How to Get Ideasby Jack Foster
Berrett-Koehler Publishers © 1996 (208 pages) Citation
ISBN:9781576750063
Introduction – An Easy-to-Follow Road
Map
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to
despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the
wisdom to choose correctly.
–Woody Allen
When they said Canada, I thought it would be up in the mountains somewhere.
–Marilyn Monroe
Where am I? I’m in a phone booth at the corner of Walk and Don’t Walk.
–Unknown
My brother writes editorials for a major newspaper. I write advertising for a major
advertising agency. Neither of us understands how the other does what he does.
“How can you write editorials on 20 different subjects that your readers are interested
in?” I ask. “How do you get the ideas?”
“How can you write 20 different commercials about a Sunkist orange?” he asks. “How do
you get the ideas?”
Actually we both probably use the same techniques without knowing it. After all,
everybody I know of who analyzes ideas pretty much agrees on the procedures you must
follow to get them.
In A Technique for Producing Ideas, James Webb Young describes a five-step method
for producing ideas.
First, the mind must “gather its raw materials.” In advertising, these materials include
“specific knowledge about products and people [and] general knowledge about life and
events.”
Second, the mind goes through a “process of masticating those materials.”
Third, “You drop the whole subject and put the problem out of your mind as completely
as you can.”
Fourth, “Out of nowhere the idea will appear.”
Fifth, you “take your little newborn idea out into the world of reality” and see how it fares.
Helmholtz, the German philosopher, said he used three steps to get new thoughts.
The first was “Preparation,” the time during which he investigated the problem “in all
directions” (Young’s second step).
The second was “Incubation,” when he didn’t think consciously about the problem at all
(Young’s third step).
The third was “Illumination,” when “happy ideas come unexpectedly without effort, like
an inspiration” (Young’s fourth step).
Moshe F. Rubinstein, a specialist in scientific problem solving at the University of
California, says that there are four distinct stages to problem solving.
Stage one: Preparation. You go over the elements of the problem and study their
relationships (Young’s first and second steps).
Stage two: Incubation. Unless you’ve been able to solve the problem quickly, you sleep
on it. You may be frustrated at this stage because you haven’t been able to find an answer
and don’t see how you’re going to (Young’s third step).
Stage three: Inspiration. You feel a spark of excitement as a solution, or a possible path to
one, suddenly appears (Young’s fourth step).
Stage four: Verification. You check the solution to see if it really works (Young’s fifth
step).
In Predator of the Universe: The Human Mind, Charles S. Wakefield says there “is a
series of [five] mental stages that identify the creative act.”
First, “is an awareness of the problem.”
Second, “comes a defining of the problem.”
Third, “comes a saturation in the problem and the factual data surrounding it” (Young’s
first and second steps).
Fourth, “comes the period of incubation and surface calm” (Young’s third step).
Fifth, comes “the explosion—the mental insight, the sudden leap beyond logic, beyond
the usual stepping-stones to normal solutions” (Young’s fourth step).
Ah, but even though they all generally agree on the steps you must take to get an idea,
none of them talks much about the condition you must be in to climb those steps. And if
you’re not in condition it doesn’t make any difference if you know the steps; you’ll never
get the ideas that you’re capable of getting.
For telling most people how to get an idea is a little like telling a first grader to find x
when x + 1 = 2x + 4, or like telling a person with weak legs how to high jump. Just as
you must know algebra before you can solve an equation, and just as you must have
strong legs before you can high jump, so you must condition your mind before you can
get an idea.
The first chapter of this book attempts to define an idea.
The next eight chapters tell you how to condition your mind. You may read them in any
order.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Have Fun
Become Idea Prone
Set Your Mind on Goals
Be More like a Child
Get More Inputs
Screw up Your Courage
Rethink Your Thinking
Learn How to Combine
Of necessity, I talk about these things in sequence. But they all should be going on in
your life at the same time, because getting your mind into idea-condition is not something
you do and then stop. It is a lifetime activity; a job you never finish, a goal you never
reach.
Chapters ten through fourteen talk about a procedure for getting ideas that should be
taken in sequence.
Although I use different words, I generally agree with Young. (Two exceptions: I add one
step to his—the need to define the problem; and I combine his third and fourth steps
because they seem one step to me, not two.)
To some, my (and Young’s) last step may not seem part of the process of getting an idea,
but it truly is, for an idea is not an idea until something happens with it.
10. Define the Problem
11. Gather the Information
12. Search for the Idea
13. Forget about It
14. Put the Idea into Action
Chapter 1: 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
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 J. Bronowski, “it is a mistake to think of creative activity as
something unusual.”
Ordinary people get good ideas everyday. Everyday they create and invent and discover
things. Everyday 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 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 J. 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.”
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 explains, “… uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes
already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills.”
“Feats of association,” “unexpected likenesses,” “new wholes,” “shake together” then
“select among,” “new 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.
WHERE DOES CREATIVITY COME
FROM?
THE FIVE MAJOR THEORIES
THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL THEORY
PEOPLE BECOME CREATIVE AS A REACTION TO
DIFFICULT CIRCUMSTANCES AND/OR REPRESSED
EMOTIONS.
AS SITUATIONS BECOME DIFFICULT OR THEY
EXPERIENCE A TRAUMATIC EVENT, PEOPLE PULL
BACK FROM THEIR SURROUNDINGS. THEY THEN
RELY ON THEIR CREATIVE SIDE TO FIND A SOLUTION
TO THE DISTUATION OR AS AN OUTLET FOR THEIR
NOW REPRESSED EMOTIONS.
THE MENTAL INLLNESS THEORY
FOR PEOPLE TO BECOME CREATIVE, SOME FORM
OF MENTAL ILLNESS NEEDS TO BE PRESENT. THIS
MENTAL DISEASE CAN COME IN MANY FORMS AND
DOESN’T HAVE TO BE SEVERE.
DISORDERS INCLUE BIPOLAR, SCHIZOPHRENIA,
MANIC-‐DEPRESSIVE DISORDERS, OR THOSE WHERE
SUFFERERS SUFFER MAJOR MOOD SWINGS AND
LEVELS OF DEPRESSION.
THEORY OF PSYCHOTICISM
ALL CREATIVE PEOPLE HAVE A DISPOSITION FOR
PSYCHOTIC TENDENCIES. THESE TENDENCIES
FORM THE FOUNDATION FOR CREATIVE
PERSONALITIES. CREATIVITY HAS BEEN VIEWED BY
MANY TO BE LINKED TO PSYCHOSIS OR MADNESS
SINCE THE TIMES OF ANCIENT GREECE.
PSYCHOTIS TEND TO HAVE A TRAIN OF THOUGHT
OTHERS WOULD VIEW AS LOOSE AND
UNPREDICTABLE, TRAITS WE LINK WITH
CREATIVITY.
THE ADDICTION THEORY
ADDICTION TO SUBSTANCES SUCH AS ALCOHOL AND ILLICIT
DRUGS CONTRIBUTES TO CREATIVITY AND MAY EVEN CAUSE
CREATIVITY IN SOME PEOPLE.
MANY PEOPLE WITH ADDICTION PROBLEMS ARE ACTUALLY
THE SAME PEOPLE PRONE TO DEPRESSION AND OTHER
MENTAL ILLNESS, SO DOES THE ADDICTION CAUSE THE
CREATIVITY OR THE PROBLEM THAT LEAD TO THE
ADDICTION?
MANY ARTISTS FIND THAT THEIR ADDICTIONS HAMPER THEIR
CREATIVE ABILITES AND ENGAGING IN THE ART FORM HELPS
THEM WITH RECOVERY.
THE HUMANISTIC THEORY
HUMANS HAVE SIX BASIC NEEDS. THESE NEEDS
NEED TO BE MET BEFORE WE CAN THRIVE. ONCE
THESE NEEDS ARE MET, WE ARE FREE AND
COMFORTABLE ENOUGH TO EXPRESS OURSELVES
IN A CREATIVE MANNER.
MOST WIDELY ACCEPTED THEORY.
MASLOW, A PROPONENT OF THIS THEORY, DIVIDED
CREATIVITY INTO 3 TYPES: PRIMARY, SECONADRY
AND INTEGRATED CREATIVITY….
THE HUMANISTIC THEORY CONT’D…
PRIMARY CREATIVITY: CREATIVITY THAT ALLOWS US TO
ESCAPE FROM THE STRESS OF DAY TO TO DAY LIFE. IT IS
A MORE SPONTANEOUS FORM OF CREATIVITY.
SECONDARY CREATIVITY: REQUIRES A HIGHER LEVEL OF
THOUGHT TO ACHIEVE.
INTEGRATED CREATIVITY: COMBINES BOTH FORMS
ABOVE. ALTHOUGH IT MAY BE SPONTANEOUS WHEN
WE BEGIN OUR CREATIVE WORK, A LOT MORE THOUGHT
HAS GONE INTO WHAT WE HOPE TO ACHIEVE BEFORE
WE BEGIN.
FOR MORE REVIEW…
hFp://www.ripperdesignandmulTmedia.com/2013/03/26/the-‐five-‐major-‐theories-‐of-‐creaTvity/
Assignment 1:
Please write a few lines about chapter one in the PDF document “how to get ideas and what
is an idea”I uploaded. Tell me what stood out to you, and any thoughts/personal reflections
you have on the content. 5-7 sentences is the expected length.
Assignment 2:
We defined an “idea” as nothing more nor nothing less than a new combination of old
elements.
Ponder this definition. What does this mean about the originality of ideas? Is there such a
thing? Can an idea truly be original? Why? Why not? Mark Twain certainly doesn’t think
so – “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas
and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new
and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely;
but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the
ages.” Do you agree?
Here’s an interesting (and very brief) article on the topic to make you ponder a little bit
more! https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/z78x2sg (Links to an external site.)
This is also a class material you can use in the answers.
Assignment 3:
Read the pdf document “theories of creativities”
After the posted article about the 5 theories of creativity, chew them over.
For this class, frankly, we don’t focus on the theories, because I prefer to focus on actual steps
and tools that can help us grow creatively. But, it IS interesting to know the
thoughts/theories/”science” behind creativity.
Digest the info on the 5 theories. Now, choose the one that you agree with the most strongly
and write a half-page single-spaced response about that theory and why you think it’s the
correct one. Next, do the same but for the theory you agree with the least.
Please note that i am looking for close to a full, one-page single-spaced write-up, here.