Cracking Creativity

Strategic Next Actions

Acknowledge that, at its core, Involgize will always be about teaching others how to think (think strategically).
Acknowledge that, over the years, you have been reading as an effective way to learn how to think brilliantly.
Acknowledge that it’s through thinking that we gain access to the full power of the universe (As a Man Thinketh).
Re-acknowledge that note-taking is a prerequisite for learning (thinking).
Continue to create book reviews that will accelerate a person’s learning (thinking) process.
Continue to build a digital 2^nd and 3^rd Brain in order to, easily, become a Genius (develop an exceptional intellectual ability).
Continue to assist others to build a 2^nd Brain so that they can easily become Geniuses.
Continue to inspire others to be consistent and relentless in order to manifest their true Genius.
Continue to encourage others to read afro-centric books to increase their ability to carry out critical analysis.
Remember to read one of Octavia Butler’s novels for new ideas, perspectives, and to develop your imagination.
Continue to separate yourself from others in order to not affect their lives and personal choices.
Attend art museums to add to your sources of creative inspiration.
Attend art museums to experiment with the development of Involgize’s brand image.
Continue to seek and discover books that will radically enhance and challenge our strategic thinking ability.

Strategic Learning Points

Everything seem to come back down to thinking. Whether it’s the book “How to Take Smart Notes,” or “Building a Second Brain,” or “Is Your Genius at Work?,” or “Psycho-Cybernetics,” or “The Magic of Thinking Big” or “Brit-ish,” and now “Cracking Creativity,” everything is about what enables a person to generate and apply the highest quality thoughts (ideas and stories). This makes perfect sense in light of books such as “As a Man Thinketh.” So in essence, this tells me that Involgize should be all about thinking. Specifically, it is about thinking strategically or strategic thinking. All my body of work appears to confirm that I was right to focus on learning how to become more strategic over time, as the best way to achieve mastering-self.
This book separates creativity from intelligence, arguing that they are different entirely. I don’t know if I agree. I would argue creativity is a form of intelligence among many other forms of intelligences. I think the point the writer was attempting to, actually, make was that creativity is not dependent on a person’s ability reason logically (intellect). A person can be highly logical, yet creatively impaired. Nonetheless, the overlapping and interplay of different intelligence is not to be easily overlooked. As pointed out in “How to Take Smart Notes” the intellectual exercise of note-taking or sketching would seem to be what underpins the development of advance levels of creative genius also.
This text really make it clear that a major deficiency of the current education system is that is does not teach students how to think for themselves (how to think independently) very well. To the extent that many would argue that this is deliberate, and the very nature of its design. The result is that I feel that we (Involgize) can, easily, out teach the education system. And, after spending years putting material together, we could achieve this result very quickly.
“It is the willingness to explore all approaches that is important, even after one has found a promising one.” In other words, we must have a process where we are always experimenting (questioning and testing what we think we know) and setting out to improve and be more effective. As this will inevitably leads to us coming up with new ideas and powerful ways of thinking that will take our abilities to a supernatural level. This book seems to be arguing that this is the only real difference between those who are called Geniuses as a result, and everybody else.
It’s all about being able to see the same information as everybody else, yet see something completely different.
Understanding a strategy is useless because real learning takes place, only, when the knowledge is actively applied.
This text makes reference to how renown creative geniuses used images or visual aids to become highly creative. In other words, they combined their Sebek and Het-Heru. Nonetheless, this was combined with their immense productivity. There is no way around the requirement to produce a substantial body of work. As is often said, however, if you find what you love doing (your genius), you will never work another day in your life. It seems to all becoming clearer and clearer by the day. We can choose to become Geniuses in our own right, or we can let the society (those around us) stop us from fulfilling our full potential. It that simple!
Being a Genius is all about being able to do things that will come easily to a person who has built a Second Brain: “Connecting the Unconnected. If one particular style of thought stands out for creative geniuses, it is the ability to make juxtapositions that elude mere mortals.” This would suggest that the building of a Second Brain is an easy why for a person to develop an exceptional intellectual ability (which is consistent with my personal experience).
This text support the conclusion that I have been drawing with Involgize and Involgize Capital: what we actually think about is of secondary importance. The most significant thing is knowing how to think in a certain way. If we know how to read strategically (1000+ books), and build thinking systems (2nd, 3rd, and 4th Brains), we won’t have to think too much about what we become or where all of this will lead too. What is clear is that this process alone will make us become phenomenal (as confirmed by the seventeen Nobel Prize laureates trained between J. J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford). It may all be about being able to teach others how to think!
“On the other hand, Darwin was willing to disregard what past thinkers thought and was willing to entertain different perspectives and different theories to see where they would lead.” This makes me think of the importance of reading afro-centric books because they purposely critique the dominant euro-centric perspectives. If we want to be able to disregard past thinkers to entertain different views and ideas to see where they would lead, then reading books written by afro-centric scholars is a, strategically, easy way to achieve this.
It’s extremely important to realise the following: “most people process the same information over and over until proven wrong, without searching for alternatives.” Therefore, arguably, it is madness to expect the majority of people to change or want to transform. It may be best, rather, to let them get on with whatever, and just fully focus on creating the changes that we would like to see (head-down, distraction free).
This review has just reminded me to not forget to read one of Octavia Butler’s novels concerning alternative imaginative ideas and afro-futurism.
Reading this book enable me to see that when I want creative ideas I have several strategies. Either I go within myself to tap into my spiritual consciousness, watch films or TV series, listen to inspiring music, tap into the frequency of my favourite artists and intellectuals, read books about marketing and branding, and so on. Whilst in Washington DC a few weeks ago, I wanted to add attending art museums to my sources of creative influence. However, I did not manage to get around to it.
I think it was important for my overall personal development that I discovered a book like this exists. And I was able to also make others aware of its existence. As, ultimately, this book helps me to be able to better teach others how to use strategic reading to learn how to think brilliantly. It may, truly, be my responsibility to teach others how to think in a certain way in order to encourage widespread change.

Key Strategic Sentences and Paragraphs from ‘Cracking Creativity’

Introduction

“The goal of this book is to describe these thinking strategies and show how we can apply them to become more creative in our work and personal life (p. 6).”

“Genius is not about scoring 1600 on the SATs, mastering ten languages at the age of seven, finishing the New York Times crossword in record time, having an extraordinarily high IQ, or even about being smart. After a considerable debate in the sixties, initiated by J. P. Guilford, a leading psychologist who called for a scientific focus on creativity, psychologists reached the conclusion that creativity is not the same as intelligence. An individual can be far more creative than he or she is intelligent, or far more intelligent than creative (p. 6).”

“In contrast, geniuses think productively, not reproductively. When confronted with a problem, they ask themselves how many different ways they can look the problem, how they can rethink it, and how many different ways they can solve it, instead of asking how they have been taught to solve it (p. 7).”

“It is the willingness to explore all approaches that is important, even after one has found a promising one (p. 8).”

“Geniuses, on the other hand, subvert habituation by actively looking for alternative ways to look at and think about things (p. 9).”

“Reproductive thinking leads us to the usual ideas and not to original ones. If you always think the way you’ve always thought, you’ll always get what you’ve always got — the same old, same old ideas (p. 10).”

“We all have a rich repertoire of ideas and concepts based on past experiences that enable us to survive and prosper. But without any provision for the variation of ideas, our usual ideas become stagnate and lose their advantages, and in the end, we are defeated in our competition with our rivals. Consider the following: (p. 11).”

“An important aspect of this theory is that you need some means of producing variation in your ideas and that for this variation to be truly effective it must be “blind.” Blind variation implies a departure from reproductive (retained) knowledge (p. 12).”

“Similarly, the techniques in this book change the way you think by focusing your attention in different ways and giving you different ways to interpret what you focus on. The techniques will allow you to look at the same information as everyone else and see something different (p. 14).”

“It is not enough to understand the strategies. To create original ideas and creative solutions, you must use the techniques (p. 14).”

“… as, for instance, in the renowned diagrams of da Vinci and Galileo. Galileo revolutionized science by making his thought visible with diagrams, maps, and drawings while his contemporaries used conventional mathematical and verbal approaches (p. 16).”

“He thought in terms of visual and spatial forms, rather than thinking along purely mathematical or verbal lines of reasoning. In fact, he believed that words and numbers, as they are written or spoken, did not play a significant role in his thinking process (p. 16).”

“Thinking Fluently. A distinguishing characteristic of genius is immense productivity (p. 17).”

“… a genius is constantly combining and recombining ideas, images, and thoughts into different combinations in their conscious and subconscious minds (p. 18).”

“Connecting the Unconnected. If one particular style of thought stands out for creative geniuses, it is the ability to make juxtapositions that elude mere mortals (p. 18).”

“Finding What You Are Not Looking For. Whenever we attempt something and fail, we end up doing something else. As simplistic as this statement may seem, it is the first principle of creative accident (p. 19).”

“When you find something interesting, drop everything else and study it (p. 20).”

“Creative geniuses are geniuses because they know “how” to think instead of “what” to think (p. 20).”

“Sociologist Harriet Zuckerman published an interesting study of the Nobel Prize winners who were living in the United States in 1977. She discovered that six of Enrico Fermi’s students won the prize. Ernest Lawrence and Niels Bohr each had four students who won them. J. J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford between them trained seventeen Nobel laureates (p. 20).”

“This was no accident. It is obvious that these Nobel laureates were not only creative in their own right, but were also able to teach others how to think (p. 20).”

“Zuckerman’s subjects testified that their influential masters taught them different thinking styles and strategies, rather than what to think. If you have the intention of becoming more creative in your work and personal life and apply the thinking strategies in this book, you will become more creative. You may not become another da Vinci or Einstein, but you will become much more creative than someone without the intention or knowledge (p. 20).”

Afterword

Strategy One: Knowing How to See

“So the guy [Gould] who had the intelligence, knowledge, and the expertise didn’t see the differences, and the guy with far less …. Darwin came up with the idea because he was a productive thinker (p. 328).”

“He generated a multiplicity of perspectives and theories. Gould would compare new ideas and theories with his existing patterns of experience (p. 328).”

“On the other hand, Darwin was willing to disregard what past thinkers thought and was willing to entertain different perspectives and different theories to see where they would lead (p. 329).”

“Consequently, we tend to process information the same way over and over again instead of searching for alternatives (p. 329).”

“We are fairly happy with the results, and the television campaign seems to work. Are we going to check out other ideas that we don’t think will be as good or better? Are we likely to explore alternative ways to advertise our product? Probably not (p. 329).”

“The profound discovery Watson made was that most people process the same information over and over until proven wrong, without searching for alternatives, even when there is no penalty for asking questions that give them a negative answer (p. 330).”

“Creative geniuses don’t think this way. The creative genius will always look for alternative ways to think about a subject. Even when the old ways are well established, the geniuses will invent new ways of thinking. If something doesn’t work, they look at it several different ways until they find a new line of thought. It is this willingness to entertain different perspectives and alternative ideas that broadens their thinking and opens them up to new information and the new possibilities that the rest of us don’t see (p. 330).”

“In summary, creative geniuses are productive thinkers. To change the way you think and become a more productive thinker, you need to learn how to think like a genius. When you need original ideas or creative solutions for your business and personal problems, you need to… (p. 330).”

“•Produce variation in your ideas by incorporating random, chance, or unrelated factors (p. 331).”

“It is my hope that the strategies in this book will show you how to look for different ways to think about your problems. When you do that, you will rethink the way you see things, and you, like the Chinese villagers, will see what is right before your eyes (p. 331).”

IVG (Involgize)