Page 121 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

112 INTERGALACTIC THINKING

improvement a few years ago, thanks to some very impressive Inter-
galactic Thinking.
The gravel business has been revolutionized in the past decade,
thanks to a bit of data from another galaxy shown in our earlier illus-
tration. Can you guess what it is? I’ll give you a hint: It’s in the bank-
ing galaxy.
Do you give up?
Well, believe it or not it’s the ATM. At leading-edge gravel pits
today, rather than pulling in and asking the guy with the shovel to help
you load your truck with the haul of the day, you simply enter a weigh
station, insert your ATM-like card into the ATM-like machine, and
designate what kind of a withdrawal you want to make (pea stone,
crushed rock, topsoil, whatever). Then you pull up to the chutes, load
your vehicle, get weighed automatically, grab your receipt, and leave.
The ATM technology is the latest thing in the gravel industry, and it is
dramatically changing the way this field does business.
Somebody thought outside the box. In Intergalactic Thinking
terms, they simply took a bit of data from outside their box, thus
redefining the box forever. In this case, it may have happened on a trip
to the bank. Probably a bank that some individual had been going to
for years. But one day—bingo!—a brainstorm occurred.
Or maybe it didn’t happen at the bank. Maybe someone just thought
about an ATM when he or she was thinking through solutions to a
problem. It happens.
It happens on your best days, effortlessly, when you get what we
often call “inspired” by something. You know the feeling. You’re look-
ing at a beautiful sunset when, out of nowhere, a great idea hits you.
Did the idea really come out of nowhere, or did you ask the question
early, as we discussed in Chapter 6, and create an open-ended possibil-
ity in your mind?

CREATIVITY ON DEMAND

It may not matter how or why it happens, but the point is that ideas do
come from unusual places quite often.

You don’t have to wait for an inspiring sunset; you can make
ideas happen, on cue, with little effort.