Unconventional Problem Solving Quotes

If you can't solve a problem, it's because you're playing by the rules

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.

Genius doesn't always come in neat packages.

People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.

Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life?

Imagination is a place where all the important answers live.

I've got a passion for solving a problem that I think I can solve in a new way. And that maybe it helps that nobody has done it before as well.

A lot of great thinkers- like Einstein and Newton- come up with their best ideas when they're young because they don't yet think in the way that the establishment teaches them. Sometimes your lack of knowledge frees your mind to be creative and think in a different way. But you still have to be logical and figure out a practical way to get things done, even though you're looking at things differently.

I only want people around me who can do the impossible.

We have all heard of the animal standing in doubt between two stacks of hay and starving to death, the like of which would never happen to Gen. Cass. Place stacks a thousand miles apart: he would stand stock still, midway between them, and eat them both at once; and the green grass along the line would be apt to suffer some, too, at the same time.

In the midst of all the chaos swirling through your brain, all the disorganization and impulsiveness, the condition (ADHD) also seems to trigger a certain kind of creativity.

I think one of the reasons musicians keep doing what they do and writers keep doing what they do, is that we're totally unsuited for anything else. And I for one am much too lazy.

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.

I see things differently, feel things differently. That's how I've always been, and that's why I'm different to everyone else. Information: simple. Detail: simple. I just aim to play as if it was five-a-side as an 11-year-old kid. That's how I see it because that's how it is.

The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient ... But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem. It's ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.

Every problem has a creative solution.

Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five

Creative people have an abiding curiosity and an insatiable desire to learn how and why things work. They take nothing for granted. They are interested in things around them and tend to stow away bits and pieces of information in their minds for the future use. And, they have a great ability to mobilize their thinking and experiences for use in solving a new problem.

Have you ever heard of a pianist who never had to practice - or of an architect who didn't bother to find out why buildings stand up?

I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. [...] If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an "individual", each of them is a "multitude".

Creativity to me is the life force that is in us. It’s an animalistic instinct for survival.

I didn't realize it at first, but the Doctor is in the same spirit as those natural 'outsider' characters 'Star Trek' series have, like Spock and Data.

Pooh is able to accomplish what he does because he is simpleminded.

I couldn't read the way that other students read, so I would just cheat, which, in my silly brain, I was like, 'This is a skill that I'm developing - how to just get around everything!'

I found it was way more fun to build useless stuff.