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

So with the art of producing ideas. What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which ideas are produced; and how to grasp the principles which are the source of all ideas.

The second suggestion is that for storing up certain kinds of general material some method of doing it like a scrapbook or file is useful.

Once I jotted in a book the question: "Why does every man hope his first child will be a boy?" Five years later it became the headline and idea for one of the most successful advertisements I ever produced.

In this classification speculator is a term used somewhat in the sense our word "speculative." The speculator is the speculative type of person. And the distinguishing characteristic of type, according to Pareto, is that he is constantly pre-occupied with the possibilities of new com-binations.

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

With these two general principles in mind – the principle that an idea is a new combination, and the principle that the ability to make new combinations is heightened by an ability to see relationships

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.

As you go through this part of this part of the process two things will happen. First., little tentative or partial ideas will come to you. Put these down on paper. Never mind how crazy or incomplete they seem: get them down. These are foreshadowing of the real idea that is to come, and expressing these in words forwards the process. Here again the

One more stage you have to pass through to complete the idea-producing process: the stage might be called the cold, gray dawn of the morning after. In this stage you have to take your little idea out into the world of reality.