Welcome back. We're in session #5 of week one, and this is a story about the Imagination Elevator. The story is told by my colleague and coauthor, Arie Ruttenberg. It's found in our book. And it illustrates our zoom in, zoom out method in a creative way that Arie discovered. The story is as follows. You probably won't believe it, but here is the story in any case. Arie is in his apartment in New York City on the 55th floor and he sees a strange creature outside the window. And it's a little angel, and the angel was called ZiZoZi. And the angel invites himself in, and Arie shares with this little creativity angel his problem. He's working on a difficult problem for his advertising agency, and he just can't come up with any solution. So ZiZoZi takes him to the elevator shaft, and together, they press a button and they take the elevator to the 989th floor. There is no such floor in any building on the face of this Earth, even in Dubai. But nonetheless, their imagine soars and they climb to the 989th floor and then get off the elevator and walk around, looking for possible solutions to the advertising problem. How do you smell more oranges? Or how do you promote a political campaign? And they walk through the floor and they see many, many ideas and many ways of widening the range of choices, many ways to do this. And in this shopping cart, they put some of these ideas into the cart. And when the cart is filled, stuffed, they take it back to the elevator and take the elevator back down to the 55th floor. Back down to the ground floor, essentially. And then you begin taking the ideas out of the shopping cart. And then you start to weigh them and examine them and make them more moderate, bring them down to Earth, combine some of them and come up with a real solution. The point here of the story is that you find creative breakthroughs to problems by cultivating wild ideas, by gathering those wild ideas. Incidentally, as you develop those ideas, you never, never ever shoot an idea down. You simply collect them and put them in your shopping cart. And then you take these wild ideas and you kind of tame them a bit and bring them down to Earth. The opposite doesn't work too well. Coming up with tame, sane, practical ideas and then trying to juice them up a bit to make them more creative. That doesn't work too well. So wild ideas, head in the clouds, 989th floor. Collect the ideas, come down to Earth, and then implement them, start to make them happen. This is the zoom in, zoom out approach. Zoom in, understand every detail of your problem or the need that you're trying to meet, everything. The science, the technology, the human aspect, everything. Then zoom out, zoom up to the 989th floor, collect wild ideas. And then come back down to the ground again. And then sift through the ideas and come up with one or a combination of ideas that you think will work and that will solve your problem. So practice going to the 989th floor of the Imagination Elevator. That phrase, incidentally, is the title in the Chinese version of our book. [COUGH] The English version is titled differently, but the Imagination Elevator is the title in Mandarin. 989th floor, and then back down to the ground. Now, this is the essence, we think, of discovery. There are two approaches. One approach is that there's a really difficult problem. We have to prove Fermat's last theorem, and most mathematicians in the world think that there is no such proof and that this is impossible. When you begin with the idea that this is really hard, too hard, impossible, nobody has done it for 358 years, why would I be able to do it? You start with a wrong mindset. You can start with a different mindset. When there is a challenge that's well-defined and we understood the problem with a clear zoom in, we begin with the assumption that there is a solution, there is a proof for Fermat's last theorem. All we have to do is discover it by soaring imagination and harvesting ideas on the 989th floor, and then making those ideas implementable, feasible, practical. This is the essence of our approach to discovery and to creativity. All problems, especially really, really, really hard problems, have a solution. And you see, I'd like to again emphasize what I quoted in an earlier session. Usually, our big difficulty is that it's not that we aim too high, we aim too low. We set the bar too low and then we succeed, and the success is not that valuable to anyone. Set the bar high. Look for really hard problems. Starting a business, running a startup, really hard and really risky. If you're going to do that, put years of your life into it. It might as well be worthwhile. You might as well tackle a challenge that's really big, really meaningful, that can change people's lives, that create value for many people. So aim high. And if you fail, you haven't really failed. Because you have a glorious attempt that you've made and you've learned a lot during the journey and what you've learned can be applied in many, many areas, probably. So back to our book, we noted in our book that according to the Bible, the human beings Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden was a wonderful place and was very comfortable. And they were kicked out of this comfortable comfort zone that they were in because they tasted the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. In Hebrew, it's [FOREIGN]. The moment human beings taste the Tree of Knowledge and begin to create knowledge of their own, they leave their comfort zone and go into an uncomfortable zone of the unknown outside the Garden of Eden. But this is what makes us human because only we human beings have a part of our brain that can imagine things that don't exist. We have a little mongrel Yorkshire dog named Pixie. And she is very good at imagining things that do exist, like the food that she gets, but probably can't imagine food that she's never had before. But human beings can imagine things that don't exist, and they can make those things actually happen. And that's why we are better off today than we were 100 or 200 years ago, and have so many things that have enriched our lives. We have left the comfort zone of the Garden of Eden, and it's a good thing that we were kicked out of it. So our brain, is our brain a PC? It's sort of a PC. It has memory, it has processing power. We can compute things. But by the Turing test, our brain is much more than a PC. We can invent things. We can imagine things. And so far, computers are not quite up to that job of imagining. They may one day be. But for now, our creative brain is one of the greatest resources that we have in the world. And we need to make full and better use of them, of this imagination ability, in order to make the world a better place. And that's what cracking the creativity code really is about. This ends session 5. Join us as we move on to learning some really nice stories about people who have changed the world using the zoom in, zoom out framework
