Thoughts By Thinkers On Thinking And Creativity -
Alias, Think Inc's Creativity Thought Of The Week

Think Inc sends out a 'Creativity Thought Of The Week' to all those interested in thinking and creativity - amounting, over time, to a week-by-week, cut-out-keep guide to leading a more creative professional and personal life.

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Meanwhile, here is a selection of thoughts on thinking by thinkers, both famous and obscure…


"If, at first, an idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it."
Albert Einstein

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."
Jack London

"The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas."
Linus Pauling, double Nobel Prize-winner

"And the trouble is,
if you don't risk anything,
you risk even more."
Erica Jong, writer

"Genius is editing."
Charlie Chaplin

"Think left and think right and think low and think high.
Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!"
Dr Seuss

"Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which the problems were created."
Albert Einstein

"Every bit of solid theory and evidence demonstrates that it is IMPOSSIBLE to generate a few good ideas without generating a lot of bad ideas. If you want to eliminate mistakes, avoid dead ends, and succeed most of the time, you will drive out innovation."
Robert I Sutton, in his book, Weird Ideas That Work (Allen Lane)

"If there is no excitement, then some must be created."
Silas Bent, Ballyhoo

"Many experiments show that when people are put into a good mood (e.g. By giving them candy or showing them a funny movie), they are more creative."
Robert I Sutton, in his book, Weird Ideas That Work (Allen Lane)

"Every idea was O.K. Steve Ross had a wonderful philosophy - that people got fired for not making mistakes."
How Steven Ross, Chairman of Warner Communications, encouraged wild ideas during MTV's early years. Quoted in The New Yorker.

"Had Shakespeare been able to protect himself by trademarks, the Shakespeare business would be bigger than the Microsoft one."
Andrew Wylie, literary agent, quoted in the book, The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas, by John Howkins

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."
George Bernard Shaw

"Show me a sculptor with a basement studio and I'll show you a low-down chiseller."
Anon

"Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream."
Malcolm Muggeridge

"Risk is how you achieve better audiences. The point is, we are in a world where the conservative route is the dangerous route."
Mark Thompson, new boss of Channel 4, July 2002

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
Gertrude Stein

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few."
Shunryu Suzuki, Zen master

"Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow."
TS Elliot

Or, as another thinker put it…

"Cut the crap and make it happen."
Greg Dyke, former BBC Director-General

"Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected."
William CF Plomer

"I thought about it all the time."
Isaac Newton, on how he discovered the law of gravity.

"It is not impossible to learn how to be more creative. Experiments have shown that just by encouraging people to relax, you can increase the number of ideas they come up with. Certain forms of meditation are effective as a means of learning how to enter a creative mental state - one that is relaxed and receptive but also awake and alert."
Guy Claxton, author of Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less (The Ecco Press)

"I really believe the only difference between a creative person and the non-creative person is that creative people tend not to have a little voice in their head saying, 'That's not going to work, that's a stupid idea'. People who are very creative just have a ridiculous amount of confidence. I don't believe there are geniuses; if you look at any child when they're playing, they are making up scenarios and fighting battles of good and evil - huge epic stories with just a couple of sticks, a ball and a sandpit. I just think creative people tend not to lose that. They tend not to get the adult voice."
Peter Molyneux, computer games designer

"Could You Quack Like A Duck?
In a meeting surrounded by colleagues, could you quack like a duck? This exercise [in creativity training] deals with fear, the number one creativity killer in business. Once you've quacked in front of your peers, offering up an idea for consideration will not seem so daunting."
Patrick Collister, of direct marketing agency, EHS Brann

"Does Lemsip Hold The Key?"
Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, recently revealed the secret of his creativity: drugs. Not opium or LSD, however, but… Lemsip. Not snorted or injected, but poured into a mug of boiling water and, er, sipped - one cup a day, just before he starts work. And not just any Lemsip … blackcurrant does not work; only the lemon-flavoured variety, says Motion, induces the 'sort of introspection' that ignites his creativity.

"When AE Housman walked home after a liquid lunch at the Spaniards Inn on Hampstead, three stanzas popped fully formed into his head. It took him another 12 months, he said, to finally come up with the fourth stanza."
Guy Claxton, author of Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less (The Ecco Press)

"There is something special about humour, because it involves seeing the world in a different way, and that is an essential for creativity... And to be creative effectively usually demands the presence of humour."
Brian Clegg and Paul Birch, co-authors of Instant Creativity (Kogan Page)

"Anecdotal evidence shows that the majority of people get their best ideas when they are off guard and least expect it."
Guy Claxton, author of Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less (The Ecco Press)

"Someone once said that to deny the existence of spiritual intelligence is to say that a pile of spinach wrote the Shakespeare sonnets."

"The Picasso Principle
(Alias, Don't Put All Your Eggs In One Basket)
Research shows that in business, as in Hollywood, nine out of ten new ideas fail and the key to finding a workable one is to maximise creative output, then weed out the duds as quickly as possible. Call it the Picasso principle. From a business perspective, what stands out about the great man's ouevre is its sheer volume and the self-belief with which it was created."
Giles Whittell, The Times, 2002

"What Is Michael Moore's Secret?
Michael Moore is somebody every ambitious politician ought to study. Despite attempted censorship for its anti-Bush message after September 11, his book Stupid White Men was a number one bestseller in America and is now number two here; his documentary films and television shows win mass audiences. Yet he is a Left-wing American critic of America at a time of unparalleled patriotism. By ordinary rules, he ought to be an unpublishable disaster.

Unlike politicians of Left, Right or centre, he has realised that the modern world runs on media-driven stunts and that you can win huge coverage for your ideas by out-stunting your enemies while making everyone laugh.

So, for instance, he once formed a choir consisting entirely of cancer survivors who had had their larynxes removed and got them to sing Christmas carols through electronic voice-boxes at the houses of tobacco company executives.
Tasteless? Maybe. Effective? Very."
Andrew Marr, Daily Telegraph, 2002

"A man will have to stand on a mountain for a thousand years before a duck will fly into his mouth."
Chinese proverb

"It has been estimated that the average rate of innovation during the Middle Paleolithic era was one new discovery every 20,000 years."
Jonathan Sacks in his book The Dignity of Difference (Continuum)

"Essentially creativity is all about learning to listen to the unconscious and being able to cultivate that relaxed and alert state that is typical of meditation and dreaming."
Guy Claxton, professor of education and psychology at Bristol University and author of Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence Increases When You Think Less (The Ecco Press)

"Creativity is the idea, innovation is the output. US research has consistently pointed out that for every 60 ideas, you have one successful innovation. Creativity is quantity driven; innovation is quality driven."
Simon Majaro, while visiting professor at Cranfield School of Management

"My experience [as an academic] is that the best way to improve an idea is to let smart people make fun of it, while not taking their comments personally."
Mike Metelits, Nothing Special, formerly of the Idea Factory

"Some people tap their feet, some people snap their fingers, and some people sway back and forth. I just sort of do 'em all together, I guess."
Elvis Presley

"The ideas that people think are the stupidest are the most protectable… I think this is especially true with new business models. People are especially likely to say they are stupid and to be afraid to copy them."
Bill Gross, founder and CEO of idealab!, an incubator of new companies. Quoted in the book, Weird Ideas That Work, by Robert Sutton

"I'm all in favour of free expression, provided it's kept rigidly under control."
The headmaster in Forty Years On, the play by Alan Bennett… giving a good unwitting definition of the art of brainstorming.

"Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere,
sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognise them when they show up."
Stephen King, said to be the world's best selling writer, in his book On Writing (New English Library)

"The idea that creative endeavour and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time."
Stephen King, said to be the world's best-selling writer, in his book On Writing (New English Library)

"Keep a notepad and pencil on your bedside table. Million-dollar ideas sometimes strike at 3am."
Life's Little Instruction Book (Thorsons)

"No problem can stand the assault of sustained thinking."
Voltaire

"All originality is judicious plagiarism."
Voltaire

"The major challenge for leaders in the 21st century will be how to release the brainpower of their organisations."
Warren Bennis, American business guru

"The fox that waited for the chickens to fall from their perching place went hungry."
Greek proverb

"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship. Imagination without skills gives us modern art."
Tom Stoppard

"There is but one art: to omit! A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a day paper."
Robert Louis Stevenson

"There is nothing more marvellous than thinking of a new idea.
There is nothing more magnificent than seeing a new idea working.
There is nothing more useful than a new idea that serves your purpose."
Edward de Bono

"I once complained to my father that I didn't seem to be able to do things the same way other people did. Dad's advice? 'Margo, don't be a sheep. People hate sheep. They eat sheep."
Margo Kaufman

"According to Japan's Minister of International Trade and Industry, 40 per cent of the leading product discoveries in the last 50 years have come from Britain."
Sunday Times. 1.11. 98

"Terry Venables once patented an invention called the Thingummywig. It was a hat with fake hair coming out from underneath, designed to allow women with curlers in to go shopping."
The Radio Times, January, 2003

"Sir Martin Sorrell has argued that the information age is long gone. We all have the same knowledge now. It's what we do with that knowledge that separates the winners from the also-rans. In other words, the defining characteristic of a successful company in this highly competitive world is its ability to have ideas and act on them."
Patrick Collister, executive creative director at direct marketing agency, EHS Brann

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
Albert Einstein

"If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking."
General George S Patton

"To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong."
Joseph Chilton Pearce

How To Protect Your Idea
Yes, get legal advice. But in the end, the best way to protect your idea is simply to do it faster and better than anyone else. Or, as General Macarthur once advised: "Have a good plan. Execute it violently. Do it today."

Q. What can you sit on, sleep on and brush your teeth with?
A. A chair
A bed
And a toothbrush
Moral: Sometimes the answer is more obvious than you think.

"Whenever colleagues or friends speak of failure, I tell them what it is like to watch a professional photographer at work. Usually they come to a portrait session armed with several rolls of film. They take 72 exposures in the hope that one will be right - unusual, dramatic, or one that just captures the character of the sitter. It if is, the session has been a success. Any observer who did not understand professional photography might be justified in thinking that one usable outcome set against 71 rejects was, on balance, a failure. He would be wrong. He would simply not have understood the logic of creativity, whether artistic or scientific."
Jonathan Sacks, in his book, Celebrating Life (Fount)

"Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say 'Why not?"
Robert F Kennedy

"You see things: and you say 'Why?'
But I dream things that never were: and say, 'Why not?'"
George Bernard Shaw in Back To Methuselah

"You have 206 bones in your body.
Surely one of them is creative."
Advertisement for the Apple, iMac. February, 2002

"The whole world is a narrow bridge. The important thing is not to be afraid."
Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810)

"Nobody ever arrives at a very big idea through a conscious, rational thought-process. It comes from your unconscious."
David Ogilvy, the famous adman