The legendary career of inventor Thomas Alva Edison illustrates how creativity can be cultivated by anyone, in any industry. His work methods reveal that the true keys to unlocking creativity are learned traits namely perseverance and an open-minded approach to learning. A shrewd businessman, Edison used his creativity not only in developing new inventions but also in bringing them to market and winning out financially over competitors.
Edison was granted 1,093 patents for inventions that ranged from the lightbulb, typewriter, electric pen, phonograph, motion picture camera and alkaline storage battery—to the talking doll and a concrete house that could be built in one day from a cast-iron mold. When he died in 1931, he left 3500 notebooks which are preserved today in the temperature-controlled vaults of the West Orange Laboratory Archives at the Edison National Historic Site in New Jersey.
The notebooks read like a turbulent brainstorm and present a verbal and visual biography of Edison’s mind at work. Spanning most of his six-decade career, the notebooks are yielding fresh clues as to how Edison, who had virtually no formal education, could achieve such an astounding inventive record that is still unrivaled. The notebooks illustrate how Edison conceived his ideas from their earliest inceptions and show in great detail how he developed and implemented them.
1. QUANTITY. For starters, Edison believed to discover a good idea you had to generate many ideas. Out of quantity comes quality. He set idea quotas for all his workers. His own quota was one minor invention every 10 days and a major invention every six months. It took over 50,000 experiments to invent the alkaline storage cell battery and 9000 to perfect the lightbulb. Edison looked at creativity as simply good, honest, hard work. Genius, he once said, is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration. For every brilliant idea he had there was a dud like the horse-drawn contraption that would collect snow and ice in the winter and compress it into blocks that families could use in the summer as a refrigerant, or the perpetual cigar which consisted of a hollow tube with a spring clip that moved tobacco forward as it burned. Although the cigar was a marketing failure, its companion product, the cigar lighter, was a marketing success.
Increasing your idea production requires conscious effort. Suppose I asked you to spend three minutes thinking of alternative uses of for the common brick. No doubt, you would come up with some, but my hunch is not very many. The average adult comes up with three to six ideas. However, if I asked you to list 40 uses for the brick as fast as you can you would have quite a few in a short period of time.
A specific quota focuses your energy in a competitive way that guarantees fluency and flexibility of thought. To meet the quota, you find yourself listing all the usual uses for a brick (build a wall, fireplace, outdoor barbeque, and so on) as well as listing everything that comes to mind (anchor, projectiles in riots, ballast, device to hold down newspaper, a tool for leveling dirt, material for sculptures, doorstop and so on) as we stretch our imagination to meet the quota. By causing us to exert effort, it allows us to generate more imaginative alternatives than we otherwise would.
Initial ideas are usually poorer in quality than later ideas. Just as water must run from a faucet for a while to be crystal- clear, cool and free of particles, so thought must flow before it becomes creative. Early ideas are usually not true ideas. Exactly why this is so is not known, but one hypothesis is that familiar and safe responses lie closest to the surface of our consciousness and therefore are naturally thought of first. Creative thinking depends on continuing the flow of ideas long enough to purge the common, habitual ones and produce the unusual and imaginative.
To prove this to yourself, try the following exercise. Following is a list of five words. Write the first association that occurs to you for each word. Now do this five more times and for each time write an association that is different from the association you gave the same word on the previous occasions.
Fish
Military
Government
Ocean
Automobile
You will note that the latter associations are much more original and unique than the earlier ones. The first responses are the common, dominant associations you have for that word. By arranging to give responses that are not common or dominant, there is an increase in originality and imaginativeness of the responses.
A way to guarantee productivity of your creative thought is to give yourself an idea quota. For example, an idea quota of 40 ideas if you’re looking for ideas alone or a quota 120 ideas if a group is brainstorming for ideas. By forcing yourself to come up with 40 ideas, you put your internal critic on hold and write everything down, including the obvious and weak. The first third will be the same-old, same-old ideas you always get. The second third will be more interesting and the last third will show more insight, curiosity and complexity.
This article describes one of Edison’s creative thinking habits. Additional Edison habits will be published in future blogs.
Michael Michalko is a highly acclaimed creativity expert. To learn about him visit: https://imagineer7.wordpress.com/about-michael-michalko/
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