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Anthony’s NotesA personal field guide
From the notebook

Thinkertoys

Michael Michalko

Book Cover

Highlights

  • creators are creative because they believe they are creative. (Location 147)
  • Can you imagine a Vincent van Gogh bemoaning his failure to sell his paintings as evidence of his lack of talent? A Thomas Edison giving up on his idea for a light bulb when he failed 5,000 times? A Leonardo da Vinci who is too embarrassed to attempt much of anything because of his lack of learning? An Albert Einstein who is fearful of looking stupid for presenting theories about the universe as a patent clerk? A (Location 148)
  • Michelangelo refusing to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel because he had never painted fresco? A weeping and wailing Mozart blaming an unfair world for his poverty? A Walt Disney giving up his fantasies after being fired from his first job as a newspaper editor because he lacked imagination? A Henry Ford giving up his dreams after the experts explained that he didn’t have the capital to compete in the automobile industry? Or a depressed Pablo Picasso shuffling down the street with his head down, hoping no one notices him? (Location 150)
  • It’s impossible to be creative if you are negative. (Location 154)
  • By changing your perspective, you expand your possibilities until you see something that you were unable to see before. (Location 180)
  • Nothing is more harmful to a positive creative attitude than fears, uncertainties, and doubts (FUDS); yet, most people let FUDS control their lives. (Location 251)
  • TICK-TOCK Tick-Tock is a very powerful exercise based on Lecky’s work that is designed to help you overcome your fears, doubts, and uncertainties. In Tick-Tock you write out your fears, confront them head-on, and then substitute positive factors that will allow you to succeed. BLUEPRINT Zero in on and write down those negative thoughts that are preventing you from realizing your goal. Write them under “Tick.” Sit quietly and examine the negatives. Learn how you are irrationally twisting things and blowing them out of proportion. Substitute an objective, positive thought for each subjective, (Location 278)
  • negative one. Write these under “Tock.” (Location 285)
  • Years back, a group of scientists visited a tribe in New Guinea that believed their world ended at a nearby river. After several months, one of the scientists had to leave, which involved crossing the river. Safely across the river, he turned around and waved. The tribesmen did not respond because, they said, they didn’t see him. Their entrenched beliefs about the world had distorted their perception of reality. (Location 326)
  • Record all the things you like about yourself—your positive qualities, characteristics, and traits. Include the successes you have had in every area of your life: work, home, school, and so on. Keep adding to this list as you think of more things and as you accomplish more. Acknowledging yourself, your abilities, and your own unique qualities will encourage you to get moving. (Location 346)
  • If you act like an idea person, you will become one. It is the intention and going through the motions of being creative that counts. (Location 400)
  • IDEA QUOTA (Location 407)
  • Set yourself an idea quota for a challenge you are working on, such as five new ideas every day for a week. You’ll find the first five are the hardest, but these will quickly trigger other ideas. The more ideas you come up with, the greater your chances of coming up with a winner. (Location 408)
  • TINY TRUTHS (Location 446)
  • DUKES OF HABIT (Location 455)
  • TRAVEL JUNKIE (Location 529)
  • CAPTURING IDEA BIRDS (Location 538)
  • THINK RIGHT (Location 556)
  • “Unhappy is the fate of one who tries to win his battles and succeed in his attacks without cultivating the spirit of enterprise, for the result is a waste of time and general stagnation.” SUN TZU (Location 686)
  • “A victorious army wins its victories before seeking battle.” SUN TZU (Location 713)
  • BLUEPRINT To center a challenge: Write it as a definite question, beginning “In what ways might I …?” Vary the wording of the challenge by substituting synonyms for (Location 734)
  • key words. Stretch the challenge to see the broader perspective. Squeeze the challenge to see the narrow perspective. (a) Divide it into subproblems. (b) Solve the subproblems. (c) Keep asking “how else?” and “why else?” (Location 737)
  • To squeeze a challenge and ascertain its strengths, weaknesses, and boundaries, ask who, what, where, when, why, and how. (Location 819)
  • In order to get original ideas, you need to be able to look at the same information everyone else does and organize it into a new and different pattern. (Location 870)
  • Take two accomplished waffle-makers whose waffles are equal in quality and price. One is a passive thinker, the other active. For some reason, people stop buying waffles. The passive thinker does nothing and goes out of business; the active thinker fashions the waffle into a cone and creates a whole new product: the ice cream cone. (Location 884)
  • FALSE FACES Technique: Reversal. Profile: How to find ideas by reversing conventional assumptions. SLICE AND DICE Technique: Attribute listing. Profile: How to get new ideas from a challenge’s attributes. CHERRY SPLIT (Location 987)
  • Technique: Fractionation. Profile: How to get ideas by dividing a challenge into two or more components and then reassembling them in new and different ways. THINK BUBBLES Technique: Mind mapping. Profile: How to map your thoughts so as to spark new ideas. SCAMPER Technique: Questions. Profile: How to manipulate what exists into something different. (Location 993)
  • Whenever Thomas Edison was about to hire a new employee, he would invite the applicant over for a bowl of soup. If the person salted (Location 1026)
  • his soup before tasting it, Edison would not offer him the job. He did not hire people who had too many assumptions built into their everyday life. Edison wanted people who consistently challenged assumptions. (Location 1027)
  • Substitute something. Combine it with something else. Adapt something to it. Modify or Magnify it. Put it to some other use. Eliminate something. Reverse or Rearrange it. (Location 1558)
    • Note: Apply to murder project
  • What procedure can I substitute for my current one? How can I combine prospecting with some other procedure? What can I adapt or copy from someone else’s prospecting methods? How can I modify or alter the way I prospect? What can I magnify or add to the way I prospect? How can I put my prospecting to other uses? What can I eliminate from the way I prospect? What is the reverse of prospecting? What rearrangement of prospecting procedures might be better? (Location 1574)
  • Prod your imagination with SCAMPER questions, and then continue asking “How can …?” “What else …?” “How else …?” (Location 1582)
  • Ray Kroc was a middle-class high-school dropout, a former piano player, and a real-estate salesman who sold paper cups for seventeen years. In his fifties, Ray Kroc left the paper cup business and hit the road selling a little machine called the Multimixer, which could make six milkshakes at a time. One day in 1954, a hamburger stand in California ordered eight Multimixers. Curious, Kroc drove his dusty little car out to investigate. He was stunned by the volume of business that Dick and Maurice McDonald were doing. They had unwittingly hit on the concept of fast food—homogenized, predictable items that are quick and easy to prepare. The McDonalds had simplified, economized, and minimized the hamburger stand. Kroc and the McDonalds formed a partnership that allowed Kroc to find new sites, and open and run them. What followed was not instant success but obstacles and challenges. Ray Kroc became a billionaire because he identified the right challenges and manipulated existing information into new ideas to solve them. (Location 1596)
  • Even the hot dog, as we know it, is the result of asking the right question at the right time. In 1904, Antoine Feutchwanger was selling sausages at the Louisiana Exposition. First he tried offering them on individual plates, but this proved too expensive. He then offered his customers white cotton gloves to keep the franks from burning their fingers. The gloves were expensive, too, and customers tended to walk off with them. Antoine and his brother-in-law, a baker, sat down to figure out what inexpensive item could be added (modify) to the frankfurter to prevent people from burning their fingers. His brother-in-law said something like “What if I baked a long bun and slit it to hold the frank? Then you can sell the franks, and I can sell you the buns. Who knows, it might catch on.” (Location 1644)
  • To find ideas using substitution, ask: What can be substituted? Who else? What else? (Location 1663)
  • Can the rules be changed? Other ingredient? Other material? Other process or procedure? Other power? Other place? Other approach? What else instead? What other part instead of this? (Location 1665)
  • To combine, ask: What ideas can be combined? Can we combine purposes? How about an assortment? How about a blend, an alloy, an ensemble? Combine units? What other article could be merged with this? How could we package a combination? What can be combined to multiply possible uses? What materials could we combine? Combine appeals? (Location 1731)
  • To become an expert at adaptation, ask: What else is like this? What other idea does this suggest? Does the past offer a parallel? What could I copy? Whom could I emulate? What idea could I incorporate? (Location 1785)
  • What other process could be adapted? What else could be adapted? What different contexts can I put my concept in? What ideas outside my field can I incorporate? (Location 1791)
  • In 1956, a couple of brothers named Jacuzzi, who sold water pumps for farm use, designed a special whirlpool bath as a treatment for their cousin’s arthritis. They did little with this new product until 1968, when Roy Jacuzzi put the concept in a different context—the luxury bath market—and bathrooms were never the same again. The Jacuzzi sold like crazy across the country, from California to the White House. (Location 1821)
  • What can be magnified, made larger, or extended? What can be exaggerated? Overstated? What can be added? More time? Stronger? Higher? Longer? How about greater frequency? Extra features? What can add extra value? What can be duplicated? How could I carry it to a dramatic extreme? (Location 1841)
  • How can this be altered for the better? What can be modified? Is there a new twist? Change meaning, color, motion, sound, odor, form, shape? Change name? Other changes? What changes can be made in the plans? In the process? In marketing? What other form could this take? What other package? Can the package be combined with the form? (Location 1903)
  • Ernest Hamwi was trying to sell paper-thin Persian waffles at the 1905 World’s Fair. It was hot, and for days he watched people walk past his little stand to a nearby ice-cream stand. When that stand ran out of dishes, Hamwi brought some hot waffles over. He fashioned the waffles into cones, let them cool, and served ice cream on top of them. (Location 1914)
  • To find other uses, ask: What else can this be used for? Are there new ways to use it as is? Other uses if modified? What else could be made from this? Other extensions? Other markets? (Location 1982)
  • Find things to reduce, eliminate, streamline, omit, and miniaturize by asking the following questions: What if this were smaller? What should I omit? Should I divide it? Split it up? Separate it into different parts? Understate? Streamline? Make miniature? Condense? Compact? Subtract? Delete? Can the rules be eliminated? What’s not necessary? (Location 2034)
  • Think of a product as an object surrounded by a cluster of advertising, marketing, and sales promotions and programs, like the squares that surround the figures in the illustration. Sometimes when these promotions and programs are understated, the quality of the product (the inner square) they surround is perceived to be greater than it is in reality. (Location 2079)
  • What other arrangement might be better? Interchange components? Other pattern? Other layout? Other sequence? Change the order? Transpose cause and effect? Change pace? Change schedule? (Location 2097)
  • faster you talk, the more likely people are to assume you know what you’re talking about. (Location 2127)
  • Questions to ask when using the reversal principle are: Can I transpose positive and negative? What are the opposites? What are the negatives? Should I turn it around? Up instead of down? Down instead of up? Consider it backwards? Reverse roles? Do the unexpected? (Location 2150)
  • TUG-of-WAR Technique: Force field analysis. Profile: How to graph a challenge’s positive and negative forces and then maximize the positives and minimize the negatives. IDEA BOX Technique: Morphological analysis. Profile: How to identify and box the parameters of a challenge to quickly produce thousands of new ideas. IDEA GRID Technique: FCB grid Profile: How to find new ideas and creative strategies using a grid to organize complex masses of information. (Location 2245)
  • LOTUS BLOSSOM Technique: Diagramming. Profile: How to diagram obstacles and then use them to reach your goal. PHOENIX Technique: Questions. Profile: How to use a checklist of problem-solving questions—originated by the CIA—to guide your thinking. THE GREAT TRANSPACIFIC AIRLINE AND STORM DOOR COMPANY Technique: Matrix. Profile: How to create a key-word index and mix and match the key words in a matrix to produce new ideas. FUTURE FRUIT Technique: Future scenarios. Profile: How to project a future scenario in order to take advantage of unexpected opportunities. (Location 2253)
  • BLUEPRINT Write the challenge you are trying to solve. Describe the best-case scenario and the worst-case scenario; the best that can happen and the worst. (Location 2285)
  • List the conditions of the situation. Conditions are anything that modifies or restricts the nature or existence of your subject. They are whatever requirements you perceive to be essential to solving a particular challenge. Note the “tug-of-war.” As you list the conditions, you will find the forces pushing you to the best case and those pulling you toward catastrophe. Pit each condition against its opposite on the continuum by specifying its push and pull powers. (Location 2289)
  • BLUEPRINT Specify your challenge. Select the parameters of your challenge. To determine whether a parameter is important enough to add, ask yourself, “Would the challenge still exist without the parameter I’m considering adding to the box?” List variations. Below each parameter, list as many variations as you wish for that parameter. The number of parameters and variations will determine the box’s complexity. Generally, it is easier to find new ideas within a simple framework than a complex one. For instance, a box with ten parameters, each of which has ten variations, produces 10 billion potential combinations. Try different combinations. When the box is finished, make (Location 2359)
  • BLUEPRINT (Location 2563)
  • Draw a Lotus Blossom diagram and write the problem or idea in the center of the diagram. Write the significant components or themes of your subject in the circles surrounding the center circle, labeled A to H. The optimal number of themes for a manageable diagram is between six and eight. If you have more than eight, make additional diagrams. To help you decide what themes to use, ask questions like: What are my specific objectives? What are the constants in my problem? If my subject were a book, what would the chapter headings be? What are the dimensions of my problem? Use the ideas written in the circles as the central themes for the surrounding lotus blossom petals or boxes. Thus, the idea or application you wrote in circle A would become the central theme for the lower middle box A. It now becomes the basis for generating eight new ideas or applications. Continue the process until the lotus blossom diagram is completed. (Location 2564)
  • BLUEPRINT (Location 2646)
  • Write your challenge. Isolate the challenge you want to think about and commit yourself to an answer, if not the answer, by a certain date. Ask questions. Use the Phoenix checklist to dissect the challenge into as many different ways as you can. Record your answers. Information requests, solutions, and ideas for evaluation and analysis. (Location 2647)
  • THE PHOENIX CHECKLIST THE PROBLEM Why is it necessary to solve the problem? What benefits will you gain by solving the problem? What is the unknown? What is it you don’t yet understand? What is the information you have? What isn’t the problem? Is the information sufficient? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory? Should you draw a diagram of the problem? A figure? Where are the boundaries of the problem? Can you separate the various parts of the problem? Can you write them down? What are the relationships of the parts of the (Location 2652)
  • problem? What are the constants (things that can’t be changed) of the problem? Have you seen this problem before? Have you seen this problem in a slightly different form? Do you know a related problem? Try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown. Suppose you find a problem related to yours that has already been solved. Can you use it? Can you use its method? Can you restate your problem? How many different ways can you restate it? More general? More specific? Can the rules be changed? What are the best, worst, and most probable cases you can imagine? (Location 2662)
  • THE PLAN Can you solve the whole problem? Part of the problem? What would you like the resolution to be? Can you picture it? How much of the unknown can you determine? (Location 2671)
  • Can you derive something useful from the information you have? Have you used all the information? Have you taken into account all essential notions in the problem? Can you separate the steps in the problem-solving process? Can you determine the correctness of each step? What creative-thinking techniques can you use to generate ideas? How many different techniques? Can you see the result? How many different kinds of results can you see? How many different ways have you tried to solve the problem? What have others done? Can you intuit the solution? Can you check the result? What should be done? How should it be done? Where should it be done? When should it be done? Who should do it? What do you need to do at this time? Who will be responsible for what? Can you use this problem to solve some other problem? What is the unique set of qualities that makes this problem what it is and none other? What milestones can best mark your progress? How will you know when you are successful? (Location 2674)
  • Ask “What is our business?” and “What should our business be?” These questions focus your attention on where to look for new ideas. Define and organize your business according to products or services, markets, functions, and technologies. For instance, the key descriptors for a business book publisher would be: Products or services: Books. Markets: Books for the business professional. Functions: Books that provide business information. Technologies: Books based on the latest printing technologies. Under each variable, list the key words for the business: Key words describe the products or services, markets, functions, and technologies in your industry. (Location 2786)
  • Mix and match your products, markets, functions, services, and technologies in various ways to explore new ideas. (Location 2817)
  • An essential step in deciding the nature of your business is a systematic analysis and combination of the key words that describe existing products, services, markets, functions, marketing, and technologies. Are they still viable? Will they remain viable? What can be connected to produce a new idea? (Location 2865)
  • BLUEPRINT The procedures for preparing for the future are: Identify a particular problem in your business. State a particular decision that has to be made. (Location 2902)
  • Identify the forces (economic, technological, product lines, competition, and so on) that have an impact on the decision. Build four or five future scenarios based on the principal forces. Use all the available information and develop scenarios that will give you as many different and plausible possibilities as a pinball in play. Develop the scenarios into stories or narratives by varying the forces that impact the decision. Change the forces (interest rates escalate, a key performer quits, need for your product or service disappears, etc.) and combine them into different patterns to describe the possible consequences of your decision over the next five years. Search for business opportunities within each scenario. Then explore the links between opportunities across the range of your scenarios, and actively search for new ideas. (Location 2906)
  • BRUTETHINK Technique: Random stimulation. Profile: Forces a connection between two dissimilar concepts to create a new idea. HALL oF FAME (Location 2986)
  • Technique: Forced connection. Profile: Produces ideas and insights by creating a relationship between your challenge and the words and thoughts of the world’s great thinkers. CIRCLE oF OPPORTUNITY Technique: Forced connection. Profile: Generates ideas by forcing a connective link between common attributes and your challenge. IDEATOONS Technique: Pattern language. Profile: A way to get ideas by using abstract symbols instead of words. CLEVER TREVOR Technique: Talk to a stranger. Profile: How to get ideas by increasing the number and kind of people you talk to about your challenges. (Location 2989)
  • Alastair Pilkington, production chief of the glassmaking firm of Pilkington Brothers, Ltd., had been working for years on developing a way to rid glass of distortion. At the time, the best technique was to pass molten glass through rollers and then polish away the imperfections, which was costly and not very effective. Glass experts thought the solution lay in developing superior grinders and polishers. One foggy October evening, Pilkington was washing dishes in his home in northwest England. His mind clear and free, he daydreamed as he watched a bar of Ivory soap float in the greasy water. He visualized glass floating like a bar of soap, and suddenly conceived of an idea that revolutionized the five-thousand-year-old glass industry. He made a connection between two dissimilar concepts—floating soap and distortions in glass—and invented float glass. In this process, the glass is made in an oven floating in a tub of molten tin. The glass cools and hardens before the tin; it is then rolled into a special annealing chamber without any damage to its finish. No grinding or polishing is needed. Distortion-free glass is now produced cheaply and efficiently, because one individual washing dishes saw a connection between a bar of soap and a whole industry. (Location 3021)
  • SOAP, SOUP, AND SAND (Location 3194)
  • Edward’s Dictionary of Thoughts, (Location 3263)
  • “He who walks with butter on his head should not walk in the sun.” (Location 3267)
  • “The perfection of art is to conceal art.”—Quintilian (Location 3280)
  • As Bertrand Russell wrote in The Conquest of Happiness: I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic, the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity—the greatest intensity with which I am capable—for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months, I return consciously to the topic and find the work has been done. Before I discovered this technique, I used to spend time worrying because I was making no progress; I arrived at the solution none the faster for this worry and the worrying time was wasted. (Location 4075)
  • BLUEPRINT Identify. Identify a challenge worth working on and think of the consequences of solving it. If you can envision a world in which your challenge is solved, you will be pulled subconsciously toward a constructive, creative answer. Prepare. Collect and gather all available information and literature about your challenge. Read, talk to others, ask questions, and do as much research as you can. Consciously work on the challenge as intensely as you can, until you are satisfied that you have prepared as thoroughly as possible. Instruct. Instruct your brain to find the solution to the problem. Close by saying: “Okay, find the solution to this problem. I’ll be back in two days for the answer” or “Let me know the minute you work it out.” Incubate. Let go of the problem. Don’t work on it. Forget it for a while. This period may be long or short. Take a walk or a shower, go to a movie, or sleep on it. Incubation has to occur and it will. Eureka! it may take five minutes, five hours, five days, five weeks, five months, or whatever, but insight will occur. (Location 4096)
  • Make the invitation pill-like. The club sent out a blue pill nestled in a black velvet ring box. Instructions on the box read “Drop into warm water, stir, and let dissolve.” When immersed, the capsule dissolved and a piece of cellophane with the time, date, and place floated to the top. The invitations cost $1.10 each, and the opening was a smash. (Location 4206)
  • Consider the story of George de Mestral, a Swiss inventor who went hunting one day in the late 1940s. He and his dog accidentally brushed up against a bush that left them both covered with burrs. When de Mestral tried to remove the burrs, they clung stubbornly to his clothes. This would be a minor annoyance to most of us, but de Mestral was curious about why the burrs were so hard to remove. After he got home, he studied them under a microscope and discovered that hundreds of tiny hooks on each burr had snagged to the threads of his pants. Burrs, he thought, would make great fasteners. After several years of work, he finally succeeded. The result: Velcro fasteners, now used on millions of items, from blood pressure cuffs to tennis shoes. (Location 4264)
  • “What-iffing” is a great way to learn to direct your imagination (Location 4557)
  • Imagining two opposites or contradictory ideas, concepts, or images existing simultaneously is beyond logic. It is a type of conceptualizing in which the thinking processes transcend ordinary logical thinking. If you hold two opposites together, your mind moves to a new level. (Location 4703)