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.