How to get ideas? Part I.
This is the first part of my reading notes on <A technique for producing ideas>, a booklet written by James Webb Young.
Is an idea only a long series of unseen idea-building processes which go on beneath the suface of the conscious mind? If so, can these processes be identified, so that they can consciously be followed and utilized?
The first question. Even assuming that there may be a technique for producing ideas, is everybody capable of using it? Or is there, in addition, some special ability for producing ideas which, after all, you must be born with - like a color sense or tone sense or card sense?
Italian sociologist Pareto thought that all the world could be divided into two main types of people. These types he called, in the French in which he wrote, the speculator and the rentier.
In this classification speculator is a term used somewhat in the sense of our word "speculative." The speculator is the speculative type of person. And the distinguishing characteristic of this type, according to Pareto, is that he is constantly preoccupied with the possibilities of new combinations. Please note particularly that the word pre-occupied, with its brooding quality.
Pareto includes among the persons of this speculative type not only the business enterprisers - those who deal with financial and business schemes - but those engaged with inventions of every sort and with what he calls "political and diplomatic reconstructions."
In short, the type includes all those persons in any fields who (like our President Roosevelt) can not let well enough alone and who speculate on how to change it.
The term used by Pareto to describe the other type, the rentier, is translated into English as the stockholder - though he sounds more like the bag holder to me. Such people, he says, are the routine, steady-going, unimaginative, conserving people, whom the speculator manipulates.
Let's recognize that these two types of human beings do exist. Whether they were born that way, or whether their environment and training made them that way, is beside the point. Now assume that if a man or woman is at all fascinated by advertising (Young is a creative director in an advertising agency.) it is probably because he is among the reconstructors of this world. Therefore he has some creative powers; and these powers, like others, may be increased by making a deliberate effort to do so and by mastering a technique for their better use.
