The power of combining old ideas in new ways also extends to finance, where the prices of stock derivatives are calculated by mixing formulas originally developed to describe the motion of dust particles with gambling techniques. “A 1997 study of the consumer product design firm IDEO found that most of the company’s biggest successes originated as “combinations of existing knowledge from disparate industries.” IDEO’s designers created a top-selling water bottle, for example, by mixing a standard water carafe with the leak-proof nozzle of a shampoo container. Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business We all carry the creative process inside us we just need to be pushed to use it sometimes.” “So we spend a huge amount of time pushing people to go deeper, to look further inside themselves, to find something that’s real and can be magical when it’s put into the mouth of a character on a screen.

“Most people are too narrow in how they think about creativity,” Ed Catmull, the president of Disney Animation, told me. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.” People become creative brokers, in other words, when they learn to pay attention to how things make them react and feel. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. “Creativity is just connecting things,” Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said in 1996.

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