Cultivate Your Imagination

“3 qualities are essential to an inventor:

1: Be persistent
2: Cultivate your imagination
3: Look for analogies

There is no logical way to invention.”

–Thomas Edison*

When my kids were little, they attended Bing Nursery School, a cutting edge pre-school on Stanford’s campus that hasn’t changed much in nearly 60 years. I learned a lot watching the teachers interact with the children.

One of the early lessons I gleaned from these masterful instructors was, “Instead of answering a question, encourage a child to explore answers.” So for example, if a child asks, “Why is the sky blue?” instead of citing something about water (my own knowledge of that particular matter basically ends there…), respond by asking, “Why do you think it’s blue?”

It may appear to be a noncommittal way of putting someone off, but I watched many times as such tactics developed a child’s capacity for wonder. What a fantastic accomplishment.

You can actually train someone’s imagination by forcing them to use it.

Imagination is so abstract that most people don’t think of developing it. I may be biased, but I’m a big believer in a growth mindset, and operating under the belief that you can actually train your brain to get better at achieving such objectives.

Inspired by our friend Dan Klein, at the d.school, we do a fun improv-inspired warm-up called “Oh good!” The premise is simple: a small group gets together and each person gives another person a gift. The recipient has to receive the gift with the phrase, “Oh good!…” and then proceed to say why it’s exactly what they wanted.

We do a round like that, without further instruction, and then we add a wrinkle: in the next round, the gifts have to be objectively “bad”: a used tissue, a broken paperclip, a discarded pipe cleaner, etc. It’s almost universally surprising to folks that this round results in much more creative outcomes!

For objectively “bad” gifts, it’s easy to say why it’s a bad idea. But looking for possibilities results in unexpected delights — laughter, and hidden possibilities. They discover that when they force themselves to find the good, it’s an opportunity to flex their imagination!

In a class of executives last week, several folks observed, “I’m surprised I actually got better with practice.” As if it’s not possible to train your imagination!

There’s a lot of evidence that deliberately exerting effort — attending to what you’re looking at with the expectation of relevance — goes a long way to finding unexpected connections and uncovering possibilities. Even deliberately looking at nothing can strengthen the imagination, when mindfully employed as a strategy.

*As quoted in French Strother, 'The Modern Profession of Inventing', World's Work and Play (Jul 1905), 6, No. 32, 186

Related: Train Your Brain
Related: Look At Nothing
Related: Look For Connections
Related: Look For What’s Right

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