Creative Problem Solving

Taken from Discover Your Genius by Michael Gelb, the following is a partial list of advice gleamed from his ten figures in history:1

• Plato—raise fundamental questions
  
  
• Brunelleschi—do the math to discover the single possible solution (as he did for raising a dome on the Florentine cathedral)
  
  
• Columbus—don’t explore by following the shore but head out perpendicularly from it
  
  
• Copernicus—see incongruity as a need for a new paradigm (Copernicus saw this in the existing mathematical models and realized a new model of the solar system was required)
  
  
• Einstein—look at problems through imaginative play, recombining them in a new framework
  
  

1. Gelb, Michael J., Discover Your Genius: How to Think Like History’s Ten Most Revolutionary Minds (Harper Collins Publishers Inc., New York, 2002)

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