How Ideas Arise

© Sergey Zaitsev, 2023

ISBN 978-5-0060-7485-9

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Annotation

In a brief and entertaining way, the author (an experienced inventor), shares the secrets of the “creative kitchen”. The general principles of obtaining and selecting ideas that are necessary to solve various kinds of problems are outlined. The suggested recommendations will help the reader to quickly and significantly increase their creative potential.

The book is intended mainly for graduates of higher educational institutions who are embarking on independent creative activity

Preface

Creating new ideas is an operation that is accessible to everyone and quite simple. It is enough to know in what concentrations the obvious and the improbable interfere.

Pete Hein

Previously, those who were able to solve problems were more appreciated. Now-those who know how to find tasks and formulate them correctly.

Zholondkovsky

Facts without ideas are rubbish for the head and memory

F.Belinsky

First you need to define what an idea is. The following definition can be proposed. An idea is a proposal that solves a problem in a new, simplest way, and, as a rule, consists of elements taken from very remote areas. Perhaps we will understand this better if we consider the possible synonyms of this word: thought, idea, idea, project, thesis. A man without ideas is a ship without a destination port. If you don’t have your own ideas, then you will work on implementing someone else’s ideas.

Are ideas necessary? Yes, we constantly need new ideas because life is so arranged that the situation is constantly deteriorating and becoming more complicated.

This fact was perfectly expressed by the classics “What we know is not necessary for us – Goethe” and “There is no benefit in what is known, one unknown is needed – Pasternak”. We all constantly have to solve emerging problems. It takes an idea to solve any problem. Therefore, we are primarily interested in the questions of where ideas come from, whether it is possible to accelerate their appearance, increase their quantity and improve quality.

A problematic situation is the starting point of mental activity (The goal of fiction is tricky – it has long been noticed). Since any goal is achieved by a number of quite simple steps, the solution to any complex problem also consists in decomposing it into a number of simple steps – mini problems. The solution to the mini problem consists in setting a specific task that solves it.

But the idea, apart from the purely utilitarian, has a huge philosophical significance. If you do not have a guiding idea, then you will move chaotically through life, like a ship without a destination port. There will never be a tailwind for you. Or an “artist” who has learned to photographically depict nature, but does not know what and why to depict.

There are many excellent essays on the proposed topic, the main disadvantage of which is that they are too long. In this manual, everything secondary is discarded. So let’s get started.

How to create (generate) ideas. (Development of creative abilities)

We will collect facts so that ideas appear.

Louis Pasteur

It is better to have a lot of ideas so that some of them turn out to be wrong than to be always right just because there are no ideas.

E.De Bono

The creative process of creating ideas is one of the most enjoyable and worthy activities for a person. But it is difficult to expect interesting ideas from an unintelligent (not having a broad mind) person.

How to improve your level in this regard? And is it possible to learn creativity? There are different opinions on this. “A fool will spend his whole life near the wise and will not know the truth. As never before, a spoon will not understand the taste of food,” says a Buddhist parable. But it’s still worth a try. You need to constantly train solving various problems that require a creative approach, and get acquainted with the best examples of solutions to problems proposed by other people. All ideas arise from practice. If you exclude the flow of information to the brain from the outside world, then it falls asleep.

The ancients recommended to consider floating cumulus clouds for the development of creative abilities and imagine what they look like. Finishing cracks on old walls and smearing ink blots on paper gives a good result. The Japanese recommend contemplation of the rock garden. It is a pond with 16 stones rising above the surface. But from any point on the shore, only 15 of them are visible.

It is very useful to read really creative works. But there are very few of them. We can recommend Lucretius, Sun Tzu, Graciana, Panchatantra, Epicurus texts. A distinctive feature of such books is the brevity of the presentation, the absence of everything secondary. For a rough preliminary assessment of whether it is worth reading the book, the following criterion is applicable. If the book is 2000 years old and it is still being published, then it will be relevant for another 2000 years, and it is worth reading. If it was published 1 year ago, then on average it will be relevant for another 1 year.

Training on jokes, aphorisms, and proverbs quickly increases mental alertness. The presenter tells half of the joke, and the trainees must finish it. You can also read half of the joke yourself, and then try to finish it yourself. As a result of such trainings, skills of non-standard thinking, overcoming psychological inertia are developed.

As a rule, impressive results appear after a few sessions. Try yourself on the following anecdotes and sayings:

1. The kid is standing at the store. A man drives up on a cart with a horse, leaves it and goes into the store. After a while, he comes out and is going to go. The boy says: “You won’t be able to move!” – “Why is that??” – “All the gasoline poured out of your horse.”

2. What will you do if you see a little green man on the street? – Cross the street

3. A man leads a penguin down the street by the paw, a policeman asks: “Where did you get a penguin from?” “I found it on the street and I don’t know what to do with it” “So take him to the zoo!” “I already drove him, and now I’m taking him to the cinema”

4. Why do they draw eyes on the planes of some airlines?

To scare away birds