Zig Zag

**Author:** R. Keith Sawyer

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:**

- Why creativity is not a mysterious gift but a learnable skill - The eight-step process that reliably produces original ideas - How to ask better questions before chasing answers - Why quantity of ideas matters more than quality at first - How to fuse unrelated concepts into breakthrough innovations - Practical techniques you can apply immediately

**Who This Book Is For:**

Anyone who believes they are not creative, professionals who want to generate better ideas on demand, parents and teachers who want to nurture creativity in children, and leaders who need to build more innovative teams.

Most people have creativity completely backwards. They imagine the lone genius struck by a sudden flash of inspiration. They picture Mozart composing entire symphonies in his head, or Newton discovering gravity when an apple falls on his head. They believe creativity is a rare gift bestowed on a lucky few, something you either have or you don't. R. Keith Sawyer spent his career discovering that this story is wrong. Sawyer is uniquely positioned to understand creativity from multiple angles. He designed video games for Atari in the early 1980s. He played jazz piano professionally for over three decades. He became a professor of psychology and education, studying how creative people actually work. His research, along with the research of many other scientists, reveals something surprising and hopeful. Creativity is not a gift. It is a skill. And like any skill, it can be learned, practiced, and improved. The problem is that most people never learn how creativity actually works. They absorb the myths from movies and biographies. They wait for inspiration that never comes. They conclude they simply are not creative people. They give up before they even begin. This is a tragedy, because the research is clear. Creativity is close to 80 percent learned and acquired. The creative process follows predictable patterns. Creative people use identifiable techniques. These techniques can be taught to anyone willing to practice them. Sawyer's research led him to a surprising conclusion. The creative process is not a straight line from problem to solution. It is a zigzag path. Creative people move back and forth between different ways of thinking. They ask questions, learn deeply, observe carefully, play freely, generate many ideas, connect disparate concepts, evaluate critically, and make things tangible. They do not follow these steps in order. They zigzag between them, moving forward and backward, circling around problems, approaching them from different angles. This book presents the eight steps of the creative process that Sawyer identified through his research. Each step represents a different way of thinking and working. Each step can be practiced…