Any Ideas?

“A Man with A New Idea Is A Crank Until the Idea Succeeds” --Mark Twain

In his latest book, ANY IDEAS? Rob Eastaway provides an encouraging assortment of tips and techniques to improve your creativity.

One of Rob’s main suggestions is to “Nurture and protect silliness.” After all, many great ideas would have been thought ridiculous years ago. How about “Injecting a deadly toxin into your face to make you look younger (Botox)?” Sometimes you just have to “embrace more silliness.”

Over the years, we tend to all become “conforming individuals who look for right answers rather than interesting ones.”

It’s important to encourage, rather than discourage new ideas. If we’re not careful, unique ideas get “questioned, challenged, laughed at or just rejected out of hand.” So, be careful to create a nurturing atmosphere, where everyone feels free to contribute.

The author points out the difference between thinking creatively versus thinking laterally. Rob suggests that creative thinking is concocting novel ideas, whereas lateral thinking is “addressing a completely different question from the problem you’re presented with.”

Here’s another fun tip: Try framing the problem “in the extreme.” Ask yourself how you would solve it if money were no object, or if you needed to have it solved in one minute. What would you do then?

I’ve employed a similar principle as this “extreme” tactic. I ask myself, “Could I solve this problem if someone would actually DIE if I didn’t?” (I actually submitted this “deadly” idea to a magazine purporting to encourage creativity. The editor didn’t really like the idea, and remarked, “But no one will actually die.”)

All in all, I found ANY IDEAS? to be a fun, easy read. I found many of the ideas to be good ones, with practical use. Embracing silliness is a great concept. Perhaps my favorite section was on the idea of lateral thinking.

I started reading at the back of the book.


Advance Review Copy courtesy of the author.