Have you become resigned and cynical about any of your problems? Is there anything that you just wish wasn't so? Is there anything that you complain about regularly? If not, you're doing pretty well. But even so, consider that there may be things you've learned to live with unnecessarily. Thinkertoys teaches a process for finding your unconscious assumptions about a particular problem that you're examining.

I'll give you an example that led to one of my biggest breakthroughs. I dropped out of sales in 2002, back in the days when I depended on the benevolence of people I knew to peddle expensive kitchen cutlery to people who didn't need it. I was frustrated at the end of my short-lived sales career, thinking that it takes a certain personality to succeed in sales. Three years later, I picked up a copy of Thinkertoys and read about a creative process called "Reversal." The process entails listing everything you believe to be irreversibly set in stone about a problem. The author uses a restaurant as his example, and lists assumptions such as "restaurants sell food" as examples of what we take for granted about restaurants. He then uses his technique to devise several new restaurant concepts from reversing these assumptions. For example, he lists a restaurant that gives away food for free, but charges by the hour for the use of the table.

In the summer of 2007, I came across Ann Sieg. Those of you who have read my network marketing lens know that I'm a huge fan of hers. But one thing that really jumped out at me about her approach was the fact that she'd used the "reversal" process to create it, whether she had used Michalko's modality or not. Before she released her network marketing system, she said in one of her e-mails that she was working on an approach to network marketing wherein prospecting for leads could become a source of revenue rather than an expense. This immediately brought to mind the restaurant example. I could envision sitting at a desk, thinking of hidden assumptions about network marketing, and listing one of them as "finding leads costs money." And then I could see her asking, "But what if it didn't?"

Seeing Ann Sieg's accomplishment (and realizing that the power of this technique could be applied to any problem) inspired me to take on a new challenge of my own. Thinking back to my dreadful and embarrassing sales years, I asked myself what I was assuming. I came up with "extraverts are better salespeople than introverts." That's the short version of the story, but the end result was this: I created myself from that day forward as The Introverted Entrepreneur. People loved it! It's written on my business cards to this day.

What constraints do you take for granted in your life? Think about a problem you're trying to solve, or better yet, a problem you've just learned to live with. Have you accepted as reality that getting a job has to be harder when you're fresh out of college? That moving to a new neighborhood has to mean a big hassle? That having children has to be a drain on your energy? That buying a new car has to cost you more money than keeping your old one? That putting gas in your tank has to be an expense?

What if nothing had to remain the way it is? What would you reverse?

It was one of those days when I started to wonder if I was nearing the end of the Idea Stream. Of course, the Idea Stream never stops flowing, and there is no end to it, so whenever I start feeling this way, I know it's just time to look at things from a different angle again. So, I tried out the "Rattlesnakes and Roses" process in the Intuitive Thinkertoys section. This process suggests that you look at two completely different things, and see if by drawing similarities between them, you can generate new insights about how to solve a problem.

So, my problem was simple. How was I going to continue writing about how to drill down a niche process over and over again? Wouldn't I simply run out of things to say, sooner or later? How much is there to say about drilling down to find a niche? So, I tried out this process and was astounded with what I found.

I looked at my blender as I was making a protein shake for breakfast. I asked myself, "What does drilling for niches have in common with a blender?" Here's what I found, among other things. I found that a blender needs to be cleaned after each use, or it will start to leave residue behind. If you leave residue in the blender, it will affect the taste of anything you blend up after that. The niche brainstorming process has a similar trait. If you don't start from a clean slate each time, you'll end up generating the same ideas over and over, or your new ideas will be tainted with the assumptions you made during the process of generating the first ideas. That's just one similarity I found.

The process led me to two great insights: one, the niche drilling process is about practicing the fundamentals and getting really good at doing them over and over, not about thinking up as many off the wall ideas as possible. Second, coming up with a niche was as much about refining the process and doing it consistently as it was about the end product. This gave me a whole host of new ideas to write about, just from doing this process one time!

I also couldn't help but notice that I was also applying part of the SCAMPER process at the same time. I was coming up with analogies to the niche brainstorming process, an intangible concept, by considering each part of a blender, a tangible object. This just showed me the vast, infinite potential available from using analogies to look at things from a new viewpoint. I didn't even get into the rest of SCAMPER, which would have been invaluable. For example, I might have considered how to improve or combine the parts of a blender and see how this might improve the parts of the niche brainstorming process.

So, it appears that all of the processes in this book have the potential to synergize in this fashion. I can't wait to explore this some more.

You've surely noticed by now that children take on fundamentally new attributes that are independent of their mother and their father. Ideas work the same way. Combining two things produces something new that's greater than the sum of its parts. Michalko describes a process called SCAMPER (an acronym). I won't go into all the aspects here, but I'll just focus on the "C," which stand for "combine." The basic idea is to break down a problem or project into its smallest components, and see which of them can be combined in a meaningful way.

I used a variation of the SCAMPER process back when I was developing the Introverted Entrepreneur concept, though it hadn't dawned on me at the time that I was using Michalko's approach. That's the beauty of these processes; like I said in the beginning, once you start using them, they become automatic. Anyhow, I jotted down a list of my own attributes. I also started listing labels that I thought other people were likely to stick on me. I came up with a lengthy list, and they represented a number of different slices of my personality. They also told a good story about my sales and marketing career, and gave a good explanation as to why I hadn't gotten very far.

I started examining each individual one, and found myself frustrated and drawing a blank. But, I started seeing a pattern. I saw words relating to sales showing up repeatedly, and I saw words relating to my introverted nature showing up over and over. Finally, at one point, I started putting them next to each other. When I saw "introvert" next to "entrepreneur," the fit was automatic and obvious. The two words didn't just fit ME, but they also fit each other like a glove.

The combination of introversion and entrepreneurship sparked a whole new line of thought. These two concepts combined created a huge conflict for me, and they also fit logically together. Introverts, I realized, are likely to gravitate toward entrepreneurship naturally. We don't fit into a mold and we're quirky. We don't like being bossed around and told what to do, and we don't like having to follow somebody else's rules. We come up with our own creative ways of doing things, and as a result, being entrepreneurial is in our blood. It also causes us a lot of problems. Owning your own business means you have to sell, and we introverts don't like selling.

I knew I had struck gold. Neither of these concepts alone had opened up much of anything for me, but combining them cracked open a whole new world of possibility. I knew that other people were in the same boat as me and would have similar war stories to tell. My exploits over the next several months confirmed this hunch. But the point is, it took combining two small parts of the overall picture to see this.

Try it out for yourself. Pick a problem or challenge, and break it down into small parts. Are there any two small parts that can be combined?

Language is a vehicle for creation of new ideas. If you read my earlier two articles in this lens, you've seen that we as humans tend to make fundamental assumptions about life and how it works, and that over time, these assumptions become unconscious. Fleshing them out and bringing them to the surface can, in itself, be an earth-shattering insight. The use of language is instrumental in this process, because articulation is a vehicle through which the unconscious becomes conscious. In other words, talking about our unspoken assumptions makes us aware of them, and it further allows us to share these insights with other people.

Writing is a tremendously powerful vehicle for capturing what Michalko refers to as "Idea Birds" in the early part of the book. He likens an idea to a bird in that it's likely to fly away if you don't catch it quickly. Writing during the brainstorming process, or rather, using writing AS the brainstorming process, captures those "Idea Birds" on the fly. But first, you need to develop the skill of writing your unconscious thoughts onto paper before you have time to think about them. That's when you'll really astound yourself.

This can be accomplished through what Michalko refers to as "Mind Pumping," or the fundamental practice of putting the creative centers of your mind to work over and over again on a daily basis until the creative flywheel picks up enough momentum to keep spinning on its own. You can start off very simply, by just writing the same or similar sentences over and over again in different variations. This begins to condition you to think about things in a slightly different way, and to look at things from a slightly different angle. That's all that's really needed for creativity to work: a slightly different viewpoint. Mind pumping is intended to get you into that habit until it becomes unconscious.

Another way that you can use writing to "mind pump" is to do daily journaling exercises. You can wake up each morning and just start writing down whatever thoughts come to mind. This can be quite interesting if you start doing it while you're still drowsy, because then you might even catch some thoughts that are left over residue from your dreams. In any case, whenever you do this, try to get in the habit of just writing whatever floats to the surface without editing or stopping to think about it. Don't even worry about getting the grammar correct. You don't have to show it to anybody, after all. Just let the thoughts come, and put them onto paper.

If you make a habit of mind pumping, you'll soon begin to notice radical new ideas and insights just inexplicably appearing. It's an exciting and exhilarating feeling to start flexing the creative muscles that you didn't know you had, so I hope you give this a try.