Imagine that you’re vacuuming your living room in an effort to have a clean place before friends coming over. Frustratingly, you’ve done it over and over but not much is happening. You reach down to open the vacuum drawer and pull out the bag, then PUFF! a huge dusty cloud envelops your space and you realize that the bag is full… again, Frustratingly, you empty it and wonder why in the world would a vacuum cleaner with a bag still exist!

Somewhere else, James Dyson, inventor and founder of Dyson®, had the exact problem, and he used creative problem solving to find the answer. While his competitors were trying to figure out a better design for vacuum filters, he realized the solution is to think differently and find a more creative method of doing it. So, innovative thinking struck and he created a revolutionary system to separate the dirt from the air, and invented the world’s first bagless vacuum cleaner.

The Human Brain
If we look at the human brain as a computer we then have to ask what is the software we use with that computer? Well, in general, the software at least as Western civilization was originally designed 2400 years ago by the Greek gang of three or the gg3, Those are Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Since then we’ve done virtually nothing about thinking or improving the way we think as humans. Evolving your brain as a human being is by far the biggest constraint you will face prior to joining the club.

Creative thinking
It is a skill. It’s not just a matter of individual talent or sitting by the river and playing Bach music while hoping you get inspired! That is a very weak method. Creative thinking is about creating VALUE! And if that has to be “different” then yes, you can think of a different way to solving a problem. James Dyson was a great example, but there are many others out there. For example, the guy who created the battery operated toothbrush. Did you know he created a battery operated lollypop (spin pop) before that? Now THAT, is creative thinking!

Progress
2,000 years ago China was way ahead of the western world in terms of science and technology. They had rockets and gunpowder and such things. What happened to that gap? What happened to their scholars? China started to believe that you could move from certainty to certainty and as a result they never developed the possibility system. They stopped developing hypothesis, speculation and imagination. Progress came to a dead end! But once they identified the missing link, that became an old story and the rest, Well! Is history.

Being Different
One of the very important things about creativity is that the new idea, the creative idea, must have value. Far too many people who believe they are creative think that just being different for the sake of being different is creative. It most certainly is not! and that is what gets creativity a bad name.

So, if you look at the door and you say doors are normally rectangular, let’s make a circular one! Now, unless you can show value for that, this is NOT creativity, this is just being different for the sake of being different.

Making Mistakes
The main reason people are reluctant to be creative in general is that if you try out an idea and it doesn’t work that is regarded as a mistake! Now, a big deficiency in language, certainly in the English language, is we don’t have a word which says “A fully justified venture which did not succeed for reasons beyond our control”, therefore anything that did not succeed is called a mistake.

People don’t like mistakes, because that stands in the way of their career promotion or progress in a project. Successful billionaires though, are not afraid to fail, as it is part of their path to learn or improve. Instagram for example; started as a complex check-in app called Burbn, pivoted later to a simple photo sharing app, and now is back to commerce with Instagram Shopping.

It takes a fault to find the right way, and a problem to find an opportunity

Logical Thinking
Provocation is one of the methods or tools of lateral thinking. It is completely contrary to the opposite of our normal logical thinking. In our normal logical thinking you can only say things which make sense, which fit our experience and fit in with what we’ve said before. With a provocation there may not be a reason for saying something until after you have said it, but because it puts us down on a different position in the patterning system, it allows us to open up new ideas

Thinking outside the box
It means thinking for unusual ideas, being creative. The notion is that we are all within a certain box which is formed by constraints, expectations, concepts and perceptions we use and we play around with-in that box. So, thinking outside the box means escaping and breaking out of the box to change those concepts and rules and develop new ideas.

It really means developing an idea which would not have been expected in our usual behavior or usual thinking, so it’s just another term for creative thinking, unusual thinking or lateral thinking.

I prefer the term lateral thinking though, because it is specifically defined in system terms of physics, which means: moving across from the main pattern to a side pattern, which once you’re there, in hindsight, you can link up with your starting point. However, thinking outside the box is a general term that is defined as having unusual ideas, ideas which would not have arisen within the box of your usual thinking.

So how do you tackle all of these traits keeping you out of the club?

Be a Creative Thinker!
Be a Lateral Thinker!
Be “Valuably” Different! in that you provide a Value, not just a different angle!

If you read something that really resonates with you, please leave a comment below as it’s much more likely to stick with yourself.

And if you ever make it! I’d love to hear about it — From you that is.

Peace. Love. Cheers. And, thank you for reading.

— Median Rawashdeh // 05.31.18

— Follow me on twitter @MedianiTTo