A How-To Book on Generating Creative Concepts and Getting To that “Aha!” Moment

One of my best friends, and certainly one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, sent me this:

Hi Craig, ​When we last talked, I mentioned this amazing book on strategy, Strategic Intuition, written by a professor at Columbia.  He explains that all strategy methods and books are based on analyzing a strategy or implementing a strategy, but methods or books explain how to come up with the idea in the first place.  H​e studied entrepreneurial thinkers in business and in social movements and found the answer. ​You will enjoy it both from a business viewpoint and from a social movement perspective.  This book changed my life; I think you’ll love it too.

I’m looking forward to it.  I read the description, and it sounds great.

I’m reminded of a time I met a professional inventor; he had patented hundreds of things from toys to garden tools to kitchen gadgets to a new kind of checking account.  In the course of the discussion I told him that I believe I am at my inventive best when I’m in the shower. He smiled and told me that, though the years, dozens of other people had asserted precisely the same thing to him. He said, “My advice is to jettison that idea from your consciousness.  If I had that belief, I’d be living in a tent somewhere. You and I have creative genius in us, 24 hours a day, to the degree we believe we do.”

That stuck with me.