A Technique for Producing Ideas - the simple five-step formula anyone can use to be more creative in business and in life!

The materials which must be gathered are of two kinds: they are specific and they are general.

The first of these steps is for the mind to gather its raw material.

am convinced, however that you gather vicarious experience best, not when you are honing up on it for an immediate purpose, but when you are pursuing it as an end in itself.

The term used by Pareto to describe the other type, the rentier, is translated into English as the stockholder-though he sounds more like the bag holder to me. Such people, he says, are the routine, steady-going, unimaginative, conserving people, whom the speculator manipulates.

In short, the type includes all those persons in any field who (like our Mr. Roosevelt) can not let well enough alone, and who speculate on how to change it.

an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.

What you do is to take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them, as it were, with the tentacles of the minds. You take one fact, and turn it this way and that, look at is in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit.

In learning any art the important things to learn are, first, Principles; and second, Method. This is true of the art of producing ideas.

The second important principle involved is that the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations, depends largely on the ability to see relationships.