“Fact is, the first 100 years of our country’s history were about who could build the biggest, most efficient farm. And the second century is focused on the race to build factories. Welcome to the third century, folks. The third century, folks. The third century is about ideas.” Seth Godin
When you are young you have a wonderful imagination. In your imagination you can create anything and any situation. As you get older you lose this creative imagination. This is usually because the older people that you look up to laugh at your imaginings or make fun of your creative ideas. You can, if you are still young, decide to keep your vivid imagination and not let it deteriorate due to outside pressures. You can cultivate a fertile imagination and increase your creativity to be used as you please. All the great inventors of the world would have been nothing without the ability to imagine that their creations were possible. People with inspiration receive their inspiration from their imagination.
If you are no longer young and have already lost most of your imagination then you may find that it is difficult to regain what you have lost. However, it is not impossible and with some hard work you can remove the blocks to your creative imagination. One short cut is to work with children. When they imagine things have them describe what they imagine in great detail and then try to see them in your imagination as they are seeing them. This retrains the technique within you but the blocks that you have put up in your past have to be found and pulled down.
Here is an example - You may have said to someone, “Imagine you could fly without wings.” The response was not the enthusiasm that you expected but ridicule as that person goes round everyone saying, in a mocking voice that you had said, “Imagine you could fly without wings.” To avoid ridicule in the future you put up a block to your imagination. Instead of putting up the block it would have been better if you had repeated an affirmation.
Let loose - Unlearn - Imagine
Write things down
Get a notebook and write your ideas down, take it with you wherever you go. Use your notebook to record your thoughts, ideas, and observations during the day. Make the notebook your constant companion. Filled with content your notebook becomes a real Fountain of Knowledge.
Regular Input
Get fresh inputs everyday! Do things different, use another way to work, have lunch with new colleagues, listen to different music. Keep your eyes and ears open, taste, touch and smell the world around you. On the my way home I try to remember as much details as possible, e.g. the color of buildings, the sortiment of the shops I pass and so on.
Relax!
Take a stroll enjoy the world around you and let your subsconcious mind work. This works best for me when I am cycling or running. I really enjoy this state of actively doing “nothing”.
Be challenged!
Take a new challenge every week. Explore something new with the purpose of solving it, or generating ideas. Check out the Break Free blog to see what weekly challenges you can take.
The barometer problem is a well-known urban legend in academia. It has multiple forms, but all are based on the same premise: A professor asked his student the following question: “How would you measure the height of a tall building using an barometer?”
One student thought this is too simple, so he answered:
“I would tie the barometer to the end of a piece of string, lower the barometer from the top of the building and then measure the length of the string and barometer once the barometer touches the ground.” The professor marked this answer as wrong.
But the student was not wrong, he succeeded in measuring the height of the house. He asked the professor to give him another chance.
This time he suggested:
“I would lower the barometer from the top of the building on a piece of string, then swing it like a pendulum and measure the period of its oscillation.”
The professor gave him a zero again. This time the student wrote:
“I would count the number of steps taken whilst carrying the barometer up the stairs to the roof and multiplying that by the height of a stair tread.”
He was told off again, but he had more ideas:
“Using a shorter piece of string measure the period of the makeshift pendulum at the top and bottom of the building. Use the two values to determine the change in gravitational force and therefore the height of the building.”
The professor rejected his answer again, but the student did not give up, his new solution was:
“Dropping the barometer off the top of the building, using a stopwatch to measure how long it takes to hit the ground, and solving for height in the equations for a falling body.”
The professor did not like this answer either, so the student tried again:
“Placing the barometer against the building at ground level, marking the top, placing the barometer above the mark, marking the new top, and so on until the building has been measured in “barometer units”.”
As also this answer was not accepted by the professor, the student gave a more mathematical solution to the problem:
“Measuring the barometer, finding the length of the shadow cast by the barometer when stood on the ground, then finding the length of the building’s shadow in the same conditions.”
After the rejection of the professor, the student was so fed up that he wrote:
“I would go to the house, knock on the door and say to the occupant. ‘If you don’t tell me the height of your house, I’ll beat you to death with my barometer.’”
In different versions of the legend, the student is passed for their answer, or initially failed but then passed after protest, or similar. According to some believes the student was the Danish Nobel Prize winner Nils Bohr. Another Nobel Prize winner, Linus Pauling, once said: “The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” And, of course it is just this ability to look for several answers to a question that many Nobel prize winners have in common.
Our search for the right answer is not something we learn to do only in school. Unfortunately, we also carry this attitude over to our working lives. Next time you have a problem to solve, ask yourself if you can find another, outside the box solution. Don’t give up until you have at least seven completely different ways of solving the problem.
This story is taken from “The Idea Book” - ideabook.org