{"product_id":"how-to-get-ideas-isbn-9781576754306","title":"How to Get Ideas","description":"\u003cb\u003eThis new expanded second edition shows you—no matter your age or skill, your job or training—how to come up with more ideas, faster and easier.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJack Foster’s simple five-step technique for solving problems and getting ideas takes the mystery and anxiety out of the idea-generating process. It’s a proven process that works. You’ll learn to condition your mind to become “idea-prone,” utilize your sense of humor, develop your curiosity, visualize your goals, rethink your thinking, and overcome your fear of rejection.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis expanded edition of the inspiring and enlightening classic features new information on how to turn failures to your advantage and how to create a rich, idea-inducing environment. Dozens of new examples and real-life stories show that anyone can learn to get more and better ideas.Preface \u003cbr\u003e Acknowledgments \u003cbr\u003e Introduction: What Is an Idea?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Part I: Ten Ways to Idea-Condition Your Mind\u003cbr\u003e 1. Have Fun   \u003cbr\u003e 2. Be More Like a Child\u003cbr\u003e 3. Become Idea-Prone   \u003cbr\u003e 4. Visualize Success\u003cbr\u003e 5. Rejoice in Failure\u003cbr\u003e 6. Get More Inputs   \u003cbr\u003e 7. Screw Up Your Courage   \u003cbr\u003e 8. Team Up with Energy   \u003cbr\u003e 9. Rethink Your Thinking   \u003cbr\u003e 10. Learn How to Combine\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Part II: A Five-Step Method for Producing Ideas\u003cbr\u003e 11. Define the Problem   \u003cbr\u003e 12. Gather the Information   \u003cbr\u003e 13. Search for the Idea   \u003cbr\u003e 14. Forget about It   \u003cbr\u003e 15. Put the Idea into Action\u003cbr\u003e Notes \u003cbr\u003e Index \u003cbr\u003e About the Author   \u003cbr\u003e About the Illustrator\u003cb\u003eJack Foster\u003c\/b\u003e spent thirty-five years working in creative departments of major advertising agencies; the first ten as a writer, the last 25 as a creative director. He has helped create advertising for scores of companies including Carnation, Mazda, Sunkist, Mattel, Albertson's, Ore-Ida, Suzuki, Universal Studios, Rand McNally, and Smokey Bear. He is a recipient of the Los Angeles Creative Club’s  \"Creative Person of the Year\" award.Introduction\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e What Is an Idea?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I know the answer. The answer lies within the heart of all mankind! What, the answer is twelve? I think I’m in the wrong building.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Charles Schultz\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Mark Twain\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e If love is the answer, could you please rephrase the question?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Lily Tomlin\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Before we figure out how to get ideas we must discuss what ideas are, for if we don’t know what things are it’s difficult to figure out how to get more of them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The only trouble is: How do you define an idea?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A. E. Housman said: “I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but both of us recognize the object by the symptoms which it produces in us.” Beauty is like that too. So are things like quality and love.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And so, of course, is an idea. When we’re in the presence of one we know it, we feel it; something inside us recognizes it. But just try to define one.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Look in dictionaries and you’ll find everything from: “That which exists in the mind, potentially or actually, as a product of mental activity, such as a thought or knowledge,” to “The highest category: the complete and final product of reason,” to “A transcendent entity that is a real pattern of which existing things are imperfect representations.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e A lot of good that does you.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The difficulty is stated perfectly by Marvin Minsky in The Society of Mind:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Only in logic and mathematics do definitions\u003cbr\u003e ever capture concepts perfectly. … You can\u003cbr\u003e know what a tiger is without defining it. You\u003cbr\u003e may define a tiger, yet know scarcely anything\u003cbr\u003e about it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e If you ask people for a definition, however, you get better answers, answers that come pretty close to capturing both the concept and the thing itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Here are some answers I got from my coworkers and from my students at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Los Angeles:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It’s something that’s so obvious that after\u003cbr\u003e someone tells you about it you wonder why you\u003cbr\u003e didn’t think of it yourself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e An idea encompasses all aspects of a situation\u003cbr\u003e and makes it simple. It ties up all the loose ends\u003cbr\u003e into one neat knot. That knot is called an idea.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It is an immediately understood representation\u003cbr\u003e of something universally known or accepted,\u003cbr\u003e but conveyed in a novel, unique, or unexpected\u003cbr\u003e way.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Something new that can’t be seen from what\u003cbr\u003e preceded it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It’s that flash of insight that lets you see things\u003cbr\u003e in a new light, that unites two seemingly\u003cbr\u003e disparate thoughts into one new concept.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e An idea synthesizes the complex into the\u003cbr\u003e startlingly simple.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It seems to me that these definitions (actually, they’re more descriptions than definitions, but no matter—they get to the essence of it) give you a better feel for this elusive thing called an idea, for they talk about synthesis and problems and insights and obviousness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The one that I like the best, though, and the one that is the basis of this book, is this one from James Webb Young:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e An idea is nothing more nor less\u003cbr\u003e than a new combination of old elements.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e There are two reasons I like it so much.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e First, it practically tells you how to get an idea for it says that getting an idea is like creating a recipe for a new dish. All you have to do is take some ingredients you already know about and combine them in a new way. It’s as simple as that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Not only is it simple, it doesn’t take a genius to do it. Nor does it take a rocket scientist or a Nobel Prize winner or a world-famous artist or a poet laureate or an advertising hotshot or a Pulitzer Prize winner or a first-class inventor.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “To my mind,” wrote the scientist and philosopher Jacob Bronowski, “it is a mistake to think of creative activity as something unusual.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Ordinary people get good ideas everyday. Every day they create and invent and discover things. Every day they figure out different ways to repair cars and sinks and doors, to fix dinners, to increase sales, to save money, to teach their children, to reduce costs, to increase production, to write memos and proposals, to make things better or easier or cheaper—the list goes on and on.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Second, I like it because it zeros in on what I believe is the key to getting ideas, namely, combining things. Indeed, everything I’ve ever read about ideas talks about combining or linkage or juxtaposition or synthesis or association.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “It is obvious,” wrote Jacques Hadamard, “that invention or discovery, be it in mathematics or anywhere else, takes place by combining ideas. . . . The Latin verb cogito, for ‘to think,’ etymologically means ‘to shake together.’ St. Augustine had already noticed that and had observed that intelligo means ‘to select among.’”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work,” wrote T. S. Eliot, “it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences. The ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A man becomes creative,” wrote Bronowski, “whether he is an artist or a scientist, when he finds a new unity in the variety of nature. He does so by finding a likeness between things which were not thought alike before. … The creative mind is a mind that looks for unexpected likenesses.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Or listen to Robert Frost: “What is an idea? If you remember only one thing I’ve said, remember that an idea is a feat of association.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Or Francis H. Cartier: “There is only one way in which a person acquires a new idea: by the combination or association of two or more ideas he already has into a new juxtaposition in such a manner as to discover a relationship among them of which he was not previously aware.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Nicholas Negroponte agrees: “Where do good new ideas come from? That’s simple—from differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And Arthur Koestler wrote an entire book, The Act of Creation, based on “the thesis that creative originality does not mean creating or originating a system of ideas out of nothing but rather out of a combination of well-established patterns of thought—by a process of cross-fertilization.” Koestler calls this process “bisociation.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “The creative act,” he explained, “… uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Feats of association,” “unexpected likenesses,” “new wholes,” “shake together” then “select among,” “new (or unlikely) juxtapositions,” “bisociations” —however they phrase it, they’re all saying pretty much what James Webb Young said:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e An idea is nothing more nor less\u003cbr\u003e than a new combination of old elements.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Now that we know what ideas are, we must devise a method for getting them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Happily enough, many such methods have already been devised. And—even more happily—these methods are quite similar.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In A Technique for Producing Ideas, James Webb Young describes a five-step method for producing ideas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e First, the mind must “gather its raw materials.” In advertising, these materials include “specific knowledge about products and people [and] general knowledge about life and events.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Second, the mind goes through a “process of masticating those materials.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Third, “You drop the whole subject and put the problem out of your mind as completely as you can.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Fourth, “Out of nowhere the idea will appear.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Fifth, you “take your little newborn idea out into the world of reality” and see how it fares.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Hermann von Helmholtz, the German philosopher, said he used three steps to get new thoughts.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The first was “Preparation,” the time during which he investigated the problem “in all directions” (Young’s second step).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The second was “Incubation,” when he didn’t think consciously about the problem at all (Young’s third step).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The third was “Illumination,” when “happy ideas come unexpectedly without effort, like an inspiration” (Young’s fourth step).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Moshe F. Rubinstein, a specialist in scientific problem solving at the University of California, says that there are four distinct stages to problem solving.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Stage one: Preparation. You go over the elements of the problem and study their relationships (Young’s first and second steps).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Stage two: Incubation. Unless you’ve been able to solve the problem quickly, you sleep on it. You may be frustrated at this stage because you haven’t been able to find an answer and don’t see how you’re going to (Young’s third step).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Stage three: Inspiration. You feel a spark of excitement as a solution, or a possible path to one, suddenly appears (Young’s fourth step).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Stage four: Verification. You check the solution to see if it really works (Young’s fifth step).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In Predator of the Universe: The Human Mind, Charles S. Wakefield says there “is a series of [five] mental stages that identify the creative act.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e First, “is an awareness of the problem.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Second, “comes a defining of the problem.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Third, “comes a saturation in the problem and the factual data surrounding it” (Young’s first and second steps).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Fourth, “comes the period of incubation and surface calm” (Young’s third step).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Fifth, comes “the explosion—the mental insight, the sudden leap beyond logic, beyond the usual stepping-stones to normal solutions” (Young’s fourth step).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Ah, but even though they all generally agree on the steps you must take to get an idea, none of them talks much about the condition you must be in to climb those steps. And if you’re not in condition, it doesn’t make any difference if you know the steps; you’ll never get the ideas that you’re capable of getting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e For telling most people how to get an idea is a little like telling a first grader to find x when x+ 9 = 2x + 4, or like telling a person with weak legs how to high jump. Just as you must know algebra before you can solve an equation, and just as you must have strong legs before you can high jump, so you must condition your mind before you can get an idea.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The first ten chapters make up Part I of this book. They discuss Ten Ways to Idea-Condition Your Mind. You may read them in any order.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 1. Have Fun\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 2. Be More Like a Child\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 3. Become Idea-Prone\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 4. Visualize Success\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 5. Rejoice in Failure\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 6. Get More Inputs\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 7. Screw Up Your Courage\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 8. Team Up with Energy\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 9. Rethink Your Thinking\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 10. Learn How to Combine\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The last five chapters make up Part II of this book.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e They talk about A Five-Step Method for Producing Ideas that should be taken in sequence. Although I use different words, I too generally agree with Young. (Two exceptions: I add one step to his—the need to define the problem; and I combine his third and fourth steps because they seem one step to me, not two.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e To some, my (and Young’s) last step may not seem part of the process of getting an idea, but it truly is, for an idea is not an idea until something happens with it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 11. Define the Problem\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 12. Gather the Information\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 13. Search for the Idea\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 14. Forget about It\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 15. Put the Idea into Action","brand":"Berrett-Koehler Publishers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304801325285,"sku":"NP9781576754306","price":22.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781576754306.jpg?v=1767729413","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/how-to-get-ideas-isbn-9781576754306","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}