Edward de Bono is one of the few people in history who can be said to have had a major impact on the way we think. He has written numerous books with translations into 34 languages, and is best known for being the originator of the term lateral thinking.
I’ve included some de Bono quotes from Lateral Thinking, Six Thinking Hats, and other places around the web. Something to come back to now and again.
“If you never change your mind, why have one?”
“The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.”
“Sometimes the situation is only a problem because it is looked at in a certain way. Looked at in another way, the right course of action may be so obvious that the problem no longer exists.”
“‘Nothing’ is the space for everything.”
“An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgements simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore.”
“An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.”
“Humour is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.”
“In the future, instead of striving to be right at a high cost, it will be more appropriate to be flexible and plural at a lower cost. If you cannot accurately predict the future then you must flexibly be prepared to deal with various possible futures.”
“One very important aspect of motivation is the willingness to stop and to look at things that no one else has bothered to look at. This simple process of focusing on things that are normally taken for granted is a powerful source of creativity.”
“To be successful you have to be lucky, or a little mad, or very talented, or find yourself in a rapid growth field.”
“We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience.”
Dr de Bono, I doff my thinking hat.
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