Category Archives: Thinking up an Idea

Chapter 5: “Thinking up” an Idea

What is Your Thinking Recipe?

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The phrase “thinking up an idea” is a common one. It is certainly fair to say that thinking, to most people, is the chief, if not the only factor that occurs to them when the job of producing an idea presents itself. How then, should one think? Have you ever thought about thinking? Surely a subject, on which so much depends, deserves at least a very brief survey of some common pitfalls before we get down to actual idea production.

Thinking of the lowest order is day dreaming. The mind flits like a butterfly from one subject to another, not rest­ing long enough to draw a drop of nectar from the flower.

Another thing which often passes for thinking is nothing more than imitation. You do the thing you have always done, based on what you have always seen someone else always do.

Sometimes, on a higher level, is a type of thinking which is done to solve problems. Many people “think” about even the most serious problems on the first level mentioned—the daydreamer or flitter. The subject is on his mind, and worries him, but none of the processes that go on in his head, if processes they may be called, are directed to solv­ing the problem effectively. A life’s savings may be lost because of a wrong idea on the part of a business man. A loved one may die because of the wrong idea on the part of a mother. A nation may be ruined by a false idea on the part of a general. Someone signs the wrong paper; someone picks the wrong medicine, and the impulsive or stupid act causes ruin.

That the world is full of such situations is only too well known to us. Examples abound, if anyone wishes to get them, in a book by Prof. Walter B. Pitkin, with the sprightly and satiric title, A Short Introduction to the His­tory of Human Stupidity. The short introduction is over five hundred pages long!

The highest level of thinking, of course, is performed by the creative thinker. He is the one who works over what enters his head. In creative thinking, prosaic facts, abstract questions, and oddities of information are transformed into fine literature, cures for dreadful diseases, and ideas which may change the way the world goes.

Most people do not even know that when they are con­fronted with a problem to solve, they have to do certain things in a certain order to solve it. Thinking in some re­spects resembles cooking. The thinker must follow a formula just as the cook follows a recipe. There is a regular order in which the ingredients are added and prepared. Proper combinations are made, proper timing is considered. The dinner suffers if instead of soup, a delicious dessert is brought in before the roast. The thinker must produce not the right answer to the wrong question but to the right one.

Is the Problem Worth Solving?

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To produce a specific idea for a definite purpose you must first state your problem in definite terms. All too often the wrong problem is tackled, and as a result, no matter how good the ideas devised to solve it, they are necessarily ineffective.

An interesting example has been cited of a buyer who devoted much time and effort in persuading a seller to re­duce the wholesale price of a product because the retail price was otherwise too high to make sales. The wholesaler agreed to the request, the article was put on sale at the lower price and—it didn’t sell any better than it did at the higher price.

The reason was that the buyer picked the wrong problem to solve. The need was not to get the price reduced. The article itself was not popular regardless of price. The moral is that the buyer was worse off when he actually solved the problem he set himself because it was the wrong one.
Stating a problem definitely has several advantages. It practically compels you to understand it better, evaluate its significance and act intelligently about it. The man, who wanted the price reduced, had he stated his problem, could have seen he was after the wrong one. His problem was, “why didn’t the article sell?” It could have been for any num­ber of reasons other than price. It may have not served any purpose of use or beauty or novelty. It may have filled a need, but inefficiently. It may have needed more advertis­ing. But there is no need here to analyze a list of reasons.

Before putting a lot of work into the production of an idea, you should decide whether the problem you have definitely stated is worth solving. Getting an idea requires time, effort, and perhaps money as well. If these assets could solve some other problem that would produce greater advantages for the same time, effort and money, the prob­lem you are considering now should be reserved for an­other time. In other words, it is worthwhile considering not only whether you are working on the right problem, but also whether you are doing it at the most favorable time.

There are other things to safeguard you in your thinking against the faults of being either uninformed or misin­formed. In this connection you should realize that there is a certain amount of information necessary to the solution of every idea problem. You must ask yourself how many of the necessary facts you already possess; how many more are readily available, either in books or through interviews; how much more can be obtained by reasonable effort, and how much is simply not to be had at all through any feasible effort. In addition, you must know not only how much of the needed information you either have or can obtain, but also how dependable and accurate it is and whether it is in a form which you can use.

Such questions have a connection in determining whether a problem should be solved, because the time factor pre­viously mentioned is affected by them. Far too often these simple considerations of finding out whether you have enough information, and whether it is dependable, are com­pletely overlooked.

Are You Feeling the Wrong Answers?

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A further menace to thinking is the sway of prejudice and emotion. People feel as well as think, or it might be better to say they feel more than they think. Anyway, these two sides of human nature are closely merged.

Prejudice means literally judging in advance. It exists by ignoring some of the evidence, over-estimating other parts of it, to conform to a conclusion decided upon ahead of time before enough evidence is in. If we accept a conclusion under the influence of a wish, a hope or a fear, our thinking is warped to that degree. Our feelings, then, injure the clarity of our thinking. Individually and col­lectively, when our feelings are involved, the quality, the fairness and the objectivity of our outlook and hence of our thinking is reduced.

Thus, love is blind to faults. We are apt to ascribe to beautiful persons other desirable qualities which they do not possess, while the good qualities of the unattractive are proportionately difficult to detect.

Prejudice is not always crude and obvious. It may be subtle, delicate, and may reach people under all kinds of circumstances. Numerous books have been written about our prejudices. All feeling, however, does not obstruct thinking. It also gives purpose and direction to it, which is quite essential at the very outset of creativeness. You must know, at least in a general way, just what you wish to create, before you may expect successfully to accomplish creative mental work. You must select at least the general goal toward which you desire to journey. You must not be content to sing, in the worlds of the familiar ballad, “I don’t know where I’m going but I’m on the way.” It is feeling and desire which determine the goal and objective, and one cannot even get started without that emotional impulse.

But one should know and make allowances for this in­fluence on thinking, and separate as far as possible, all emo­tional influences from your thinking for the time being. However do not banish your emotions permanently, for as will be seen, they play a later part in idea production.

Reasoning as such is seldom a process of following a straight line to an objective. The thinker goes off on many a tangent, rejecting one hypothesis after another before he hits upon the right one. New ideas are not generated in a vacuum without relation to existing ideas and conclusions about a subject. It is not true that thinking is consciously creating, producing concepts and ideas out of nothing. To think, you recall everything you know about the subject in hand, ransack your memory, collect and review all the relevant facts from any source that bear upon it. Only as you explore and put together this and that combination, do you see new relationships that point the way to new conceptions.

We all have smiled at stories like the one about the sound effects expert in a broadcasting studio who was having trouble simulating the noise made by an egg beater until he listened to the office simpleton’s suggestion, “Why not get an egg beater and work it?” Often the obvious answer is the right one. At least it should not be overlooked or spurned. But more often, a great deal of hard work comes first.

In business organizations, a strong idea-producing pro­cedure is the conference, because it brings together persons with a common interest and objective. It also takes away the resistance to new ideas because all of the leaders partici­pate in evolving them. This gives a new idea a better chance of acceptance and co-operation.

Obviously the conference pools the experiences, abilities and education of the conference group. By discussion and rubbing one thought against another, it starts flashes of insight which would not occur if each person tried to go it alone.

Many firms now hold regular conferences, brainstorming sessions and discussion groups for the purpose of initiating new and better ideas for business success. Ideas thrown into the free association methods of such sessions do often border on the absurd, but even so, they loosen up the mind, abolish tension, develop a relaxed state, and when con­ducted in the right spirit, do produce unusual results from which may or may not be reclaimed ideas of value. But for the most part this book will discuss what you, by yourself, can do to develop ideas.