Page 229 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

220 THE FIVE GREATEST BARRIERS TO CREATIVITY

Fear of failure and re-
jection gets in the way of Results! Why, man, I have gotten a
lot of results. I know several
great accomplishment.
thousand things that won't work.
But just because you
might fail during the ideation
phase doesn’t mean you necessarily have to fail in
the end. Maybe my spy novel would have been better Thomas Edison
if I had practiced 100 MPH Thinking in coming up with
the plot, then chosen the best from among 50 plot ideas.
Failure in the conceptual phase is not failure. No high-achieving
person is without failure in the laboratory of his or her mind. But it’s
only the successes we look at, the great novelists, the great playwrights
and songwriters and scientists.

BARRIER #3: JUDGMENT

Another great barrier to creative thinking is judgment. Here I’m talk-
ing about judgment of others’ ideas and judgment of our own ideas.
Judging ideas during the exploration phase of the creative process is
rarely beneficial. Most often, it is very destructive—destructive to the
idea in question, destructive to the creative process, and, perhaps most
damaging, destructive to the individual whose idea is being judged. I
see many ideas stifled while they are delicate little seedlings because we
judge them too early.

7

FLOWER POWER

A friend of mine who grows orchids took me to his greenhouse and
showed me what looked like tens of thousands of orchids. He
explained, “I enter them in competitions and I win prizes.” When I
asked which ones would be the prizewinners, he said, “I don’t know.
They’re all seedlings right now. If I took this one,” he picked up a
beauty, “and nurtured it because this is the prettiest one now, it doesn’t
guarantee it will be the prettiest one later. The ugliest one now, which
I might be tempted to throw in the trash, could turn out to be the great-
est winner of all.” So you see? You can’t know in the fragile early
stages what might become of our seedlings of ideas. And judgment too
early can prune the best ones.

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