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1 • Use of the Familiar

The familiar, the commonplace, and the mediocre are all im­portant tools for the creative mind. A hissing teakettle was the familiar that started the invention of a steam engine; a chunk of soft rubber, used for cleaning wallpaper, was the commonplace that led to the idea of attaching erasers to lead pencils; a barber's clippers suggested to McCormick the idea for his mechanical reaper. A baby's crying, a sound ignored for hundreds of years, started Walter Hunt on experiments for a new way to bend wire and produced the first "safety" pin. The sight of a wife acciden­tally spilling paint on the floor, while trying to pour it from one can into another, gave another inventor an idea for a clamp-on pouring spout for paint cans.

Every new idea must have its beginnings in something familiar —something old. The inventor or creator cannot start with noth­ing—he must borrow his beginning somewhere. This is usually something familiar, accepted, and often ignored by everyone else. But it is something more to the creative mind: something that bothers the individual so that he either wants to put an end to it or wants to get away from it through a leap to a better "some­thing." The creative "urge" comes from realizing this—then realizing that the familiar must be changed.

For a business executive, this suggests that the more things he can make familiar to himself, the more opportunities he will have to materially improve both himself and his business. He should, therefore, know and understand such commonplace business prob­lems as the unions with which he must deal; the government that regulates, taxes, or controls the business; the communities in which his plants are located; the economy in which the ups and downs of wages, prices, and interest rates are significant.

Good ideas come when a person is alert to conditions, has the imagination to see opportunities and the common sense to follow through. And it all begins with something so familiar that it is easier to ignore it than challenge it.

Related terms include small business start up and business organizations.