Walter O'Brien Quotes

I do a great deal of work with young children, and if you give a child a problem, he may come up with a highly original solution, because he doesn't have the established route to it.

Hackers often describe what they do as playfully creative problem solving.

There's an alternative. There's always a third way, and it's not a combination of the other two ways. It's a different way.

In The 3rd Alternative, Stephen Covey urges us to chart a course beyond the suboptimal solutions to all our crises - beyond left and right, and beyond the many false choices in front of us. The 3rdAlternative is a wise and welcome echo of Einstein's warning that the problems we're facing today cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.

Creativity is not just for artists. It's for businesspeople looking for a new way to close a sale; it's for engineers trying to solve a problem; it's for parents who want their children to see the world in more than one way.

Actually, I think I come at things a whole different way from most people, and, you know, sometimes political answers are one way to solve the problem, and sometimes there are better ways to do it.

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.

By the way, intelligence to me isn't just being book-smart or having a college degree; it's trusting your gut instincts, being intuitive, thinking outside the box, and sometimes just realizing that things need to change and being smart enough to change it.

Everything has been thought of before... the real problem is to think of it again.

The best way to get people to think outside the box is not to create the box in the first place.

I often try to think about, What sounds like a bad idea, but if you find the right plan of attack, it's actually a really good idea? I spend a lot of time really trying to systematically tackle problems from different angles.

Nintendo's way is to challenge conventional thinking. Not just for the sake of doing things differently, but to do things better.

Successful people engage that creative part of their minds and ask, "Well, I wonder how else I can look at this problem? I wonder how else I could deal with this decision? I wonder what other possibilities I have there?"

You have to stand outside the box to see how the box can be re-designed.

Never accept the proposition that just because a solution satisfies a problem, that it must be the only solution.

Solve problems, make art, think deeply.

It seems that we're better at finding someone to blame for our problems than we are at finding creative solutions to fix them.

Often we use the word problem only because we have not learned that imagination and creativity can handle the situation.

I think being a producer makes you a problem solver, so you kind of go, "Well there's a problem. What do we do? How do we solve it?"

Lateral thinking... is the process of using information to bring about creativity and insight restructuring. Lateral thinking can be learned, practised and used. It is possible to acquire skill in it just as it is possible to acquire skill in mathematics.

To develop the creative attitude, analyze and focus on the wanted SOLUTION; seek out and fill your mind with the FACTS; write down ideas, both sensible and seemingly wild; let the facts and ideas simmer in your mind; evaluate, recheck, settle on the creative ideas.

It is not enough just to identify a problem; there are plenty of people who were very skilled at pointing out what was wrong with the world, but they were not always so adept at working out how these things could be righted.

To complicate things in new ways, that is really very easy; but to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.

You have to have the will not to jump at the first solution, because the really elegant solution might be right around the corner.

You read something and you know it's not there yet. There's a little section here that... this part's good but that is a little not, it doesn't quite work. That doesn't quite work. That's easy. To say, "OK, now, this is what I think will fix it." That's harder. And most people can tell you what's wrong with something. Very few people can say what they would do to fix it.