"Limits are usually self-imposed."
"Often even a minor change in the way a thing is looked at can make a huge difference."
Lately, I find myself looking at self-help books more and more skeptically, especially when titles tend to make bold declarations. 'Creativity Step by Step' is one of those titles, but after having Lateral Thinking for a long time on my TBR shelf, I finally decided to give this a try. Though I'm having some mixed feelings now, I'm happy to say, overall, it was time well spent. I'm rounding off what felt like a 3.5-star read to 4.
"Vertical thinking is immensely useful but one needs to enhance its usefulness by adding creativity and tempering its rigidity."
Before diving in to particulars, this book is intended for educators, as the author clearly attempts explain during introductory chapter. I'm not one. However, the first chapter was intriguing enough to kept me going. Until now, I only imagined that one's way of thinking is a combination of logical, creative, and emotional aspects: I haven't really thought about specifics related to each component before. But this book introduces a very clear distinction to separate the 'creative' and 'logical' aspects of thinking, which are referred to as 'lateral thinking' and 'vertical thinking'. And it's the 'lateral thinking' that is directly responsible for generation of creative solutions.
"Insight, creativity and humor are so elusive because the mind is so efficient."
The content is arranged more like a teacher's guide book, with first part of each section explaining the theory, and then followed by practice methods. I did feel some of the content were a little too repetitive, but it appears that the author expected that the reader would be using this as a frequent reference book, when practicing or teaching lateral thinking. In that case, any teacher would find the book quite helpful.
"Exclusive emphasis on the need to be right all the time completely shuts off creativity and progress."
"Lateral thinking enhances the effectiveness of vertical thinking. Vertical thinking develops the ideas generated by lateral thinking."
So, will this book help you enhance creativity? May be a little, by helping identify where vertical thinking becomes limiting, and when to introduce lateral thinking. But the truth is, unless you're a teacher, you'll find the content to be too detailed (and a little boring). I skipped through a lot of practice sections, as they went it too deep about how to handle classroom situations. Still, this book did help me understand several ways to tackle seemingly impossible problems in future. Had I been involved in the field of education, I probably would've found this to be a solid 4-star read.
"Hindsight demonstration of a logical pathway does not indicate that the solution would have been reached in this way."