A young man walked into a store to buy a necktie. The blank bare wall behind the tie counter depressed him. What would fill it attractively and increase sales? He experimented with his camera and a darkroom, produced an enlargement more than ten feet long and sold it to the clothing store. He had started an entirely new business idea, now called photo murals that paid him handsomely.
One single observation or interpretation of a sensation has been the turning point of a person’s life in thousands of cases. One single observation has built fortunes, won wars and achieved in any number of cases, which confront us all the time.
The higher mental processes: reasoning, reflection, memory, imagination and so on, are of no value unless the material composing them, sensations, are accurate. Interpretations of the sensation can be no more accurate than the observation thereof. So spare no effort to be a competent observer.
Imagination is not the same as fancy, though they are different exercises of the same plastic or creative faculty. Fancy employs the laws of association capriciously and without purpose. Imagination aims at definite and useful results. Fancy is a passive, drifting affair, while imagination is active and guided. It is subject to control and the more intelligent and planned its control, the more effective its results in creative achievement. “I never thought of it,” is a common remark in many a postmortem analysis of a situation when someone asks, “Why didn’t you do so and so?” In such a case the creative intelligence did not work. The failure was one of imagination, for it is the imagination which looks ahead, supplies, plans, solves, and originates ideas.
Ordinarily when a person is confronted with some disagreeable task which could be made easy by an improved method, they grumble, “Why doesn’t somebody do something about this?” Rarely the victim of such a condition happens to be a person who asks themselves, “Why don’t I do something about this?” The substitution of “I” for somebody makes all the difference in stimulating the imagination. It gives you an open minded, active approach, in which you may strike something that will be effective and rewarding. At least this cannot happen just by doing nothing and waiting for someone else to find a solution.
Do something. Look around where you are, at home, at work, at meal time, while traveling. Select any object, or method. Consider it carefully and see if it can be changed or improved. Stop taking everything for granted as final. Start analyzing in view of today’s different needs and new techniques: lightweight luggage for airplanes; vitamin enriched foods; remote control for TV [Obviously, again, these items were "cutting edge" in 1961. Don't allow this to dissuade you now, however from the same concepts. Looking around you will see any number of things that can use updating, re-engineering to perform a specific function better, or the occasional situation where there simply still isn't something that exists to "get the job done"!]
The constructive imagination does not merely recall images from the memory of experiences in their original form. It rearranges, recombines and re-adapts the factors into a different form. It associates things or ideas in new ways. This is the basis for invention, for artistic creativeness. It is essential for improvement of any kind, for the discovery of new relationships, for adapting old things to new uses. It is the foundation of the idea producing process.
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