For a More Creative Brain, Follow These 5 Steps

Uses the story of Frederic Eugene Ives — the 19th-century inventor whose halftone printing process cut the cost of reproducing photographs 15x — to illustrate James Webb Young's five-stage creative process from A Technique for Producing Ideas: (1) gather new material, both specific and general; (2) thoroughly work it over in your mind; (3) step completely away from the problem; (4) let the idea return to you in a flash; (5) shape and revise it based on real-world feedback. Creativity isn't generating something from nothing — it's making new combinations of existing ideas.