Where did all these ideas come from?

Over the past year, this barbecue restaurant named The Lancet has exploded the circle of friends and become a "5A-level scenic spot" for medical students to come to Beijing.

This store is run by more than a dozen doctoral alumni who graduated from Tsinghua, Peking University, and its clients are mainly doctors. They named the shop after the scalpel "The Lancet", and stipulated that the first author or correspondent of SCI, SSCI and CSSCI (I don't know what it is, but the published articles can be retrieved, which is quite remarkable) will have preferential treatment in the shop in the past five years. This move attracted the editors of The Lancet, a top medical magazine, to admire the creativity of these young doctors.

Come to think of it, from naming to positioning to activities, this store is very eye-catching and I really want to try it.

How did such a good idea come about? Why is it often difficult for us to come up with a good idea when we encounter problems? How can we find creativity in our daily work like these excellent doctors?

While listening to the manuscript recently, I came across a book, Creative Man, published by Taiwan Province writer Zhan Hongzhi at 1986. This book is out of print. I found the only one with a high price on the second-hand books on the Internet. It's thin, the typesetting is a bit messy and the binding is not good. After reading it all morning, I can't help but suddenly realize that the original ideas that make us marvel at the wide opening of our brains actually have rules to follow.

The author Zhan Hongzhi is a well-known writer, editor, publisher and filmmaker in Taiwan Province Province, all of whom are highly creative. The book "Creative Man" is a set of principles and methods that the author summarizes his years of creative work experience and digs out behind creativity, and tells readers in plain language supplemented by a large number of cases.

In The Creator, Zhan Hongzhi divides the sources of creativity into four categories: invention, combination, deformation and symbol; The technical factors that affect creativity can be summarized into three types: straightforwardness, straightforwardness and contrarian psychology. Finally, the methods of cultivating creative thinking ability are put forward. To sum up, read thousands of books, take the Wan Li road, accumulate knowledge and experience, and then change the way of thinking, mobilize these knowledge and experience to stimulate creativity.

We really can't deny the existence of creative genius, but for ordinary people, it is out of reach. Therefore, we are more concerned about whether there are any laws behind this that can be mastered through learning. Author Zhan Hongzhi classifies creativity. He believes that most creativity in our life can actually be divided into the following four categories: invention, combination, transformation and symbol.

The so-called invention is an idea from scratch, such as four great inventions of ancient china, papermaking, compass, gunpowder and printing. The author believes that although this kind of idea seems to be a flash in the dark, it has actually been bred in my mind for a long time before it appeared, but at that moment, the quantitative change has changed qualitatively and jumped out of my mind.

Combination, simply put, is to combine two unrelated things. For example, the combination of black tea and milk is milk tea, and the combination of making a phone call and walking produces a mobile phone. But not only two things can be combined. Maybe it will make a joke. Only by clarifying the relationship between different things can we combine ideas.

Deformation is to look at familiar things from a broader perspective, which is often used in business development of enterprises. For example, a company's initial business was limited to selling mobile phones on the Internet. If it expands its perspective and can sell all electronic products, it can be a full-category e-commerce.

Finally, all symbols, such as sound, words, colors and lines, are used to convey creativity. For example, the Logo of many enterprises tells us what it does in a graphic way, and another example is Gong Linna's Divine Comedy "Uneasy", which is the creativity of using sound.

The next time you see an advertisement in the video, you will see the Logo in the store when you are shopping, and the public service poster at the station when you are waiting for the bus. Try to classify it and guess how it is made.

There are many factors that affect creativity, such as society, personality and technology. If a society overemphasizes authority and attacks innovation, everyone's creativity in society will be hindered. In addition, psychologists have found that stubborn and inflexible people often lack creativity, while lively and curious people are often more creative. The technical factor here refers to a person's cognition of things, and wrong cognition will also affect the creation of creativity. The first two factors have great influence on creativity, but they are not easy to change. For individuals, the only way to improve their creativity is to change technology, that is, to change their cognition of things.

There are three technical factors that affect creativity: straightforwardness, straightforwardness and contrarian psychology.

Genealogists believe that everything has an orthodoxy and cannot cross each other. For example, black tea is black tea and milk is milk. Are they mixed together? No way! According to the bloodline logic, many things in this world will not appear. Walkman, mobile phone, sports earphone, decaffeinated coffee, vegetarian restaurant and so on are all combined products.

Linealists believe that things develop in a straight line in one direction. For example, in recent years, mobile phones have become bigger and bigger, and they will follow this trend in the future. But this is not the case. At some point, it may develop in a new direction. For example, after the development of mobile phones to 5.5 inches, mobile phone manufacturers began to pay attention to thickness. Everyone is no longer competing for size, but who is thinner. This kind of thinking mode of linear people will make them lose the initiative because of wrong trend judgment at the critical moment of things.

Rebellious psychology is a kind of psychology that refuses to change, which will greatly limit a person's creativity, especially in today's era of rapid development of the whole society. Being rebellious will make a person indulge in the past and keep up with the times. The more so, the more difficult it is to understand and accept new things, the more rigid it is, and the more difficult it is to have new ideas.

For creative people, the above three modes of thinking are dangerous and must be abandoned.

In fact, no matter what kind of creativity, it is inseparable from a lot of knowledge and experience. Behind the invention is long-term accumulation, and the combination needs something to group, and deformation and symbols are no exception. Therefore, the first level of training creativity is to accumulate materials. With the material, the next thing to do is to abandon the dangerous thinking mode and change the way of thinking.

The accumulation of materials depends on observation and memory.

Observation ability is not innate and needs long-term conscious practice to master. The author recommends an exercise method called Paris driver training method, which describes the same thing in different ways at first glance. To accomplish this task, you have to force yourself to observe carefully and attentively. We can usually observe the expression of everyone in the office when they are on the phone, waiting for the bus and so on. It may be difficult to practice at first, so you need to remind yourself to enter the state of observation frequently. After the habit is formed, observation becomes a part of life, as natural as eating and sleeping.

After observation, what needs to be done is to record the observed pictures in the form of images. Compared with language memory, image memory can remember more details. For example, leonardo da vinci's painting Mona Lisa is remembered by language as a woman with an elegant sitting posture and a kind smile. The background is a deep landscape, but it is different to remember it with images, except for the image of women, the use of colors, the treatment of sideline and the perspective of the background.

With the material, the next thing to do is to change the way of thinking, mobilize the material in the brain and stimulate creativity. There are many methods provided by the author, such as resisting customary law, science fiction training, redefining training, creative imitation and so on. We take science fiction training as an example.

Create a virtual situation first, and then maximize your imagination. This is how Kafka's novel Metamorphosis begins. Samoza, the protagonist of the novel, is a small clerk. One morning, he woke up and found himself a big reptile. The story begins with this assumption. He misses his family and is willing to give everything for them. However, in the eyes of his family, he was just a bug and was finally tortured to death.

The structure of science fiction can be described in one sentence, that is, if ... the "if" part makes us make all kinds of assumptions that go against nature and common sense, and the "will" part requires us to release our imagination and make all kinds of reasoning. For example, "What would human life be like today without the invention of mobile phones?" "If water resources are exhausted in the future, what will mankind face?"

In fact, there are many ways to change the way of thinking, and these mentioned by the author may not be applicable to everyone. It is important to accept this concept, jump out of the wall of thinking, overcome the misunderstanding of cognition, keep curiosity and sensitivity to things, and then force yourself to practice and practice a lot.