Provide educational materials on the creative process. When people are hired, give them a book on personal creativity. Purchase and circulate reading materials on creativity; you might even consider selecting one book per year that the company buys for each person and gives as a gift. Some readings on the creative process that we recommend are:

• Creativity in Business by Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers

• Conceptual Blockbusting by James Adams

• The Art of the Problem by Russell Ackoff

• Lateral Thinking by Edward deBono

• A Whack on the Side of the Head by Richard Van Oech

The successful creative business leaders who speak to our classes don;t strive. They apply themselves to a task for the sheer joy of doing it. It is in this sort of effort that you, too, can experience your inner creativity.

In our Stanford classes, we recommend this: Get to work on something (almost anything) productive, with the simply (even foolish) confidence that the work that’s in front of you is part of your answer.

So let us begin the adventure of living with the chapter’s heuristic: “Destroy judgment, create curiosity.” The first step is to recognise the power of your own thoughts by exploring your inner terrain.

Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, the burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside. From the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself.

We’ll explain a few simple ways to do this, but first you need to understand one really big point: Designers don’t think their way forward. Designers build their way forward. What does that mean? It means you are not just going to be dreaming up a lot of fun fantasies that have no relationship to the real world—or the real you. You are going to build things (we call them prototypes), try stuff, and have a lot of fun in the process.

Want a career change? This book will help you make that change, but not by sitting around trying to decide what that change is going to be.