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.

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.