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1 Text A
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2 Comprehension&nbs...
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3 Chinese Version
Unit Four Text A
Creativity is essential to the development of human society. In the following passage, John Adair offers some insights and tips forcreative thinking — the core of creativity.
The Art of Creative Thinking
John Adair
1 The importance of creative thinking today needs no emphasis. In your profession or sphere of work, you will have a competitive advantage if you develop your ability to come up with new ideas. In your personal life, too, creative thinking can lead you into new paths of creative activity.
Human Creativity
2 Humans cannot make anything out of nothing. Once, a distinguished visitor to Henry Ford's auto plants met him after an exhaustive tour of the factory. The visitor was lost in wonder and admiration. "It seems almost impossible, Mr. Ford," he told the industrialist, "that a man, starting 25 years ago with practically nothing, could accomplish all this." Ford replied, "But that's hardly correct. Every man starts with all there is. Everything is here — the essence and substance of all there is."
3 The same principle holds good in creative thinking. We do not form new ideas out of nothing. As Henry Ford said above, the raw materials are all there. Your task as a creative thinker is to combine ideas or elements that already exist. Creativity is the faculty of mind and spirit that enables us to bring into existence, ostensibly out of nothing, something of use, order, beauty or significance.
Use the Stepping Stone of Analogy
4 Put yourself into the shoes of an inventor. You are casting about in your mind for a new idea. Something occurs to you, possibly suggested by reading about other people's attempts. You go home and sketch your invention, and then make a model of it.
5 The point is that the model you have reached may well have been suggested by an analogy from nature. Indeed you could look upon nature as a storehouse of models waiting to be used by inventors. What the natural model suggests is usually a principle that nature has evolved or employed to solve a particular problem or necessity in a given situation. Radar, for example, came from studying the uses of reflected sound waves from bats. The way a clam shell opens suggested the design for aircraft cargo doors. Nature suggests models and principles for the solutions of problems.
6 This fundamental principle can be applied to all creative thinking, not just to inventing new products. Take human organization for example. Most of the principles involved can be found in nature: hierarchy (baboons), division of labor (ants, bees), networks (spiders' webs), and so on.
7 Thinking by analogy, or analogizing, plays a key part in imaginative thinking. This is especially so when it comes to creative thinking.
Widen Your Span of Relevance
8 Many inventions in history indicate that the inventors may have knowledge in more than one field. They may even work in a quite different sphere from the one in which they make their names as discoverers or inventors. Look at the following list of inventions with the occupations of their inventors:
Invention Inventor's main occupation
Ballpoint pen Sculptor
Safety razor Traveling salesman
Kodachrome films Musician
Automatic telephone exchange Undertaker
Parking meter Journalist
Long-playing record Television engineer
10 The lack of expert or specialized knowledge in a given field is no bar to being able to make a creative contribution. As Disraeli said, we must "learn to unlearn." When you are grappling with a problem, remember to widen your span of relevance. Look at the technologies available in fields other than your own, possibly in those that may appear to others to be so far removed as to be irrelevant. They may give you a clue.
11 You will be creative when you start seeing or making connections between ideas that appear to others to be far apart: the wider the apparent distance, the greater the degree of creative thinking involved.
Curiosity
12 Thinking is a way of trying to find out for yourself. If you always blindly accepted what others told you, there would be nothing to be curious about. Creative thinkers tend to have a habit of curiosity that leads them to give searching attention to what interests them.
13 "The important thing is not to stop questioning," said Einstein. "Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity." Such curiosity is — or should be — the appetite of the intellect.
14 One way to develop your curiosity is to begin to ask more questions, both when you are talking with others and when you are talking in your mind to yourself. Questioning, carefully done, helps you to distinguish between what is known and what is unknown.
Chance Favors Only the Prepared Mind
15 It is interesting to note that many inventions in human history have been the results of unexpected or chance occurrences. The classic example, of course, is the discovery of penicillin by Sir Alexander Fleming. The sweetening effect of saccharine was accidentally discovered by a chemist who happened to eat his lunch in the laboratory without washing his hands after some experiments. The idea of the mirror galvanometer first occurred to William Thomson when he happened to notice a reflection of light from his monocle. As Louis Pasteur said, “In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.”
16 What does it mean for you to have a prepared mind? You have to be purposeful in that you are seeking an answer or solution to some problem. You have become exceptionally sensitive to any occurrence that might be relevant to that search. You have the experience to recognize and interpret a clue when you see or hear one. That entails the ability to remain alert and sensitive to the unexpected while watching for the expected. You will have to be willing to invest a good deal of time in fruitless work, for opportunities in the form of significant clues do not come often. In those long hours, experiment with new procedures, and expose yourself to the maximum extent to the possibility of encountering a fortunate accident.
Think Creatively About Your Life
17 Creative thinking has a more general application. You may not be an author of books, but you are writing the book of your own life. Life should bean adventure. It is a usually interesting, occasionally exciting and sometimes painful journey forwards into an unknown future.
18 If you decide to take a creative approach to life, it does change your perspective. You will seek out first some "given" ideas about yourself. What are your distinctive strengths? These are not easy questions to answer. Self-discovery lasts a lifetime. Seek to identify what you are born to excel at, and make sure you are working in the right area. That involves an element of trial and error, periods of frustration and despair, and moments of excitement and joy.
19 A person who thinks creatively will never look upon life as finished. "I have no objection to retirement," Mark Twain once said, "as long as it doesn't interrupt my work." We can all learn from creative thinkers to see life as essentially a series of beginnings.
20 Even if your work in the narrow sense does not call for imagination, the art of creative thinking is still relevant to you. For our lives are unfinished creations. Shaping and transforming the raw materials of our lives and circumstances is endlessly interesting and often challenging. It is not what happens to you in life that matters, but how you respond. The creative response is to transform bad things into good, and problems into opportunities.
