Friday, March 30, 2012

Creative Tinkering

  Creativity lessons that emerge from a review of the way Edison worked:
1. CHALLENGE ALL ASSUMPTIONS. Before hiring an assistant, Edison would invite the candidate over for soup. If the person salted the soup before tasting it, Edison would not hire him for the job. He did not hire people who had too many assumptions built into their everyday life. He wanted people who consistently challenged assumptions.
2. QUANTITY. He believed to discover a good idea you had to generate many ideas. Out of quantity comes quality. He set idea quotas for all his workers. His own quota was one minor invention every 10 days and a major invention every six months. It took over 50,000 experiments to invent the alkaline storage cell battery and 9000 to perfect the light bulb. Edison looked at creativity as simply good, honest, hard work. Genius, he once said, is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. For every brilliant idea he had there was a dud like the horse-drawn contraption that would collect snow and ice in the winter and compress it into blocks that families could use in the summer as a refrigerant.
3. NOTHING IS WASTED. When an experiment failed, he would always ask what the failure revealed and would enthusiastically record what he had learned. His notebooks contain pages of material on what he learned from his abortive ideas, including his many experiments on will power. He conducted countless experiments with rubber tubes extended from his forehead trying to will the physical movement of a pendulum. Once when an assistant asked why he continued to persist trying to discover a long-lasting filament for the light bulb after failing thousands of times, Edison explained that he didn’t understand the question. In his mind he hadn’t failed once. Instead, he said he discovered thousands of things that didn’t work. Finally, he completed Patent 251,539 for the light bulb that ensured his fame and fortune. Whenever he succeeded with a new idea, he would review his notebooks to rethink ideas and inventions he’d abandoned in the past in the light of what he’d recently learned.
4. CONSTANTLY IMPROVE YOUR IDEAS AND PRODUCTS AND THE IDEAS AND PRODUCTS OF OTHERS. Contrary to popular belief, Edison did not invent the light bulb: his genius, rather, was to perfect the bulb as a consumer item. Edison also studied all his inventions and ideas as springboards for other inventions and ideas in their own right. To Edison, the telephone (sounds transmitted) suggested the phonograph (sounds recorded), which suggested motion pictures (images recorded). Simple, in retrospect, isn’t it? Genius usually is.
Edison would often jot down titles of books, failed patents and research papers written by other inventors. He would research them  and try to figure out where those inventors quit or left off, so his own patentable work could begin. He advised his assistants to adapt the ideas of others. He told them to make it a habit to keep on the lookout for novel and interesting ideas that others have used successfully. To Edison, your idea needs to be original only in its adaptation to the problem you are working on.
5. TURN DEFICIENCIES TO YOUR ADVANTAGE. No one knows for sure what caused Edison’s hearing problems, but after the age of twelve he could no longer hear birds singing. As a teenager working in a telegraph office jammed with clattering telegraph machines, he viewed his poor hearing as a distinct advantage because he could focus on his instrument on his desk and not be distracted. As a renowned inventor, he received pleas from hearing-impaired people all over the world to invent a hearing aid, but he declined believing this so-called disability gave him valuable mental space in which to think.

6. RECORD YOUR IDEAS AND THOUGHTS. Edison had a deep-seated need to articulate his ideas on paper, to see for himself the relentlessly cause-and-effect nature of many of his works. Leonardo da Vinci was Edison’s spiritual mentor, and his notebooks illustrate the depth of their kinship. An obsessive draftsman, hoarder of ideas, supreme egoist, engineer and botanist—a conceptual inventor, scientist and mathematician, Edison recorded and illustrated every step on his voyage to discovery. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Michael Michalko is the author of the highly acclaimed Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques; Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius; ThinkPak: A Brainstorming Card Deck and Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work.

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