Blogs–Creative Thinking and Innovation

            How are you spending your creative brain money?

            Pretend that a deposit is made into your brain bank account each morning right before your eyes open.  A sum of $60,000 has just been placed into your ledger.  The catch?  It has to be spent in full—or to the fullest extent possible—by the end of the day.  If not, the money vanishes. 

            Would you wake each morning with a child-like excitement about the possibilities for this daily …or would you simply get used to it?

            Yeah, maybe the latter.  After all, tomorrow is just another day with the automatic deposit. Ho hum.

            And so it is with creative thinking.  It is a challenge to adopt a creative thinking mindset with a “Groundhog’s Day” mindplot swirling in our brain.  Think and repeat…think and repeat.  You get the idea.

            In creative thinking, options abound daily.  That $60,000 is actual 60,000 thoughts that, it is estimated, humans have each day.  (Who knows whether that is accurate? However, the point is clear: You and I have at least some control over our thinking.)

            How are you spending your $60,000 today?  Are you buying new stuff and exploring new cognitive lands in creating fresh ideas for your cerebral cortex or pressing “rewind” and playing the same thoughts as yesterday?  Now maybe there are times when “repeats” help.  In venturing toward a creative lifestyle, though, the breaking of yesterday thought patterns can result in innovative ideas. 

            Eyes help us to see—meaning “interpret”—the world.  We sometimes tend to see what we believe rather than believe what we see.  Many deliberate creativity techniques from brainwriting to mindmaps exist for aiding that creativity mindset.

            So…when that creative problem-solving spark is needed, how might your $60,000 be spent?

Thinking intrigues me.

            After graduate school, I became quite interested in a counseling approach called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).  The “cognitive” part is about how people think in ways that may be helpful (adaptive) or not as helpful (maladaptive) to them.  It posits that people can think about their thinking (known as metacognition) and modify their thinking to have a healthier lifestyle.  [Dr. Aaron Beck is one of the preeminent developers of CBT.  For more information, please visit the website for the Beck Institute, a page of which can be found at https://beckinstitute.org/get-informed/tools-and-resources/cbt-store/]

            The word floating in your mind as you read that last paragraph might be “attitude” or “outlook” or “perspective.”  If so, you’d be right in large part. 

            In CBT, the key word is “interpretation.”  How a person interprets an event is reflective of their thinking.  You and I could watch the same tennis match, game, or musical and “view” it differently.  In a soccer match, for instance, we could be at the same game, sitting next to each other, but have two completely different experiences based perhaps on which team won or lost the game.

               So…people continually think as they try to make sense of the world and influence it.  Thoughts percolate throughout our waking days, some of which we attend to with great zest (i.e. focusing on a work project) and others of which we let slip by.  As much as we would like to turn off our brains at times, it can be difficult to do.

            The point around our thinking is we have brain money each and every day.  We wake each morning and have the opportunity to think.  These thoughts may be entirely new, creative thoughts or recycled thoughts from the previous days, weeks, or years (yes, a type of “Groundhog’s Day” in the brain).

            This notion of thinking relates closely to creativity.  I’ll discuss this more in the next post…

I give thanks to Charles Holland Duell quite often.  Few people may know that Mr. Duell was the Commissioner of the US Patent Office from 1898-1901 and later became a federal judge.  During his time as Commissioner in the Patent Office, he purportedly said, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”  [Note: Though the quote can be found in various places, I also ran across a 1981 book where the authors indicated that it has been misattributed.]

 Regardless of the origin, the observation about nothing else needing to be invented is brilliant: It infers a limit to inventiveness, a completeness to what is needed, and how current innovation has delivered a sufficiency to our current state.  Nothing else is needed in creativity and innovation.  Simply put, we’re all set.

Imagine if that were the case.  Life would, to a large extent, stay the same.  Nothing new would be on the horizon in medical care, computer technology, or business manufacturing.  It would make an inviting plot to a “Twilight Zone” episode.

Or would it?  It could also make for a long, boring episode with no real ending. 

Without creative thinking and problem-solving, society would remain stagnant.  We wouldn’t be entranced by attention-grabbing headlines or television stories about the next-big-thing in whatever industry.  The breaking news of innovation would be broken.

Whether college graduates today are entering engineering or medicine, architecture or environmental sustainability, the future is exciting with the problem-opportunities to be addressed in exciting, inventive ways that will no doubt result.

 Imagine Mr. Duell–or another US Patent Commissioner from the late 1800s—spending a day of in a cellular, online world.  Consider what it would be like giving them a tour of a business, a hospital, or even a hotel.  The number of patents encasing their visit would be remarkable.  New devices, innovative tools, and creative systems surround us. 

At some point, someone must have hinted that innovations would be tapped.  It’s a good that their forecast was wrong.