photo courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/jckhamken
post by Mitch W. Steel
here’s a quote I’m rather fond of… It rephrases the age old proverb, “necessity is the mother of invention” to “necessity isn’t the mother of invention – invention is.”
Napoleon Hill wrote the all-time classic personal development book, Think and Grow Rich. The book is based on his 20-year study of the greatest minds of his time, including Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. He discovered from this exercise that there human creativity took basically two different forms – synthetic imagination and creative vision.
Synthetic imagination joins your pre-existing ideas, your concepts and your products and transforms them into something completely different, into a completely new form or a new, unanticipated solution to a problem. Very little of what is created today is absolutely original – from scratch, if you will. In fact, many of our greatest inventions are based upon the concept of synthetic imagination. Perhaps that is what Isaac Newton said when he attributed his greatest discoveries to the ability to “stand on the shoulders of giants.”
Really when you consider it further necessity, in reality, is the GRANDMOTHER of invention.
For example, the garbage can. Yes, the lowly, smelly garbage can. The original intent of the garbage can was to have a receptacle to place the garbage collected during the course of a week in your household. A simple enough need.
Soon, the garbage bag was invented. One invention – the garbage can – spawned yet another invention, the garbage BAG. This, in a nutshell, is synthetic imagination. In other words, this is simply a creative way to combine two pre-existing ideas or inventions.
The second type of creativity is creative vision. *more* »
Image courtesy Flickr by pmuellr
