Imagineering: How to Profit from Your Creative Powers

The person who knows how to create good, new ideas and turn them into realities is the one who will prosper no matter what the future brings; in this book the reader will find valuable, practical techniques for generating new ideas and turning them into successful realities. Our education system helps us to learn facts, analyze, evaluate and critique but seldom helps us develop our creative abilities. We have two minds with the left brain thinking in terms of symbols and words used for logic, judgement, speaking, and maths, while the right brain thinks in terms of sensory images and is the source of dreaming, feelings, visualization and intuition. Creative thinking requires coordinating and using both sides of the brain as flashes of insight are right-brain but analyzing insights is left-brain. Highly creative people rely heavily on the intuitive left brain; Einstein relied heavily on visual thinking to transform thoughts into equations. If we divide our mental abilities into four functions - observe and call attention; memorize and recall; analyze and judge; and generate new ideas, foresee and visualize the non-existent - our educational system develops abilities in the first three left brain categories while neglecting the fourth right brain category. The challenge today is to develop right brain thinking to take advantage of computer technology. Great thinkers seldom have an original thought; most plagiarize nature, books and others ideas. There is nothing new under the sun; creativity is mixing old things in new ways. Dale Carnegie used Socrates, Chesterfield and Jesus. Creative people make an asset of being a nonexpert, are motivated by need, feel free to fantasize, work hard to obtain their ideas and then promote them, make things as simple as possible, realize that everything can be done better, are not restricted by age or gender, take time to innovate, dream, plan and calculate how to turn ideas into realities, do not worry what others think, tread in areas where they have no credentials, are not discouraged by bureaucracy, discord, opinions and beliefs. Success is never final; failure is never fatal. New ideas come to those who decide what they want, have self-discipline and are determined to control their own destiny. Putting a man on the moon was an example of a pipe dream which generated millions of ideas but it was based on written goals, broken into manageable categories with specific and measurable results within an agreed time frame and with a clear vision and definition of success. There are five stages to creativity - the desire to create; information gathering; incubation; illumination; refinement and verification. After immersing yourself in information, ideas incubate until a new insight pops into the mind as with gravity and Newton's apple or Darwin's evolution. While this all sounds very easy, there are techniques for generating and capturing new ideas, determining whether you have a good idea and turning an idea into an i