Creative Thinkering by Michael Michalko

I finished this book in January 2026. I recommend this book 9/10.

Why you should read this book:

This is a great book if you are looking for tools to look at your problem or even the world in a different light. The book contains many great examples and ways to come up with new ideas.

Get your copy here.

🚀 The book in three sentences

1. You can change how you look at things

2. Combine words and professions

3. Have Idea boards and create happiness

📝 My notes and thoughts

• Pxxi. Take two ideas, and your imagination will fill the rest.

• P7. Even when we actively seek information to test our ideas to see if we are right, we usually ignore paths that might lead us to discover alternatives. This is because educators discouraged us from looking for alternatives to the prevailing wisdom. The following is an interesting experiment, originally conducted by the British psychologist Peter Wason, that demonstrates our tendency not to seek alternatives. Wason would present subjects with the following triad of three numbers in sequence: 2, 4, 6. He would then ask subjects to write other examples of triads that follow the number rule and explain the number rule for the sequence. The subjects could ask as many questions as they wished without penalty. He found that almost invariably people would initially offer the numbers "4, 6, 8" or "20, 22, 24" or some similar sequence. And Wason would say, yes, that is an example of the number rule. Then they would offer something like "32, 34, 36" or "50, 52, 54" and so on—all numbers increasing by two. After a few tries and getting affirmative answers each time, they would become confident that the rule involved numbers increasing by two, without exploring alternative possibilities. Actually, the rule Wason was looking for is much simpler—it entails numbers merely increasing. Examples of valid sequences could be "1,2,3" or "10, 20, 40" or "400, 678, 10,944." And testing such an alternative would be easy. All the subjects would have had to do was offer Wason a sequence like "1,2,3" to test it, and it would have been affirmed. Or subjects could have thrown out any series of numbers—for example, "5,4,3" —to see if this elicited a positive or negative answer. And that information would have told them a lot about whether their guess about the rule was correct. The profound discovery Wason made was that most people progress the same information over and over until proven wrong, without searching for alternatives, even when there is no penalty for asking questions that give them a negative answer. Incredibly, in his hundred experiments, he never had an instance in which someone spontaneously offered an alternative hypothesis to find out if it was true. In short, his subjects didn't even try to find out if there was a simpler, or even another, rule.

• P10. It can help looking at things upside down at times.

• P17. Ask Chat GPT: What are the "two items" I need to solve the business problem I'm dealing with right now?

• P26. Jake Ritty's invention is another example of conceptually blending two elements from unrelated fields into an insightful solution. In 1879, Jake, a restaurant owner, was traveling by ship to Europe. During the voyage, the passengers took a tour of the ship. In the engine room, Jake was captivated by the machine that recorded the number of times the ship's propeller rotated. What he saw in this machine was the idea of "a machine that counts." Ritty was thinking inclusively. His goal was to make his work as a restaurant owner easier and more profitable. Looking at his world, he examined it for patterns and for analogies to what he already knew. When he saw in the engine room the machine that counted the number of times a ship's propeller rotated, he asked, "How would the process of mechanically counting something make my restaurant more profitable?" A mental spark jumped from his thinking about the ship to his thinking about his restaurant business when he conceptually combined a machine that counts propeller rotations with counting money. He was so excited by his insight that he caught the next ship home to work on his invention. Back in Ohio, using the same principles that went into the design of the ship's machine, he made a machine that could add items and record the amounts. This hand-operated machine, which he started using in his restaurant, was the first cash register.

• P29. How are industrial management techniques related to heart bypass surgery? Heart surgeons in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont reduced the death rate among their heart bypass patients ty one-fourth by incorporating the business management techniques of W Edwards Deming, a leading industrial consultant. His technique emphasized teamwork and cooperation over competition. Doctors usually function as individual craftspeople without sharing information. Following Deming's industrial model, they began to operate as teams, visiting and observing each other and sharing information about how they practiced.

• P43. When Henry Ford decided to build automobiles, he didn't think of how cars are manufactured. He thought of essences. He looked at "how things are made" and "how things are taken apart." Among these many experiences was his visit to a slaughterhouse, where he watched how workers slaughtered pigs. Conceptually blending the slaughterhouse method of disassembling pigs with assembling cars, he created the concept of the assembly line that made the Model T possible. The U.S. Postal Service and UPS both worked on the challenge of making overnight deliveries using established systems and theories. They thought logically in terms of packages and points. Say, for instance, that you wanted to connect one hundred markets with one another. With direct point-to-point deliveries, each market would need to ship directly to ninety-nine other markets. Multiply that times one hundred, and you'd be looking at 9,900 direct deliveries. Based on this model, the postal service and UPS concluded that there was no way they could make overnight shipping economically feasible. Fred Smith did not think in terms of delivering packages within established systems. Instead, he perceived the essence of all delivery systems to be "movement." So Smith wondered about the concept of movement and thought about how things are moved from one place to another. He thought about how information is moved, and how banks move money around the world. Both information systems and banks, he discovered, put all points in a network and connect them through a central hub. He decided to create a delivery system—Federal Express, now known as FedEx—that operates essentially the way information and bank clearinghouses do. For any individual transaction, going through a central hub would be absurd—it would mean making at least one extra stop. But if you look at the network as a whole, using a central hub is an efficient way to create an enormous number of connections. To connect the same one hundred markets, it would take at most one hundred deliveries. So you're looking at a system that is about one hundred times efficient. Smith's delivery system is so efficient that the same idea was subsequently employed in, of course, all air cargo delivery systems in the industry.

• P51. A Texas utility company wanted to dramatically reduce its capital equipment costs. Huge power-generating machinery, such as turbines, generators, and boilers, has a life expectancy of thirty-five years. Replacement of large pieces of equipment like this costs thousands of dollars. A team of managers imagined they were a kilowatt traveling through the company's various fossil fuel and nuclear power systems. For three months, they imaginatively traveled through each stage of the process. When they began to understand the complex and diverse levels of durability within the system, they took advantage of them. Rather than replacing whole systems, they developed a plan to replace key constituent parts. This redesigned maintenance plan will drive down the company's equipment costs tenfold or more. Imagine yourself as the subject you are contemplating, or some part of the subject, and try to see the situation from its perspective. This is a favorite technique of T.A. Rich, a famous inventor at General Electric. Suppose you are contemplating installing a swimming pool. Can you imagine yourself as a pool? What perspectives would the pool have about its installation? What recommendations would it make?

• P 58. Lavoie and Joseph Marino, cofounders of Rite-Solutions, did just that when they needed an employee-suggestion system that could harvest ideas from everyone in the company, including engineers, accountants, salespeople, marketing people, and all administrative staff. They wanted a process that would get their employees to creatively invest in the company. The word invest encouraged them to find ways to invest. One association was the New York Stock Exchange. Rite-Solution combined the architecture of the stock exchange with the architecture of an in-house company stock market and created a stock exchange for ideas. The company's internal exchange is called Mutual Fun. In this private exchange, any employee can offer a proposal to create a new product or spin-off, to solve a problem, to acquire new technologies or companies, and so on. These proposals become stocks and are given a ticker symbol identifying the proposal. As reported in the New York Times, "Fifty-five stocks are listed on the company's internal stock exchange. Each stock comes with a detailed description—called an expect-us, as opposed to a prospectus—and begins trading at a price of $10. Every employee gets $10,000 in 'opinion money' to allocate among offerings, and employees signal their enthusiasm by investing in a stock or volunteering to work on the project." The result has been a resounding success. Among the company's core technologies are pattern-recognition algorithms used in military applications, as well as for electronic gambling systems at casinos. An administrative employee with no technical expertise was fascinated with one of the company's existing technologies and spent time thinking about other ways it could be used in schools to create an entertaining way for students to learn history or math. She started a stock called Win/Play/Learn (symbol: WPL), which attracted a lot of attention from the company's engineers. They enthusiastically bought her stock and volunteered to work on the idea to turn it into a viable new product, which they did. A brilliant idea from an unlikely source was made possible by the new employee-suggestion system. Just as Isaac Newton got his insight by combining images of a falling apple and the moon, this corporation created an innovative employee-suggestion system by blending the concepts of the New York Stock Exchange and employee suggestions.

• P79. Perception is an active, not a passive, process. You catalyze creative thinking by looking at your subject from many different perspectives. With each new perspective, your understanding deepens, and the creative possibilities expand. Leonardo da Vinci called this thinking strategy saper vedere, which means "knowing how to see."

• P82. The Hindu's view of a cow in no way corresponds to that of a meatpacker's or a farmer's, and in Istanbul, they keep their pigs in the zoo instead of making them into sausage. We build our own reality. Even colors are products of our mind. Vincent Van Gogh told his brother he could see twenty-seven different shades of gray. Who knows if my red is the same as your red? Even if the two most distinguished color experts in the world were asked to dress up Santa Claus, and one were asked to pick the coat and the other the trousers, you can be sure the top would not exactly match the bottom. An oft-quoted story about Pablo Picasso tells of a time he was hanging around an exhibition of his paintings in Paris. Picasso was approached by a man who asked him why he didn't paint people the way they look. "How do they look?" asked Picasso. The man pulled a photograph of his wife from his wallet and held it out to Picasso, who looked at the picture and said, "She's awfully small, isn't she? And flat." We have to accept the fact that much of what seems real to us is governed by our own perceptions.

• P89. All of us, with a little thought, can come up with easy ways to change our perspectives by adopting different roles. One gym owner was trying to come up with innovative ways to market his gym. He adopted different roles, including those of a judge, Rosie O'Donnell, a comic, and Pablo Picasso. Picasso got him thinking about artists and their work, which inspired his idea. He hired a freelance caricature artist to sit in front of his gym with a sign offering "free caricatures in five minutes." The artist drew caricatures of the person in a well-developed body, with a gym displayed prominently in the background. The person also got a brochure and a business card. His business increased substantially almost overnight.

• P90. Leonardo da Vinci believed that to gain knowledge about the form of a problem, you begin by learning how to restructure it in order to see it in many different ways. He felt the first way he looked at a problem was too biased toward his usual way of seeing things. He would restructure his problem by looking at it from one perspective and then moving to another perspective and still another. With each move, his understanding would deepen, and he would begin to recognize the essence of the problem. As I mentioned at the end of the preceding chapter, Leonardo called this thinking strategy saper vedere, or "knowing how to see."

• P109. Dr. Randas Batista in Curitiba, Brazil, had many patients dying of congestive heart failure, which causes the heart to weaken and enlarge. When the heart becomes weakened, it tries to compensate by stretching its muscle to help it beat. But as the heart's muscular left ventricle enlarges, it becomes less efficient at pumping blood through the body. Dr. Batista lacked the resources necessary for the standard American treatments for the disease, which are drug therapy and heart transplant. He came up with a radical solution. His solution was to cut off pieces of the heart to make it smaller and, at the same time, stronger. His solution—cutting away at the heart to make it stronger—is paradoxical. Surgeons around the world were amazed. Their perspective had been prejudiced by conventional thinking about congestive heart failure that they never considered radical solutions until after Dr. Batista devised this stunning treatment. It was difficult for them to think beyond what they had learned. Dr. Batista's thinking was extreme.

• P124. Using his imagination, Walt Disney uncritically explored fantastical ideas. Afterward, he would engineer these fantasies into feasible ideas and then evaluate them. He would shift his perspective three times by playing three separate and distinct roles in relation to them: those of the dreamer, the realist, and the critic. On the first day, he would play the dreamer and dream up fantasies and wishful visions. He would let his imagination soar without worrying about how to implement his conceptions. The next day, he would bring his fantasies down to earth by playing the realist. As a realist, he would look for ways to work his conceptions into something practical. On the third day, he would play the part of the critic and poke holes in his ideas, asking, is this feasible?

• P134. Bertrand Russel wrote in The Conquest of Happiness: "I have found, for example, that, if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic, the best plan is think about it with very great intensity—the greatest intensity of which I am capable—for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months, I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. Before I had discovered this technique, I used to spend the intervening months worrying because I was making no progress; I arrived at the solution none the sooner for this worry, and the intervening months were wasted."

• P137. Rupert Sheldrake about plant physiology: "Annual plants, which die after fruiting, have no need to keep anything in reserve. They give all they have got, continuing to form fruits until they run out of resources, with the result that the later-formed fruits get smaller and smaller. By contrast, in perennial plants, which need to keep something in reserve for the next year, the fruits formed early and late in the season are more or less the same size. Perennial plants yield less than their full capacity because they hold back reserves for the following season." We are like perennials, in a way: when we are working on a problem, we reach a point when our brains shut down. Perhaps this is nature's way of helping us hold something in reserve for future thought, after the information has been incubated for a period of time.

• P141. A favorite writer's exercise for overcoming writer's block: Set aside ten minutes. Simply list whatever comes to mind (words, phrases, thought fragments, etc.) What you are doing is trying to catch thoughts and feelings from your subconscious. When you are finished, don't review what you have written. It's important to do this ten-minute exercise every day for five days without reviewing your list. On day six, go back over each day's writing, starting with day one. Circle the phrases, thoughts, and metaphors that hold the greatest interest for you. Lost the items you've circled. Then look for patterns, relationships, and insights into things you have been working on. You'll discover glimpses of relationships between thoughts, facts, or experiences that were kept separate from each other in your conscious mind. Your subconscious mind brings out intuitive connections.

• P157. An inventor I know uses one whole wall in his workshop to post articles, pictures, photos, personal notes, and so on. He ruminates by his wall almost daily. His general theme is "supply and demand." He is constantly identifying demands and then trying to invent something to supply them at a profit. His wall has pictures of people scalping football tickets, people trying to make reservations for seats at premier restaurants or Broadway shows, traffic jams in New York that develop as people look for parking spaces, a clock showing the passing of time, and many other things. One day, he posted a short article about a municipality on the verge of bankruptcy. That got him thinking about what a municipality might supply to meet a demand. He observed his pictures of cars, parking lots, traffic jams, and clocks, and one photo of parking meters on an empty street. He thought that one thing a municipality has to sell is time—most cities do sell time by renting out space in parking lots and alongside parking meters. Parking meters inspired his idea. Parking meters provide income, but he wondered if they could be better designed to correlate with actual demand. He designed a parking system that adjusts the price of parking spaces according to demand at any given moment. The system uses electronic sensors to measure the call for parking slots in real time and price them accordingly. So when there are a lot of empty parking spaces, you can pay as little as twenty-five cents an hour. When space is at a premium, you will have to shell out up to six dollars an hour.

• P162. Children, before they become educated, speak a different language, a language of inclusion, a language of "what is" and "what can be." If you ask children how they feel, they'll tell you. They'll say, "Great," or "Awesome," or "Sleepy," or "I'm sick." Offer an idea to a child, and the child will reply, "Great" or "Interesting." Suppose you go to Disneyland with your family, and you have a wonderful time. I come up to you and ask, "How did you like Disneyland?" If your response is "Not bad," that description of what is not may come across in a cool monotone, barren of enthusiasm. But what if you say, "Great"? Notice that there is a difference in volume, in effect, in intention—in the whole feeling associated with the word great. Your volume goes up. Your mouth gets more relaxed. Your thoughts and feelings are different when you talk about what's there, as opposed to what's missing. By changing your language and speaking patterns in a positive way, so that they are about "what's there," you guarantee a feeling of optimism and real output in performance. What you say affects how you feel. How you feel affects how you think, and vice versa. All language, feelings, and thoughts interact with each other, and the entire accumulation of those influences creates your output and behavior.

• P177. You become what you pretend to be. The surrealist artist Salvador Dali was pathologically shy as a child. He hid in closets and avoided all human contact until his uncle counseled him on how to overcome this shyness. He advised Dali to be an actor and to pretend he played the part of an extrovert. At first, Dali was full of doubts. But when he adopted the pose of an extrovert, his brain soon adapted itself to the role he was playing. Dali's pretense changed his psychology. Another remarkable example is Viktor Frankl, who wrote about his experiences in the concentration camp in his book From Death-Camp to Existentialism. While most of the other inmates lost hope and died. Frankl reframed his experience by pretending to be an academic lecturer. He occupied his mind by creating lectures he would give after he was released from the camp—lectures that would draw on his experiences in the camp. He took a hopeless situation and transformed it into a rich source of experiences that he could use to help others overcome potentially deadening and hopeless situations.

• P183. Veltne mood induction statements:

  • Today is neither better nor worse than any other day.

  • I do feel pretty good today, though.

  • I feel lighthearted.

  • This might turn out to have been one of my good days.

  • If your attitude is good, then things are good, and my attitude is good.

  • I feel cheerful and lively.

  • I've certainly got energy and self-confidence to share.

  • On the whole, I have very little difficulty in thinking clearly.

  • My friends and family are pretty proud of me most of the time.

  • I'm in a good position to make a success of things.

  • For the rest of the day, I bet things will go really well.

  • I'm pleased that most people are so friendly to me.

  • My judgments about most things are sound.

  • The more I get into things, the easier they become for me.

  • I'm full of energy and ambition—I feel like I could go a long time without sleep.

  • This is one of those days when I can get things done with practically no effort at all.

  • My judgment is keen and precise today. Just let someone try to put something over me.

  • When I want to, I can make friends extremely easily.

  • If I set my mind to it, I can make things turn out fine.

  • I feel enthusiastic and confident now.

  • There should be opportunities for a lot of good times coming along.

  • My favorite songs keep going through my mind.

  • Some of my friends are so lively and optimistic.

  • I feel talkative—I feel like talking to almost anybody.

  • I'm full of energy, and am really getting to like the things I'm doing.

  • I feel like bursting with laughter—I wish somebody would tell a joke and give me an excuse.

  • I feel an exhilarating animation in all I do.

  • My memory is in rare form today.

  • I'm able to do things accurately and efficiently.

  • I know good and well that I can achieve the goals I set.

  • Now that it occurs to me, most of the things that have depressed me wouldn't have if I'd just had the right attitude.

  • I have a sense of power and vigor.

  • I feel so vivacious and efficient today—sitting on top of the world.

  • It would really take something to stop me now.

  • In the long run, it's obvious that things have gotten better and better during my life.

  • I know in the future I won't overemphasize so-called "problems."

  • I'm optimistic that I can get along very well with most of the people I meet.

  • I'm too absorbed in things to have time to worry.

  • I'm feeling amazingly good today.

  • I am particularly inventive and resourceful in this mood.

  • I feel superb! I think I can work to the best of my ability.

  • Things look good. Things look great!

  • I feel that many of my friendships will stick with me in the future.

  • I feel highly perceptive and refreshed.

  • I can find the good in almost everything.

  • In a buoyant mood like this one, I can work fast and do it right the first time.

  • I can concentrate hard on anything I do.

  • My thinking is clear and rapid.

  • Life is so much fun; it seems to offer so many sources of fulfillment.

  • Things will be better and better today.

  • I can make decisions rapidly and correctly, and I can defend them against criticisms easily.

  • I feel industrious as heck—I want something to do!

  • Life is firmly in my control.

  • I wish somebody would play some good, loud music!

  • This is great—I really do feel good. I am elated about things!

  • I'm really feeling sharp now.

  • This is just one of those days when I'm ready to go!

  • Wow, I feel great!

• P194. Take a moment and imagine you are a mountain climber, and read the following scenario. You are climbing one of the largest mountains in the world and are very close to reaching the peak, which is a goal you've had all your life. You've prepared yourself physically and mentally. You are beginning the final stretch of your climb when you decide to rest on a small ledge that is just about three-quarters of the way up the mountain. You see another climber approaching you from below. He lifts himself up and joins you on the ledge. He's wearing a rope tied around his waist and holding the loose end in his hands. He holds out the end of the rope and says. "Pardon me, would you be so kind as to hold the end for a moment?" You take the rope. "Thank you," says the man, who then adds, "Use two hands now, and remember, hold tight." To your surprise, the man jumps off the ledge and yells, "Don't let go! I'll fall a thousand feet if you do." You hold on with all your strength. The man is suspended over a chasm and sure to die if he falls. You try to pull him up, but he is too heavy. You offer suggestions about how he could climb up the rope. The man shouts back, "Hold on. Don't let go. If you let go, I'll die." You tug and tug, but nothing works. The afternoon is beginning to fade, and it's getting cold. You have to do something, or you won't reach the peak, which you can see through the mist. You think of a way the man can wrap the rope around himself and eventually pull himself up hand over hand, and you shout instructions. The man replies, "No, please, please don't let go. I'll fall to my death if you do." You coax, wheedle, scream, and yell at the climber, all to no avail. You think once again about the fact that you are running out of time, and you shout instructions one more time. "Listen carefully. I mean what I'm about to say. I will not accept responsibility for your life, only for my own, if you don't help yourself while I'm helping you, I can do more. I'm going to let go of the rope." The man responds, "No, hold on. If you let go, I'll die. Just hang on tight." You wait and tug, and the man does nothing but hold the rope. He makes no effort at all." You let go of the rope and climb to the peak of the mountain. Now, take a moment and think about the scenarios. What is it in your life that you are holding on to that is represented by the climber? What is keeping you from getting on with your life? Think about that thing at the end of the rope, and think about what it would mean to let go of it. Is it worth staying stuck in order to keep that thing alive? What would actually happen if you let go of it?

• P200. Matthew Crawford thought about how he was living his life. He finished his doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago and was hired by a prestigious think tank in Washington, D.C. After five months, he could not see the rationale for being paid at all for what he did. He was always tired, and he said he lost all self-respect while working in a job that had no discernible product or measurable result. Basically, he said, he was managing information, and his self-esteem depended on the opinions of others. Despite his income and title, he felt he was no more than a clerk. Crawford quit his job and started doing motorcycle repair in a decaying factory in Richmond, Virginia. His journey from philosopher-intellectual to philosopher-mechanic forms the arc of his book Shopcraft as Soulcraft. Crawford states that an office is, at best, "a place of moral education," with managers acting as therapists, concentrating on making workers into "team" players. The individual begins to believe he is alone and that he has no effect. He becomes passive and helpless and has difficulty imagining how he might earn a living otherwise. The "massification of higher education" created this bleak scenario, Crawford says, where everyone must go to college or be viewed as stupid and/or unemployable. After you get a degree, you must take a job where you are "doing smart, clean, fun, and well-paid work." However, getting a job of doing smart and well-paid work is becoming increasingly difficult. Crawford decided to do something that was meaningful for him and became a motorcycle mechanic. He ignored other people's expectations about him and his PhD. To be happy, all he needed was to be willing to get his hands greasy.

• P200. His name, I was told, is Johnny, and he has Down syndrome. One day, the store owner asked the store employees to try to do something special for customers to create good memories about the market and bring them back. The managers and employees discussed their ideas, but when Johnny tried to get involved, he was ignored. Johnny was used to being treated with indifference by the store's managers, so it didn't bother him. He thought and thought about what he could do as a grocery bagger. He thought about the things that made him feel good. His favorite thing to do each day after he got home was to look up a quote, or make one up if he couldn't find one he liked, and to repeat it silently to himself all the next day at work. Then he decided that, if it made him feel good, it would make customers feel good too. He started giving his daily quote to his father, who would type it into his computer and print it out, giving Johnny multiple sheets. Each page would have many copies of the quote, and Johnny would cut each one, sign his name on the back, and bring them all to work. While bagging groceries, he would put a quote in the bag and say, "Thank you for shopping with us." A month later, the owner noticed that Johnny's check-out lane was five times longer than the other lanes. He tried to encourage the shoppers to move to other lanes. Incredibly, the people wouldn't do it. They said they wanted Johnny's "thought of the day." Three months later, the owner discovered Johnny's spirit had pervaded the whole staff, and each employee was now trying to add an extra touch to make people feel special. I often think human potential, and how the courage and will necessary to overcome personal adversity can make ordinary tasks into extraordinary examples of inspiration.