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Good ideas are not easy to cultivate. They
need rich soil, attention, and encouragement to take root
and grow. Jim Adams's classic Conceptual Blockbusting
was a handbook to weeding your garden, to clearing your
mind of rubbish that stifles creative thought. The Care
and Feeding of Ideas is its long-awaited sequel, a guide
to creating a greenhouse environment in which ideas can
thrive.
"If you're serious about encouraging
creativity," writes Adams, "you need to understand
the entire creative process -- from concept to reality."
You need to understand thinking -- the mysteries
and mechanics of creative thought. You need to understand
doing -- the actions you can take to increase your
creativity. Only by becoming aware of how you conceptualize,
and of the techniques that lead to better problem solving,
can you begin to bring forth your very best ideas.
Adams leads a tour through the unconscious
mind, the brain and nervous system, and the storehouse of
memory, and points out how they work (and conspire against
us) when we tackle problems. He shows that bad problem-solving
habits can be broken, that money and time are your muse's
best friends, that creativity involves risk but the risk
is worth it, and that the stereo you bought with your last
bonus was not a luxury but a necessary reward. He illustrates
his arguments with ingenious games and exercises that will
surprise you what they reveal about your patterns of thought.
Whether you're a midnight novelist or management consultant,
a Sunday painter or city planner, this book can forever
change the way you approach creative challenges.
James L. Adams is the author of Conceptual
Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas, a creativity classic
with over 250,000 copies in print. He teaches at Stanford
University, where he is the chairman of the Values, Technology,
Science, and Society Department. An engineer by training,
he is also a creative consultant to businesses, government
agencies, and other organizations.
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