The Opposite Strategy – Using Paradoxes to Generate Crazy Ideas
“If wool shrinks when you wash it, why don’t sheep get smaller when it rains?” ― Ron Brackin...
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Tag: creativity
The Pharmacy Store and Rubbing Alcohol – A Lesson on Looking for Things That Dont Make Sense
A pharmacy store was looking at their sales data for their retail products and saw an unusual...
Read MoreThe Forest and the Tree Strategy for Generating Ideas
Although I call this the Forest and the Tree Strategy, I learned about this strategy for generating ideas from Edward de Bono in his excellent book Serious Creativity. The strategy is simply this: any time you want to generate...
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The Reversal Technique for Creative Breakthroughs
One of my favourite topics is creativity. But not just creativity in general, but specific...
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Look ma, life’s easy! What I learned about leading an easy life from Ernie Zelinski
Ernie Zelinski is another author that I am glad I discovered. I remember it was through a chance...
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How to ‘kick’ start your creativity (or what I learned from Roger von Oech a creativity consultant)
The ‘kick’ is a reference to Roger von Oech’s book A kick in the seat of the...
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Ten ways to inject creativity into your life
Recently, I was introduced to Michael Michalko and Roger von Oech who both have written a number...
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10 ways to inject creativity and ‘new’ into your life
As some of you know, I recently read Tom Peter’s The Brand You and one of the chapters was...
Read MoreHow to become a better lateral thinker or what I learned from Edward de Bono
I can’t remember how I discovered lateral thinking puzzles but I do remember why I became fascinated with them – often the puzzles revealed an underlying assumption that was made without us knowing about it which, when actually challenged, would reveal the solution to the puzzle. Here’s an example problem – see if you can […]
Read MoreTen things I do to get ideas, inspire creativity and get through writer’s block
A lot of the times, I get stuck, creatively. I reach for ideas that do not magically appear. I stare at blank slides or word documents, struggling for ideas. After a while of staring blankly, I realized that this was not productive so I started to study how others around me ‘inspire’ creativity. I tried […]
Read MoreThree incredible ideas I learned from Seth Godin
Seth Godin, the legendary marketer, podcaster, best selling author and man extraordinaire is my hero. To be honest, when I first heard about Seth, I wanted to dislike him. I refused to read his books. I refused to subscribe to his e-mail list. I just did not want to like him. But then I started […]
Read MoreRe-thinking the education system – what basic skills should everyone have?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the education system lately – as some of you know, I’m the co-host of the Remix Podcast with Shawn Kanungo and one of our recent episodes talked about how schools trained people to be followers and I thought that school should be teaching students to be leaders, to understand […]
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