What is Borrowed Brilliance?
It’s a creative thinking technique. You know the one. Admit it, you’ve borrowed an idea before: From a competitor, a coworker or the little red-haired girl sitting next to you in fifth grade. In his new book, published by Penguin in North America and Random House in Europe, former aerospace scientist and software entrepreneur, Dave Murray, says that borrowing is much more than just intellectual theft, it’s actually the core creative thinking technique and that all creative thought derives from it. New ideas, he says, are constructed out of existing ideas. Period. It’s the law of cerebral physics. Brilliance is, and has always been, borrowed. Newton, Darwin and Einstein did it. So do Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Page of Google. Don’t be fooled and let anyone tell you differently.
Once you submit to borrowed brilliance, Dave says, it changes your relationship with creative thought. Instead of being mysterious and out of reach, creativity becomes deliberate and intentional, it becomes the search for an existing idea. It’s still difficult, the borrowed ideas only provide the material, you still need to construct the new idea, but, at least, it’s no longer a mystery. Dave cuts through all the creative confusion and lays out the journey in six simple steps.
Step 1: Defining—Define the problem you’re trying to solve.
Step 2: Borrowing—Borrow ideas from places with a similar problem.
Step 3: Combining—Connect and combine these borrowed ideas.
Step 4: Incubating—Allow combinations to incubate into a solution.
Step 5: Judging—Identify the strength and weakness of the solution.
Step 6: Enhancing—Eliminate weak points while enhancing strong ones.
