Where observation is concerned, chance favours only the prepared mind
—Louis Pasteur.
The Art of Creative Thinking
can lead you into new paths of creative activity. It can enrich your life—though not always in the way you expect.
Use the stepping stones of analogy:
Thinking by analogy, or analogizing, plays a key part in imaginative thinking. This is especially so when it comes to creative thinking.
Make the strange familiar and the familiar strange:
The reverse process of making the familiar strange is equally important for creative thinking. We do not think about what we know. Here artists can help us to become aware of the new within the old.
Practise Serendipity:
Serendipity means finding valuable and agreeable ideas or things—or people—when you are not consciously seeking them.
You are more likely to be serendipitous if you have a wide span of attention and a broad range of interests.
Curiosity:
‘Curiosity in children is but an appetite for knowledge,’ wrote the philosopher John Locke. You should aim to retain throughout your life that eager desire to see, learn or know. Curiosity is the mind on tiptoe.
One way to develop your curiosity is to begin to ask more questions, both when you are talking with others and when you are talking in your mind to yourself.
Reading to generate ideas:
Nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind, open and eager to learn.
Make better use of your depth mind:
The functions of the conscious mind—analysing, synthesizing and valuing—can also take place at a deeper level. Your Depth Mind can dissect something for you, just as your stomach juices can break down food into its elements.
Think creatively about your life:
It is not what happens to you in life that matters but how you respond. The creative response is to transform bad things into good, problems into opportunities.
Remember the Arab proverb, ‘You should never finish building your house.’ It is beginnings and the unfinished work to be done that excites your creative mind.