You can increase your odds of solving a problem by becoming a collector. When you come across a nifty
notion or a savvy strategy, save it. Start a journal, a clipping file, and a computer file... When you're trying to find a
solution to something, dip into your collection. Then use the following blueprint to make the most of an existing idea...
1. Substitute... 2. Combine... 3. Adapt... 4. Magnify or minimize... 5. Put it to other uses... 6. Eliminate...
7. Reverse or rearrange... 8. Shift audiences.
-Jack Trout, In Search of the Obvious, p. 116
The Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn says that ideas can be acted upon in four ways. First, you
must generate the idea, usually from memory or experience or activity. Then you have to retain it-that is, hold it steady
in your mind and keep it from disappearing. Then you have to inspect it-study it and make inferences about it. Finally, you
have to be able to transform it-alter it in some way to suit your higher purposes.
-Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit, p.101
it is vital that the chaos of ideas that start to flood your brain when you open up to your own creativity
have a place to be sorted and saved. If you don't give them that chance, then chaos overwhelms you and no work can get accomplished.
-Eric Maisel, The Creativity Book, p.19
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every
preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
-Thomas Henry Huxley
