Vincent said that thinking should be creative, and the process of creation is divided into four steps, and today we will carefully analyze these four steps of the creative process to see how to stimulate our creativity.
About creativity
Many people think that creativity is a natural ability, think that some people are born with creativity, some people do not, and some people will think that creativity depends on high IQ, in fact, creativity is not innate, nor does it require high IQ.
Many people still have some misconceptions about creativity, thinking that mavericks are creative, but mavericks are not the expression of creativity. Because creativity requires two elements: knowledge and imagination, mere imaginative mavericks are just a strange behavior, and mere rigidity of dead-ended knowledge is not part of creativity.
There are also people who think that drinking and taking drugs can stimulate creativity, but in fact, drinking and taking drugs will only damage creativity, because it only brings illusions, not creativity.
A truly creative person is an independent person, a mentally healthy person, such a person who is honest, enthusiastic, upright, engaged, passionate, consistent in words and deeds, and is a person with a complete personality. Not only are they energetic, but they are also adventurous, resourceful, and hardworking, and they have the ability to use creativity to solve problems and disputes.
Clarifying the question about creativity, let's take a look at what the four steps of the creative process look like.
Regain your curiosity and look for challenges
The first step is to look for challenges, that is, to find problems or disputes that we need to solve in our lives or studies and work.
Usually, some obvious problems and controversies come to us directly. But more often than not, problems and controversies need to be discovered, and only when we are aware of them ourselves can we come up with creative solutions.
This is actually inseparable from our curiosity, if a person does not have curiosity, it is difficult to find problems or controversies in life or work, for such people, every day is the same, life is like a pool of stagnant water.
Everyone knows that our curiosity is gradually destroyed in the process of our growing up, but without curiosity, we can't see the challenge!
Still, Vincent says there are ways to rekindle our curiosity. He recounts his experience of regaining his curiosity:
When he first went to work at a large mail order company, his boss told him to do nothing during the first week, just look around every day, and write down what he saw and any problems he saw, and before work, his boss would come to him and talk about them for half an hour.
At first he didn't understand why he was doing this, but slowly he noticed that he remembered getting longer and longer during the week, filled with questions: "What are the steps in this operation?" Is it all necessary? If all is necessary, can it be done in other ways? Is there an easier, faster, safer, and more economical way? ......”
And that habit also allowed him to save the company tens of thousands of dollars over the next four years. Not only that, but he also found that he had regained his curiosity.
From this, he summed up six techniques for regaining curiosity: "Be observant, look for imperfections in things, pay attention to your own dissatisfaction and others, look for causes, be sensitive to possible consequences, and be aware of opportunities in arguments." "
Finding challenges requires us to have a pair of eyes that are good at discovery, not only to observe phenomena, but also to notice imperfections and dissatisfaction.
Present a problem or dispute
When we find a problem or controversy in our lives, the next step is to articulate the problem or controversy.
The same thing, the problem expressed is not the same, the solution will be different, so the correct expression of the problem is equivalent to solving the problem half.
So what is the difference between a question and a controversy? When we are trapped in a situation, we can first ask ourselves: Is this something that makes me emotionally uncomfortable because it doesn't agree with other people's opinions, or does it make me unacceptable?
If it is an unacceptable situation, it is a problem, otherwise it is a dispute. For questions, the question is usually expressed in the sentence form of "how to ..." and the question is expressed in terms of "whether..." or "whether it should be..." for disputes.
After determining whether it is a problem or a dispute, and knowing the sentence pattern of the question, we must use this sentence to ask questions from as many aspects and angles as possible.
Because after a question is raised, we will realize whether its corresponding solution is really in line with our original problem or dispute. Therefore, in this questioning stage, we should also ask as many questions as possible, and the author advocates that we write down the problems and think of more questions while writing.
At this time, we must eliminate some of the prejudices in our hearts about our own questions, such as feeling that our questions are too stupid or too out of touch with reality. Don't have a psychological burden, write it down, maybe this is the best question.
"Once you've chosen a point of view, you block all other lines of thought and leave that one." So be sure to express and improve your questions in as many ways as possible, so as to break the inertia and inertia of thinking and keep your thinking open.
Investigate a question or controversy
Once a question has been written and confirmed, the question or controversy is investigated. Because the problem or dispute we encounter is not to provide us with all the relevant information that needs to be resolved at the beginning, but to investigate and collect information on it in many ways later.
Vincent said that the survey is not to collect some ordinary information that everyone can get, but to use creativity and imagination to obtain some information that others have overlooked. Louis Pasteur writes, "Inspiration is the impact of facts on prepared minds." "Investigation can provide such psychological preparation.
Investigation is particularly important for solving a complex problem, so what should be investigated?
The objects to be investigated include eyewitness testimony, published and unpublished reports, expert opinions, experiments and statistical information. However, because a person's memory is affected by time, mood and circumstances, eyewitness testimony is not very reliable.
As for both unpublished and published reports, it is necessary to ascertain its provenance and its true reliability.
The most common mistake we make with regard to expert opinions is to be influenced by the aura of experts, so that since experts have said so, it must be credible, and there must be no problem. We tend to overlook whether experts are also experts in this field. Does the expert's knowledge match the profession? So be sure to conduct research and investigation before adopting expert opinion.
Regarding the experiment and statistical information, it also depends on the reliability of the experiment, whether the results of the experiment are reproducible, and whether the sample of the statistical information is large enough and the value is not worthy of belief.
Of course, the investigation stage can also obtain some important information through observation and research, but it is necessary to ensure that the observation time is long enough, the appearance of the observer does not disturb people's normal behavior, and the observed results cannot be generalized.
The book argues that a review of research in this industry is the most valuable and reliable information.
In the investigation stage, our personal experiences and the experiences of others can play a certain role, but we must also pay attention not to treat these as all information, but to combine these experiences with real information.
During the investigation phase, we also need to make good use of the auxiliary tools of libraries and the Internet.
Spark your imagination and generate ideas
When the investigation phase of information gathering is over, we can move on to the fourth step – generating ideas.
The book says that the more ideas we produce, the more likely we are to get good ideas, that is, at this time, we also have to produce as many ideas as possible.
Vincent says the quality of the original idea tends to be inferior to that of the later ones, because the idea is often most influenced by the subconscious mind and our biases. And thinking is like water flowing, it must flow to be creative.
So creative ideas don't emerge until we've eliminated ordinary, conventional ideas, and then ideas become unusual and imaginative.
For the question, our idea is to answer the question "How can..." For disputes, our ideas include not only answers that directly answer questions such as "whether..." and "should it be...", but also other ideas that can help answer these questions, because dispute resolution often uses ideas that are not direct answers.
There are two ways to generate creative ideas, one is to generate a large number of ideas, and the other is to use our imagination.
But many of us act without much imagination because we are used to normal ideas, and we are afraid that our different ideas will make us look different, surprised or dissatisfied. Of course, this is very harmful to oneself, because creativity depends on imagination, Albert Einstein said: "I believe in imagination ... Imagination is more important than knowledge. ”
So how do we spark our imagination?
Vincent offers seven strategies: "forcing yourself to respond unusually," that is, writing down what everyone can think of and then writing about what everyone may not think of, so that the result is that you will be uncomfortable with your own ideas, to adapt to this feeling, know: "The game mentality is an important feature of creative talent." ”
"Using free association" means letting go of the reins of the mind and letting it fly freely.
"Using analogy" is to find one or more similarities between two different things, such as gutenberg conceiving of a printing press when he saw a grape press. When applying analogy, you can fully mobilize your senses to appreciate the connection between these two things.
"Looking for unusual combinations", sometimes our solutions are not just one method, but to combine multiple methods.
There are also three strategies: "Visualize the solution, conceive the arguments of both sides, and imagine the relevant context."
When we have a lot of ideas, how do we test whether they are creative? Remember the saying: "Creative ideas are both imaginative and effective".
Well, at this point we've finished the creative part of The Art of Thinking, and we'll continue to be critical in the next section.