At this point, I should mention that Einstein said, "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources," but I'll share nonetheless.

One of the secrets to our success was the relationships we retained with freelance toy designers, one of whom was a former Muppeteer who had worked for the late Jim Henson.

Perhaps this creative peer is the person most responsible for helping me understand that Absolute Creativity is really about asking the right questions.

Consider the reflections he shared during one of our brainstorming sessions about his experience as an undergraduate student at an internationally prestigious art school:

"Some of the teachers could be really nasty when reviewing a student's work. So much so that many students broke down and cried during harsh critiques. Some quit all together. I was never really thrown by an instructor's emotional tirades. Instead, I would let them finish their outburst, then calmly ask them to explain specifically what it was about the colors or shading that were *%#@ wrong. Like electrical engineers searching to separate the noise from the signal, I would separate the emotions from the facts, and then I'd go back and address those factual elements. I would come back to class and say, 'Here. Does the shading work now?' Often I would find that my work advanced to another level as a result from going back to find and tweak the signal. More than anything, school taught me how to ask questions like, 'Does it work? If not, what do I need to do to make it work?' and 'Can I make it work better?' and so on."

Over time, I searched to distill the Muppeteer's creative questioning into a binomial set of questions, a set of either-ors that added to a summation greater than itself; inseparable, yet ever contrasting, which would hint at the necessity of creative tension.

Thus, the Theory of Absolute Unlimited Creativity can be boiled down to two simple, perpetual questions:

• Does it work? and
• How can we make it work better?

With the worst case scenario, "Nothing works and nothing can make it work." Then at least the process of observation is working. At a minimum, the workings of our observations help us understand/recognize that we really need to find other venues and start on a process of improvement.

This is why Einstein stated, "Imagination is more important than knowledge," since even if we know nothing to work, we need to be able to explore dreams of what it would be like if we knew what working could/might be like. Legend has it that Einstein's E=mc2 was started when he wondered about what it would be like at the tip of a beam of light speeding through the universe. Comedian Steven Wright used dry delivery to the same line of thinking. "If you were driving your car at the speed of light and you turned your head lights on, do you think you'd see anything?"

There are times when we may be asking the wrong questions. Many a motivational expert can be found saying: "The human mind answers any question we pose to it; just keep asking the question and the answers will appear; its only a matter of time; what we think about expands; ultimately we get the answers to what we think about; ask 'why am I a jerk' and we'll find the evidence; like attracts like; where energy goes, energy flows."

"Be careful what we ask for since we might get it," is an age-old reminder to ask the right questions. I remember hearing a story about a man who kept asking the Universe to make him a millionaire. Over and over, he held out his financial request until finally he got what he sought, but only after suffering from a horrible accident where he became crippled.

Tony Robbins tells the story of a Nazi concentration camp survivor who asked the question, "How do I get out of here today?" He kept repeating the question until he found the answer: by stripping naked and burrowing himself deep into a pile of dead bodies laying on a truck bed about to transport them to a mass grave for burial outside the camp grounds.

Gordon Liddy once told the story about how to survive prison by asking the right internal questions. He soon realized that the ability to type was a valuable skill, which promptly landed him an office job with access to stationary and a typewriter. A note was somehow devised and posted to a bathroom stall: "Warning: this stall quarantined for those new prisoners suspected of being contagious with a fatal strand of hepatitis." When Liddy was the only one using that stall, others dropped back to give the man room.

Asking the right question is half of the creative truth. The other half is the quality of the care and feeding along the path of questioning. Together they spin the journey from not working to working, and from working to working better.

During a conversation with a programmer who reviewed only the introductory sections of this book, he stated, "Now, if you could think of a way to deliver creativity all at once, rather than by the rote iteration of the compass, that would be news!"

The answer is yes, we can have creativity at any time, all at once, by asking this question: "What can I do to make it work better?" To really hit it home, add the word "now!" Keep asking earnestly and you'll get answers.

PS - One can always hire creative consultants to add spice to insight, intensity and momentum!   top