creating questions is as important as answering them, if not more so, because framing good questions focuses your attention on the right issues.

Asking yourself challenging questions can help you reveal hidden assumptions, avoid bias, expose vagueness, identify errors, and consider alternatives. Generating questions can help direct your next steps toward deeper understanding and creative problem solving.

The defects as well as the strengths of our first effort aren’t available for us to examine until they exist.

You have probably heard of the “10,000-hour rule,” which encapsulates the idea that a person needs 10,000 hours of practice to become world-class at anything, from art to music to sports to zoology. This book is about what to do during hours 1 through 9,999. The magic of the 10,000-hour rule does not happen at the 10,000th hour. The magic is an

If you want to get more out of what you hear or see, force yourself to ask questions—in

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. —Samuel Beckett

Creativity is not a matter of magical inspiration.

Effective questions turn your mind in directions that lead to new insights and solutions. They highlight hidden assumptions and indicate directions to take to make progress.

When the going gets tough, creative problem solvers create an easier, simpler problem that they can solve. They resolve that easier issue thoroughly and then study that simple scenario with laser focus. Those insights often point the way to a resolution of the original difficult problem.