Topic : Creativity

In addition to Mt. Rushmore, one of Gutzin Borglum’s great works as a sculptor is the head of Lincoln in the Capitol at Washington. He cut it from a large, square block of stone in his studio. One day, when the face of Lincoln was just becoming recognizable out of the stone, a young girl was visiting the studio with her parents. She looked at the half-done face of Lincoln, her eyes registering wonder and astonishment. She stared at the piece for a moment then ran to the sculptor.

“Is that Abraham Lincoln?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Well,” said the little girl, “how in the world did you know he was inside there?”

Bits and Pieces, June 23, 1994, p. 23

A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. During periods of great change, answers don’t last very long but a question is worth a lot. The word question is derived from the Latin quaerere (to seek), which is the same root as the word quest. A creative life is a continued quest, and good questions are useful guides. We have found that the most useful questions are open-ended; they allow a fresh, unanticipated answer to reveal itself.

These are the kind of questions children aren’t afraid to ask. They seem naive at first. But think how different our lives would be if certain questions of wonder were never asked. Jon Collins of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business has compiled the following list of questions of wonder:

• Albert Einstein: What would a light wave look like to someone keeping pace with it'
• Bill Bowerman (inventor of Nike shoes): What happens if I pour rubber into my waffle iron'
• Fred Smith (founder of Federal Express): Why can’t there be reliable overnight mail service'
• Godfrey Hounsfield (inventor of the CAT scanner): Why can’t we see in three dimensions what is inside a human body without cutting it open'
• Masaru Ibuka (honorary chairman, Sony): Why don’t we remove the recording function and speaker and put headphones in the recorder? (Result: the Sony Walkman.)

Many of these questions are deemed ridiculous at first.

• Other shoe companies thought Bowerman’s waffle shoe was a “really stupid idea.”
• Godfrey Hounsfield was told the CAT scan was “impractical.”
• Masaru Ibuka got comments like: “A recorder with no speaker and no recorder—are you crazy?”
• Fred Smith proposed the idea of Federal Express in a paper at Yale and got a C.

Bits & Pieces, April 29, 1993, Page 5-7

O poet, Blush like a rotted skin;
Brighten like a dusty tower;
Wail like an enormous flood;
Tremble like a red locomotive;
Flop like a damp gate!

The beaches are praying.
Listen!
How they stifle their enormous lips!
The river winks,
And I am ravished.

The Mediation of IBM 7094-7040 DCS

Before you rush off to English to read your class the greatest since Edgar Allen Poe, you ought to know that the preceding was written by a computer. Although the quality is...well...unusual, the computer has one thing going for him. He’s fast. Such literary masterpieces are knocked off at the rates of two stanzas a second.

The computer has only its teacher to thank. Yale English Professor Marie Boroff fed in the raw data.

“Reading the collected output,” Miss Boroff wrote, “one gets the impression that the computer is obsessed with earthworms and caterpillars, and that it has a penchant for making gratuitous references to locomotives and Vaseline.” The computer doesn’t totally lack in intelligence, it seems. In the middle of one of its greatest works it wrote, “The roses are vomiting. Enough!”

Source Unknown

Sometime ago, I received a call from a colleague who asked if I would be the referee on the grading of an examination question. He was about to give a student a zero for his answer to a physics question, while the student claimed he should receive a perfect score and would if the system were not set up against the student. The instructor and the student agreed to submit this to an impartial arbiter, and I was selected.I went to my colleague’s office and read the examination question: “Show how it is possible to determine the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer.”

The student had answered: “Take the barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it, lower the barometer to the street, and then bring it up, measuring the length of the rope. The length of the rope is the height of the building.”

I pointed out that the student really had a strong case for full credit, since he had answered the question completely and correctly. On the other hand, if full credit were given, it could well contribute to a high grade for the student in his physics class. A high grade is supposed to certify competence in physics, but the answer did not confirm this.

I suggested that the student have another try at answering the question. I was not surprised that my colleague agreed, but I was surprised that the student did. I gave the student six minutes to answer the question, with the warning that his answer should show some knowledge of physics. At the end of five minutes, he had not written anything. I asked if he wished to give up, but he said no. He had many answers to this problem; he was just thinking of the best one. I excused myself for interrupting and asked him to please go on. In the next minute, he dashed off his answer which read:

“Take the barometer to the top of the building and lean over the edge of the roof. Drop the barometer, timing its fall with a stopwatch. Then using the formula S = 1/2 at2, calculate the height of the building.”

At this point, I asked my colleague if he would give up. He conceded, and gave the student almost full credit. In leaving my colleagues’ office, I recalled that the student had said he had other answers to the problem, so I asked him what they were.

“Oh, yes,” said the student, “there are many ways of getting the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer. For example, you could take the barometer out on a sunny day and measure the height of the barometer, the length of its shadow, and the length of the shadow of the building, and by the use of a simple proportion, determine the height of the building.”

“Fine,” I said. “And others?”

“Yes,” said the student. “There is a very basic measurement method that you will like. In this method, you take the barometer and begin to walk up the stairs. As you climb the stairs, you mark off the length of the barometer along the wall. You then count the number of marks and this will give you the height of the building in barometer units. A very direct method.

“Of course, if you want a more sophisticated method, you can tie the barometer to the end of a string, swing it as a pendulum, and determine the value of ‘g’ at the street level and at the top of the building. From the difference between the two values of ‘g’, the height of the building can, in principle, be calculated.

“Finally,” he concluded, “there are many other ways of solving the problem. Probably the best is to take the barometer to the basement and knock on the superintendent’s door. When the superintendent answers, you speak to him as follows: ‘Mr. Superintendent, here I have a fine barometer. If you will tell me the height of this building, I will give you this barometer.”

At this point, I asked the student if he really did not know the conventional answer to this question. He admitted that he did, but said that he was fed up with high school and college instructors trying to teach him how to think ... and to explore the deep inner logic of the subject in a pedantic way, as is often done in the new mathematics, rather than teaching him the structure of the subject.

Holy Sweat, Tim Hansel, 1987, Word Books Publisher, pp. 183-185

When we think of creativity, we tend to picture a composer or an artist at work on a masterpiece. But creativity is simply a new approach to anything.

Earle Dickson, an employee of Johnson & Johnson, married a young woman who was accident-prone. Johnson & Johnson sold large surgical dressings in individual packages, but these were not practical for small cuts and burns. Dickson put a small wad of sterile cotton and gauze in the center of an adhesive strip to hold it in place. Finally, tired of making up these little bandages every time one was needed, he got the idea of making them in quantity and using crinoline fabric to temporarily cover the adhesive strip. When the bandage was needed, the two pieces of crinoline could easily be peeled off, producing a small, ready-to-use bandage.

The firm’s president, James Johnson, saw Dickson put one of his homemade bandages on his finger. Impressed by its convenience, he decided to start mass-producing them under the name Band-Aids. Dickson had been looking for a way to handle a small problem, and in the process he invented a useful new product.

Three Minutes a Day, Vol. 27, Christopher Books

When St. Petersburg, one of the most splendid and harmonious cities in Europe, was being laid out early in the eighteenth century, many large boulders brought by a glacier from Finland had to be removed. One particularly large rock was in the path of one of the principal avenues that had been planned, and bids were solicited for its removal. The bids submitted were very high. This was understandable, because at that time modern equipment did not exist and there were no high-powered explosives. As officials pondered what to do, a peasant presented himself and offered to get rid of the boulder for a much lower price than those submitted by other bidders. Since they had nothing to lose, officials gave the job to the peasant.

The next morning he showed up with a crowd of other peasants carrying shovels. They began digging a huge hole next to the rock. The rock was propped up with timbers to prevent it from rolling into the hole. When the hole was deep enough, the timber props were removed and the rock dropped into the hole below the street level. It was then covered with dirt, and the excess dirt was carted away.

It’s an early example of what creative thinking can do to solve a problem. The unsuccessful bidders only thought about moving the rock from one place to another on the city’s surface. The peasant looked at the problem from another angle. He considered another dimension—up and down. He couldn’t lift it up, so he put it underground.

Bits & Pieces, October 15, 1992, pp. 9-10

When Jean-Claude Killy made the French national ski team in the early 1960s, he was prepared to work harder than anyone else to be the best. At the crack of dawn he would run up the slopes with his skis on, an unbelievably grueling activity. In the evening he would lift weights, run sprints—anything to get an edge. But the other team members were working as hard and long as he was. He realized instinctively that simply training harder would never be enough. Killy then began challenging the basic theories of racing technique. Each week he would try something different to see if he could find a better, faster way down the mountain. His experiments resulted in a new style that was almost exactly opposite the accepted technique of the time. It involved skiing with his legs apart (not together) for better balance and sitting back (not forward) on the skis when he came to a turn. He also used ski poles in an unorthodox way—to propel himself as he skied. The explosive new style helped cut Killy’s racing times dramatically. In 1966 and 1967 he captured virtually every major skiing trophy. The next year he won three gold medals in the Winter Olympics, a record in ski racing that has never been topped.

Killy learned an important secret shared by many creative people: innovations don’t require genius, just a willingness to question the way things have always been done.

Reader’s Digest, Oct, 1991, p. 61.

British journalist Alistair Cooke has made a career out of writing about the U.S. In the process he has built an imposing library of books about the various regions of the country that covers an entire wall. He was always having trouble finding what he needed, so he began seeking an effective way to arrange them.

Initially, he placed the books on the shelves alphabetically by the author’s names. That didn’t work, because he had trouble remembering who had written what. Then he tried arranging them alphabetically by states. That posed problems, too, because some of the books were about regions, like New England or the Great Plains. Finally, he hit upon a solution. Books about New England went on shelves in the upper right hand corner. Books about the Great Plains states went in the middle. Books about the southwestern states were placed on the lower left. When Cooke was researching any state or region, all he had to do was look at the area on the library wall that corresponded to that area on the map of the U.S.

Bits and Pieces, September 19, 1991, p. 11

As a student, fashion designer Sandra Garratt was given a project to design clothing that would go against her natural inclinations—clothes that she didn’t like. She came up with a line of economical, one-size-fits-all, modular clothing for women. Garratt moved on to a series of jobs in the fashion industry, but she kept thinking about those clothes she’d designed. They intrigued her enough that she eventually began producing them for a boutique in Dallas. Several businesspeople saw promise in Garratt’s clothes, and in 1986 they invested the money to help her start a nationwide chain of shops. The investment paid off. Within a few years, more than $100 million of Garratt’s clothes had been sold, and she had made millions in royalties. All because she put her natural inclinations aside and investigated something different.

Bits and Pieces, August, 1989

The most important way parents can help children be creative is to teach them not to fear failure. To be creative, people need to explore and try new things. Also, children need to learn to tolerate being laughed at. Creative people are willing to risk criticism and aren’t afraid to be different.

Trap: Stressing success. Children whose parents have emphasized achievement over exploration are more inclined to try only things they know they do well. These activities make them feel secure in their abilities, but they don’t lead to fulfilling success.

Joyce Brothers in Homemade, Jan., 1987

A young couple decided to start their own business. He was an engineer and she was an advertising copywriter. They wound up buying a small salmon cannery in Alaska. They soon discovered they had a problem. Customers opening a can of their salmon discovered that the fish was gray. Sales sagged. Investigation revealed that the problem was a result of the way they processed the fish.

“This is a technical problem,” said the wife, “and you’re an engineer. You have to find a way to fix this.”

A month later, the husband announced that they would have to replace some machinery and make other changes. It was going to take at least 10 months to do the job and it was going to cost a lot of money.

“We have to do something sooner than that,” said the wife, “or we’re going to go under.” For the next two days she pondered the problem and came up with this solution: There was nothing wrong with the salmon—it tasted fine. The problem lay in its looks. So she changed the label on the can. In bold letters, right under the brand name, the labels thereafter announced, “The only salmon guaranteed not to turn pink in the can.”

Bits and Pieces, June, 1990, pp. 9-10

1. The right answer.

2. That’s not logical

3. Follow the rules

4. Be practical

5. Avoid ambiguity

6. To err is wrong

7. Play is frivolous

8. That’s not my area

9. Don’t be foolish

10. I’m not creative

Roger von Oech, A Whack on the Side of the Head, p. 9, quoted in Swindoll, The Quest for Character, Multnomah, p. 200

Great composers do not set down to work because they are inspired, but become inspired because they are working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day in his figures. They didn’t waste time waiting for inspiration.

Ernest Newman, in Bits and Pieces, September, 1990