rejection.
Jack Foster's simple five-step technique for solving problems and getting ideas takes the mystery and anxiety out of the idea-generating process. It's a proven process that works.
This expanded edition of the inspiring and enlightening classic features new information on how to turn failures to your advantage and how to create a rich, idea-inducing environment. Dozens of new examples and real life stories show that anyone can learn to get more and better ideas.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jack Foster spent thirty-five years working in creative departments of major advertising agencies; the first ten as a writer, the last 25 as a creative director. He has helped create advertising for scores of companies including Carnation, Mazda, Sunkist, Mattel, Albertson's, Ore-Ida, Suzuki, Universal Studios, Rand McNally, and Smokey Bear. He is a recipient of the Los Angeles Creative Club’s "Creative Person of the Year" award.
I was born in London, England. It was raining.
After fifteen years of studying Latin I decided to go into advertising.
My first job was as an apprentice at an advertising
agency called Graham and Gilles. I changed the water pots for the art directors (they painted layouts with watercolours in those days) and made them tea. This was before magic markers. This was even before rubber cement—I’m that old.
It was raining. It was always raining, and I was watching my favourite programme at the time— 77 Sunset Strip. I said, “Ah, sun, palm trees, women.” My dad gave me a one-way ticket.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction

What Is an Idea?

I know the answer. The answer lies within the heart of all mankind! What, the answer is twelve? I think I’m in the wrong building.

Charles Schultz

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

Mark Twain

If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?

Lily Tomlin

Before we figure out how to get ideas we must discuss what ideas are, for if we don’t know what things are it’s difficult to figure out how to get more of them.

The only trouble is: How do you define an idea?

A. E. Housman said: “I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but both of us recognize the object by the symptoms which it produces in us.” Beauty is like that too. So are things like quality and love.

And so, of course, is an idea. When we’re in the presence of one we know it, we feel it; something inside us recognizes it. But just try to define one.

Look in dictionaries and you’ll find everything from: “That which exists in the mind, potentially or actually, as a product of mental activity, such as a thought or knowledge,” to “The highest category: the complete and final product of reason,” to “A transcendent entity that is a real pattern of which existing things are imperfect representations.”

A lot of good that does you.

The difficulty is stated perfectly by Marvin Minsky in The Society of Mind:

Only in logic and mathematics do definitions
ever capture concepts perfectly. … You can
know what a tiger is without defining it. You
may define a tiger, yet know scarcely anything
about it.

If you ask people for a definition, however, you get better answers, answers that come pretty close to capturing both the concept and the thing itself.

Here are some answers I got from my coworkers and from my students at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles:

It’s something that’s so obvious that after
someone tells you about it you wonder why you
didn’t think of it yourself.

An idea encompasses all aspects of a situation
and makes it simple. It ties up all the loose ends
into one neat knot. That knot is called an idea.

It is an immediately understood representation
of something universally known or accepted,
but conveyed in a novel, unique, or unexpected
way.

Something new that can’t be seen from what
preceded it.

It’s that flash of insight that lets you see things
in a new light, that unites two seemingly
disparate thoughts into one new concept.

An idea synthesizes the complex into the
startlingly simple.

It seems to me that these definitions (actually, they’re more descriptions than definitions, but no matter—they get to the essence of it) give you a better feel for this elusive thing called an idea, for they talk about synthesis and problems and insights and obviousness.

The one that I like the best, though, and the one that is the basis of this book, is this one from James Webb Young:

An idea is nothing more nor less
than a new combination of old elements.

There are two reasons I like it so much.

First, it practically tells you how to get an idea for it says that getting an idea is like creating a recipe for a new dish. All you have to do is take some ingredients you already know about and combine them in a new way. It’s as simple as that.

Not only is it simple, it doesn’t take a genius to do it. Nor does it take a rocket scientist or a Nobel Prize winner or a world-famous artist or a poet laureate or an advertising hotshot or a Pulitzer Prize winner or a first-class inventor.

“To my mind,” wrote the scientist and philosopher Jacob Bronowski, “it is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual.”

Ordinary people get good ideas everyday. Every day they create and invent and discover things. Every day they figure out different ways to repair cars and sinks and doors, to fix dinners, to increase sales, to save money, to teach their children, to reduce costs, to increase production, to write memos and proposals, to make things better or easier or cheaper—the list goes on and on.

Second, I like it because it zeros in on what I believe is the key to getting ideas, namely, combining things. Indeed, everything I’ve ever read about ideas talks about combining or linkage or juxtaposition or synthesis or association.

“It is obvious,” wrote Jacques Hadamard, “that invention or discovery, be it in mathematics or anywhere else, takes place by combining ideas. . . . The Latin verb cogito, for ‘to think,’ etymologically means ‘to shake together.’ St. Augustine had already noticed that and had observed that intelligo means ‘to select among.’”

“When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work,” wrote T. S. Eliot, “it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences. The ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.”

“A man becomes creative,” wrote Bronowski, “whether he is an artist or a scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before. … The creative mind is a mind that looks for unexpected likenesses.”

Or listen to Robert Frost: “What is an idea? If you remember only one thing I’ve said, remember that an idea is a feat of association.”

Or Francis H. Cartier: “There is only one way in which a person acquires a new idea: by the combination or association of two or more ideas he already has into a new juxtaposition in such a manner as to discover a relationship among them of which he was not previously aware.”

Nicholas Negroponte agrees: “Where do good new ideas come from? That’s simple—from differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions.”

And Arthur Koestler wrote an entire book, The Act of Creation, based on “the thesis that creative originality does not mean creating or originating a system of ideas out of nothing but rather out of a combination of well-established patterns of thought—by a process of cross-fertilization.” Koestler calls this process “bisociation.”

“The creative act,” he explained, “… uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills.”

“Feats of association,” “unexpected likenesses,” “new wholes,” “shake together” then “select among,” “new (or unlikely) juxtapositions,” “bisociations” —however they phrase it, they’re all saying pretty much what James Webb Young said:

An idea is nothing more nor less
than a new combination of old elements.

Now that we know what ideas are, we must devise a method for getting them.

Happily enough, many such methods have already been devised. And—even more happily—these methods are quite similar.

In A Technique for Producing Ideas, James Webb Young describes a five-step method for producing ideas.

First, the mind must “gather its raw...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler
Erscheinungsdatum
1996
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
157675006X
ISBN 13 
9781576750063
Einband
Taschenbuch
Zeichner
Corby Larry
Anzahl der Seiten
208
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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