1. Find techniques for shifting perspective. Think 13. Be an ideas factory! Produce lots of ideas, like someone else.What would your brother or then just throw out the bad ones. school Principal or Barack Obama do? 14. Be attentive to seemingly mundane things. 2. Think like an object. When Einstein imagined Picasso learned to draw by sketching pigeons’ riding along a light beam he came up with the feet. theory of relativity! 15. Analogise. Try to force a relationship between 3. Think with the muscles and skin and sinews of two dissimilar objects. In the 17th century, your body. Like you would if you were a surgeon William Harvey compared the heart to a pump. or a dancer. 16. Be different. But not so different it’s hard to be 4. Use your senses. Imagine hearing the sound of taken seriously. Edvard Munch’s famous image. 17. Be sloppy. Make a mistake. See what happens. 5. Put some distance between yourself and your work. 18. Who’d have thought light could be both a Imagine solving your problem in 100 years’ time. particle and a wave? Bring new things together, 6. Then try the opposite. Lose yourself in the create paradoxes. thing you’re studying, integrate "I" and "It". 19. Find your favorite place to go and let your mind The fisheye lens was invented by someone who wander. wanted to understand how fish saw the world. 20. Change the medium. What would a picture of 7. Pay attention to what doesn’t make sense. your favorite song look like? The greatest discoveries are often preceded 21. Pursue your bliss. Alexander Fleming noticed by the thought, "That’s strange…". 8. Recognise the importance of good problems. penicillin growing in his petri dish because he If you’re stuck, maybe it’s a different problem had the somewhat unusual hobby of making you need, not a solution to an existing problem. portraits out of bacteria, meaning he could instantly identify new types of mould just by 9. People are literally more creative after performing their appearance. a pulling action than a pushing one. Don’t retreat. 22. Look for patterns. Sir Francis Bacon noticed that Go towards your problem with open arms. Africa and South America were similar shapes. 10. Find ideas in Nature. The inventor of Velcro was 23. Welcome and nurture diversity in your home, inspired by the grasping properties of plant burs. school, workplace and community. 11. Trust your intuition. "The heart has its reasons 24. Resist premature closure. Don’t let a good idea that reason cannot know" (French philosopher stop you having a great idea. and mathematician Blaise Pascal). 25. Be an explorer: go where there’s no light, and 12. Simplify it! The words love, honor, truth, and duty look for the land on the other side of the known. are all representations of very complex ideas. 65