Here's Some Old Advice

[Peter Lloyd]

Yesterday I posted "Old Creative Advice" on IdeaConnection. Doing so prompted me to make a wish.

Many, many years ago, in a faraway land called CompuServe (which I was shocked to learn still exists), Franca Leeson, Tim Hurson, Hal Portner, my daughter Caitlin, and a crew of crazy creatives hobnobbed at 300 baud or slightely faster in the new frontier of pre-internet, dial-up, online community life.

We were just youngsters then and made fast and furious fun out of our all-text Creativity Forum. Little did we know that the helter-skelter world that raged and the methods we thought we were heralding there were nothing new. We talked about Father of Brainstorming Alex F. Osborne as if he were the Creativity Messiah.

Sometime between then and now, I discovered the advice of Friedrich Schiller to a friend in the creative doldrums. It is essentially similar to the Osborne-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process. At least the idea-finding part. How could it be otherwise? Our brains still work they way the brain of Socrates worked. And the way to greater creativity is found in a mental open-door policy. It always will be.

I wish (I suppose "hope" is the better word) that The Hub will always let "ideas rush in pell-mell" as Schiller advised his creatively blocked friend a century or so ago. And as we did in our Creativity Forum so many, many years ago.