People can be motivated to creativity simply with the instruction to "be creative."

People can be motivated to creativity simply with the instruction to "be creative."

You only understand information relative to what you already understand.

Physicist Isador Isaac Rabi, who won a Nobel Prize for inventing a technique that permitted scientists to probe the structure of atoms and molecules in the 1930s, attributed his success to the way his mother used to greet him when he came home from school each day. "Did you ask any good questions today, Isaac?" she would say.

I am terribly fascinated with things that I don’t understand.

The key to making things understandable is to understand what it's like NOT to understand.

My opening line to my students, and a recurring theme in my classes, was that the big design problem isn't designing a house for your parents or yourself, a museum, or a toaster, or a book, or whatever. The big design problem is designing your life. It's by the design of your life that you create the backboard off which you bounce all your thoughts and ideas and creativity. You have to decide what it is that you want to do each day.