Hello, I'm Shlomo Maital. Welcome back to our course, Cracking the Creativity Code, part one, Discovering Ideas. I'd like to thank you for sticking with my course through week four, and hopefully to the very end. I think we have very interesting week coming up for you. And looking ahead, I hope you'll also enroll in our next course, Cracking the Creativity Code Part 2, Delivering Ideas. Let me review briefly, what I have planned for this week during our ten sessions together. Our first session will be about, doing workouts, working out our brains as we work out our muscles, based on chapter six of our book, Cracking the Creativity Code. The next session will be about 50 years of creativity research, research that you can use. The third session, is about my favorite author James Thurber and his short story, Walter Mitty, the Secret Life of Walter Mitty. And we'll talk about whether creativity can be fun or is it sometimes painful. In session four, we'll talk about creativity and life planning, career planning. And we'll realize that, in these days of rapid change, we have to Reinvent ourselves, perhaps several times, creativity can help. We'll then talk about very creative people in history, Einstein, Da Vinci, Edison. What we can learn from them, very different people. I'd like to bring you some stories about very simple everyday items that we make use of. The safety pin, lipstick. And we'll do this in our Session six and seven. In Session 8, I'll recall that I gave all recipients seven major global challenges. Things where the world really needs super duper creativity to solve these seven problems, and we'll look at some ideas proposed by students for these seven challenges as expressed in their wonderful two minute videos. In the next to last session, session nine, the Torrence Test for Creative Thinking. We'll go back to the same test that you took. In week one and see if we've made any improvement in your own perception of your own creativity, as measured by the Torrance test, which is the most widely used test of creative thinking. We use a multiple version so it can be scored. And then the last section, we'll wrap the course up and ask what have you learned? What have you implemented? And of course, above all, how have you changed? So session one, creativity exercises. So my question to you is are you working out? Many of you are probably working out for your body, for your muscles. Running, jogging, walking, weightlifting, fitness and so on. What about your brain? Are you working your brain, are you working out for your brain? In chapter six of our book, we have a whole set of ten plus one, creativity, exercise. But I'd like to begin by Quoting a passage from a wonderful book. The book is by a doctor Norman Doidge, published in 2007. The name of the book is Brain That Changes Itself, published by Penguin. And this is what doctor Dr. Doidge says. He talks about researchers and brain science. In the 60s and 70s, and they made some unexpected discoveries. They showed that the brain changed its very structure with each different activity it performed, perfecting it's circuits so it was better suited for the task at hand. In other words, the more you work on discovering ideas, the better your brain gets at it. Your brain rewires itself. It's got neuroplasticity. It reshapes itself, it rebuilds itself according to what you're trying to do. If you're trying to come up with ideas, your brain rewires itself in order to get better and better and better at it. So there's scientific foundation to the idea. That the brain is a kind of muscle. And the more you exercise it, the better, and stronger, and more creative it gets. These are the creativity exercises. We can just briefly review them. They're given in chapter six of our book. And the exercises are first act sometimes don't just gripe. Creativity is creating something novel and useful. But useful means somebody has to use it. Nobody can use your idea unless you find a way to make it happen. So, act sometimes, don't just complain about things. Use your creativity and apply it. Break the rules, intelligently. Learn the rules, and then break the rules always to create value for people, not just for the fun of breaking rules. Change your habits, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Because, creative ideas, the wilder they are the more uncomfortable they are. And creative people are comfortable with being uncomfortable. Develop resilience and embrace failure. The more creative your ideas, the riskier they are, the more resistance you'll encounter. Develop resilience, and remember that there really is no such thing as failure. As Edison said, there's just another step toward eventual success. Explore dark corners, and experiment everywhere. Creativity is not just about gadgets, devices. It's about everything we do in life and the way we do it. So apply your creativity to everything that you do and the way you do it. We know from research process innovation, changing the way you do things is actually more profitable than product innovation, product creativity, because process innovation rarely fails. Exercise six, learn to focus. So our model of creativity, our method, is called, zoom in, zoom out. And the first part is the focus, zoom in. Zoom in on a problem, understand it, learn it, do a deep dive, know every aspect of the problem. Before you leap to ideas that solve the problem, be sure you understand the problem really well and the core of the problem, what is the core of the problem? So learn to focus. Grow your persistence, sometimes finding these creative solutions. We know there up there, there on the 989th floor, but there not easy to find. We need to be stubbornly persistent, the entrepreneurs I work with have that. As a key quality and many of them tell me that that's the number one quality for success as an entrepreneur, persistence. Stubbornly sticking at something until you solve it. I talked to you about the mathematician Andrew Wiles who solved the Fermat's conjecture and proved it, but it took him years and years. And then they found an error, and he had to work another whole year in order to perfect the proof. Hear, listen, teach. Part of focus and zoom in is really listening to people. And understanding the problem and their need. And then, passing on your knowledge to your team. Individualize, creativity is sometimes personal, maybe nearly always personal, in the sense that we're driven by our passion, to create value for people that we love. And very often, something that you need, a problem that you have, an unmet need, well, probably other people have that too. Because you're probably like millions of other people in the world. So many ideas are born from people who simply wanted to create something because they needed it. And finally, become who you are. Creativity is sometimes a difficult and painful process. We need a lot of self awareness and a lot of self confidence. The self confidence that comes out of knowing exactly who we are, what are our skills, what are our weak points, what are we good at, what are we less good at, and above all what are we passionate about. Build your self awareness it will help sustain you in the difficult exercise of implementing a creative idea. And finally the ten plus one exercise, develop this strange vision that we talk about, the microscope joined to the telescope. Zoom in, then with the microscope. Analyze the problem and at every single detail, zoom out to possible solutions all over the world. Zoom back in and become an expert at this weird kind of vision. With one eye being a microscope and one eye being a telescope and your ability to alternate between those two things. We also call this, sometimes conversion thinking, the microscope and divergent thinking, the telescope and both are crucial in discovering ideas. Let me end the session, by suggesting an exercise that I like a lot for your own personal work out and first of all, I'd like to challenge you, each of you, to develop your own exercises. We've given you ten plus one exercises in chapter six, but maybe they don't especially appeal to you. What workout would you like to give your brain? What exercises do you find meaningful? And I'll give you a small suggestion, that I'm sort of fond of, do a what if exercise. A lot of ideas in science fiction eventually come true, Arthur Clarke wrote about Communication satellites well before they happened. Geocentric satellites in fixed position, orbiting the Earth. So many ideas come from science fiction. Science fiction writers practice the what if exercise. Even if you're not a science fiction writer, why don't you try it? Start with a weird what if sentence. What if something could happen? What if gravity were suspended? I have a little switch and I'm going to switch off gravity. What would happen? What if there were no gravity. Here's another one. What if we could instantly communicate? With every single person in the world, and in every possible language. So [FOREIGN] I can speak in Hebrew, my own language. And you would understand me perfectly and respond in your own language. What if the whole world could communicate effortlessly, no matter what the language? And see that's a wild idea. But when you take that wild idea, and you bring it down to the ground you think about a universal translator, that could help people communicate with one another. Sometimes you can come up with a workable, implementable idea, from discovery, to delivery, as we take the imagination elevator down to the ground floor and being implementing our ideas. That in session one. When we go on to section two, I'll welcome you back and we'll talk about 50 years of research done by psychologists and others. What do we know about creativity, what can you use from this 50 year body of research?
