Came across an interesting article on Claude Shannon, who is known as the “father of the Information Age”.
In a speech he wrote in 1952 around creative thinking – there are some pearls of wisdom (about half way through the article.
Here’s the article…
Claude Shannon’s “Creative Thinking” Speech: A Genius Reveals How To Be Creativeby Jimmy Soni
A few takeaways from over 65 years ago…
On innovation:
“Then there’s the idea of dissatisfaction. By this I don’t mean a pessimistic dissatisfaction of the world — we don’t like the way things are — I mean a constructive dissatisfaction. The idea could be expressed in the words, This is OK, but I think things could be done better. I think there is a neater way to do this. I think things could be improved a little. In other words, there is continually a slight irritation when things don’t look quite right; and I think that dissatisfaction in present days is a key driving force in good scientists.”
On problem solving:
“The first one that I might speak of is the idea of simplification. Suppose that you are given a problem to solve, I don’t care what kind of a problem — a machine to design, or a physical theory to develop, or a mathematical theorem to prove, or something of that kind — probably a very powerful approach to this is to attempt to eliminate everything from the problem except the essentials; that is, cut it down to size. Almost every problem that you come across is befuddled with all kinds of extraneous data of one sort or another; and if you can bring this problem down into the main issues, you can see more clearly what you’re trying to do and perhaps find a solution.”