LESSON FOUR: A NEW WAY TO THINK
If you always think the way you've always thought, you'll always get what you've always got. The same old ideas. You only have the ability to create ideas based on your existing patterns of thinking_on the way you have been taught to think. You need some means of producing variations in your ideas. Here are a few ways to generate variations in your ideas:
- Combine things in novel ways
- Using random stimuli in connecting the unconnected
- Thinking in opposites
- Thinking metaphorically and analogically in other worlds
- Actively seeking the accidental discovery and finding what you are not looking for
These strategies liberate your creativity by breaking up your conventional thinking patterns. Think about substitution, combine, adapt, magnify, modify, put to other uses, rearrange, reverse. Everything new is some addition or modification of something that already exists. You take a subject and turn it into something else. Example: Natural gas becomes polyethylene becomes milk jugs. French artists Seurat and Cezanne realized that color was not continuous transitions in nature. They broke down the discrete experiences of colors into "dots" and grouped them in various ways to act on each other and create stunning new artistic experiences that revolutionized the way artists perceived the world. OK, try these ideas to think of something brilliant! Keep an open mind but don't let your brains fall out. Keep on thinking.
I drink beer before eating chocolate cake. Well, not any beer but actually ale. Arrogant Bastard Ale works best to prevent the sugar from paining my often sensitive teeth. I told my dentist about it. He’d never heard of this fantastic cure for the common toothache. My dentist is a beer drinker and we often exchange odd beers and good wines we run across. He is now checking out another hypothesis: That in fact it is the chocolate cake that causes the buzz I feel when drinking AB. He is on his second case and third cake and has gained 10 pounds. I tell him that he is sorta like the Pasteur discovering penicillin, or was it butterfat in cow’s milk (I forget which). He retorts that he has received telepathic signals from Alpha Centuri, and that’s the way they do it there. Anyhow, the other day he and I were eating grapes and drinking wine and discovered that, under perfect conditions, eating grapes cause drunkenness. Who knew? Afterwards, his gout cleared up. Fortunately, I know a good patent attorney. His name is Cezanne. Harry Cezanne. Tsar Patrovich
ReplyDeleteTsar,
ReplyDeleteThis is your most esoteric comment, yet! It is so intellectual, so thought provoking, and so filled with hidden meaning, that it left me gasping with wonder. I am wondering about the hidden meaning. I wish I could think well enough to figure it out. Have you tried eating grapes without the wine, to see if they are the cause of your drunkenness? It might be the wine. If it is truly the grapes, you are on to something very big!
Dear Thinker:
ReplyDeleteI believe it has already been invented. I suspect that the discovery of wine was predated by the discovery that the juice from rotting grapes gave off a fine buzz . . . if it didn't kill you first.
I am now attempting to ferment breakfast cereal. I've started with Kellog's Corn Flakes and brown sugar. On my first try all I got was ethenol. Too bad there isn't a use for that.
Tsar Pat