In continuing to follow my curiosity about creativity, I read “A Technique for Producing Ideas” by James Webb Young, published by The McGraw-Hill Companies, 2003.
It’s a very thin book but he gets to the point rather quickly: how to create ideas. His thoughts on the process of creating seems to stem mostly from his experience in advertising but I think it translates well to the general idea making process.
A lot of it has to do with finding new relationships of old bits of information.
He proposes 5 steps.
- information gathering, both specific and general, and sorting the information.
- think through the problem and the information you gathered
- let it all “incubate” in the back of your mind while you go do something else
- appearance of the idea
- work with the idea so it becomes practical to the problem at hand
He goes into greater detail in the book about the various steps as well as some interesting thoughts about how to get ideas in general.
Personally, I think I need to do a bit more gathering of general raw material by just following my curiosity on whatever I want. I also think I need to do a bit more of step 3. I tend to chew on a problem and work at it till something happens. Maybe setting it aside and letting the information and my thoughts settle would be beneficial.
This book is a pretty quick read (about 47 pages). If I remember correctly, I found my copy used because I wasn’t so sure it was worth the full cover price of $10. I’m still not so sure about that so I’ll let you decide. However, I do think it was worth taking the time to read it.