What Do You Do About The Problem

Whatever your specific problem or goal is, it doesn’t matter. You have an endgame that you are trying to reach. You are at point A and looking for a way to point B.

You Have Two Options on How To Do This:

Imagine yourself at point A and imagine a chain of events that will take you to point B.	Or	Consider yourself already at point B and mentally slowly step back to point A.

Which one do you think is the best fit for the creative process?

The first is what we usually do, but what about when you get stuck in this way?

That’s when we use the second method, called lateral thinking, because it ignores your expectations. Breaks you out of the box and all that.

Here’s the fun part: changing the direction you’re approaching a problem will actually help you come up with new solutions! That’s because instead of thinking vertically up from the problem – where you’ve already been thinking a lot – you’re moving away from the solution. In this way, you are sure to come up with many new possibilities, because it forces you to look into a new perspective.

It’s Like Going Through a Maze By Starting At The End

As you plot your way back to where you started, you can confidently look over your shoulder to see a clear path back to your goal. This frees you from the hard limits of logical thinking, because you know that any path you may explore has a valid connection to your endgame. This allows you to confidently consider unusual, even absurd ways. You can realistically think of solutions that you would never think of as options if you were vertical thinking, but now that you see how they relate to your end result, they are clearly viable solutions – you just need to think about what they might be. these strange ways. leads back to your A point. Working backwards is always more flexible and even more fun.

This shows a solution that you might not normally have found.

To get from point A to point B, you may have to go through point C, or maybe it’s better to go a long way through points E and F. Whatever. The point is, now you know how to do it. Now you can go do it.