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Think Naked helps businesspeople reconnect with their inner genius
By Chuck Frey
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Summary:
If you like reading about creativity techniques and thinking "out of the box," then Think Naked should be on your must-read list.
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Buy this book from Amazon.com
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Think Naked, a new creativity book by Marco Marsan, is written around an interesting concept: Its goal is to help you to return to your "childlike brilliance," so you can be much more creative and open to new ideas.
Because many executives tend to suffer from "hardening of the attitudes" -- habitual, rutted thinking patterns -- books like Think Naked can help to ''whack you upside the head" and get you thinking in fresh, creative directions. In that sense, Think Naked can be classified in the same genre of creativity books as A Kick in the Seat of the Pants by Roger von Oech and ThinkerToys by Michael Michalko. All three of these books successfully combine a playful tone with a wealth of interesting creative problem-solving techniques.
How the book is structured
Think Naked contains a combination of stories, principles and exercises designed to help you reclaim your childlike genius. What it's ultimately all about, however, is helping you to get back in touch with what makes you passionate. The book teaches four principles:
- Wear your cape: This section helps you to overcome the fear that naturally comes with taking creative risks.
- Blockbuster: This section provides you with advice on how to destroy conventional thinking, break stereotypes, positively challenge authority and change the rules.
- Look at your neighbor's paper: In school, you were taught not to cheat, not to look at your neighbor's paper. But, as an adult in the business world it's okay to admit that you don't know everything, Marsan explains. It's perfectly acceptable to seek information and advice from others who are experts on the challenge at hand, or to adopt and adapt the best practices of others.
- Show and tell: How to get in touch with what makes you passionate.
Each section contains numerous creative problem solving tips and strategies designed to help you put aside preconceived ways of thinking, and to begin thinking in fresh, creative directions. Some of these are techniques that I've read before in other creativity technique books, while others were unique and thought-provoking.
Look at your neighbor's paper
My favorite section of the book is "Look at Your Neighbor's Paper." It contains ten different exercises to help you to find the information you need to solve problems and develop killer ideas, how to ask intelligent questions, and how to seek out unconventional and even radical sources of inspiration. My mind is most creative when I have filled its "raw material pile" with a lot of high quality, divergent input. So naturally, I enjoyed hearing Marsan's advice for getting out of my information rut and seeking new sources of creative input.
One of the core principles of this section is that "Lfe is an open book test." Marsan points out that, in school, we were measured on our ability to accumulate and regurgitate information. No more. "You don't have to pull every answer, idea or solution out of your head," he explains. "Your boss, your spouse, your kids don't care where you get answers. They just want a solution that makes them happy. So even though it's difficult to believe this after more than a decade of education, here it is straight up: If you don't know the answer, it's OK to get it from somewhere else."
This advice sounds simple, but is actually quite profound. Think about it As knowledge becomes obsolete more and more quickly today, we can no longer be "Lone Rangers," pretending we have all the answers and trying to solve every challenge on our own. Increasingly, our success will depend on our abilities to ask creative questions, seek out expert advice, and to become proficient at researching and gathering information on an ad hoc basis from a multitude of sources. In order to do that, we must often "look at our neighbor's paper."
Finding your passion
Indirectly, Think Naked is about finding your passion in life -- the unbridled energy and optimism you approached everything with as a child. This is an important mission that each of us must personally undertake if we want to become more creative, for without passion, there is very little creativity!
Once you reconnect with what Marsan calls the "purity of intent" that you enjoyed as a child, you'll find that your world opens up, exposing many new, exciting possibilities. "With purity of intent, you always know what to do," Marsan advises. "No more fretting over what you want to do versus what you have to do. But you've been told you have to do it anyway. I'm here to tell you the reverse is true. You have to do what you want to do." In other words, you must follow you passion to reconnect with your childlike brilliance.
"Thinking naked will make it so that you always have possibilities. With possibilities come more choices, and with more choices, better decisions. It's that simple. You'll never find yourself in a desperate situation again... You'll find yourself tackling problems that used to debilitate you," he predicts.
Conclusion
Think Naked contains a wealth of valuable advice and techniques for living a creative life and for injecting a fresh does have childlike wonder into your problem-solving strategies. In this case, the medium is the message: By making the book very playful in tone and style, it's easy to see that Marco Marsan practices what he preaches.
Submitted on: 11/11/2003
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