Zig Zag

When great designers think outside the box, what they're really doing is wearing the glasses of totally different disciplines

You're set up to fail if you spend all your time chasing the answer to the wrong questio

s. If you spend too much time thinking about your list, your conscious mind will start to censor the ideas, and you'll get only ideas that are “sensible”—rather than surprising and original

Try Ten Questions
Write down ten different formulations of your problem, all in one sitting. Try to make them as different as possible from each other. It's important to do this quickly, without taking a break, because working fast will force your unconscious mind to generate an odder, more intriguing mix of ideas

To the contrary: studies of creativity show that it rarely arrives as a single brilliant idea. Rather, creative solutions to life's problems are lit by many small creative sparks—what Virginia Woolf described as “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark

When you begin to master the eight steps, you'll start to zig and zag

. Mastering the discipline of asking means you're always looking for good problems, always seeking new inspiration

3.Look. You are constantly, quietly aware

4.Play. The creative life is filled with play—the kind of unstructured activity that children engage in for the sheer joy of it. You free your mind for imagination and fantasy

.Learn. In a creative life, you're constantly learning, practicing, mastering, becoming an expert. You seek out knowledge not only in formal classrooms but also from mentors, experts, books, magazines, film, Web sites, nature, music, art, philosophy, science