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

In this third stage you make absolutely no effort of a direct nature. You drop the whole subject, and put the problem out of your mind as completely as you can.

Please hold that italicized definition in mind, because we shall return to it later. Note particularly the word: pre-occupied, with its brooding duality.

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.

Now, if you have really done your part in these three stages of the process you will almost surely experience the fourth. Out of nowhere the Idea will appear.

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

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.

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.

This is simply to get yourself a supply of those little 3 x 5 ruled white cards, and use them to write down the items of specific information as you gather them. If you do this, one item to a card, after a while you can begin to classify them by sections of your subject. Eventually you will have a whole file box of them, neatly classified.