1. If you think you are creative, chances are you’re right.
2. Your history of creative accomplishments, even more than “creativity test” scores, tends to indicate how creative you will be in the future.
3. If you want to be more creative, you must know your field, understand creative problem solving approaches, then with the right motivation, you will meet your goals. Desire is as important as ability. Those who do not care or dare to be creative, won’t.
4. Those who are gifted in creativity have a sense of destiny about what they are trying to do. It helps them persist when others might give up.
5. All these characteristics have been found in the early life of creative people.
6. Paying attention to ideas that pop up during free time leads to imaginative breakthroughs. Alternation between work and play is important to creative fitness. Innovation often results from purposeful play. 
7. If you don’t love what you are doing, it is unlikely you will ever be inspired.
8. Only those who don’t ask questions are stupid.
9. You need to do both (a) and (b) or you’ll strike out creatively.
10. Those who believe (a) will always fall into the adequacy trap.
11.The drive to find a logical explanation often motivates creative individuals, but frequently they do not get original solutions through a logical route. The nonlogical, sometimes random, but purposeful play of the creative individual is fueled by curiosity and delight in uncertainty and mystery.
12. Although many creative ideas come in brain storming groups, highly creative individuals often are introverts who value working alone with a problem more than gaining approval and acceptance from others.
13. A rigidly ordered life is governed too closely by outmoded rules from the past. Because creative people have one foot in current reality and another in the future, they have to tolerate ambiguity well. They seek ambiguous situations to impose their particular order on the world.
14. Innovators question the way even when it seems right. They continually seek a better way. Consequently they stir things up just to see what might happen. Plans are primarily useful to get you going, then you re-adjust as you see the results.
15. Immediate evaluation–any kind of judgment– will kill off the next creative idea. Be curious rather than critical. Creative people play with others’ ideas and build upon them if they can. Then all gain.
16. Logic can be useful if the logical system is up to date. But if you want to get ahead of the crowd, you need to find new possibilities and new paradigms. Hunches are OK, if you check them out later.
17. Intuition is a sudden wholistic insight, not processed serially like logical thinking. One who is creative uses both logical and nonlogical methods. Anything is OK in creative thinking if it is the means to a better end.
18. Creative people must seek change where they hope to be creative, but change in every area of life can be chaotic. The more internal stability individuals have, the more freedom they have to change externally. Rigidity, however, is an anathema to creativity.
19. Those who dare to take a chance will be creative. Luck comes to those who work hard, and to those who see what others are afraid to see. Creativity is often persistence with a twist.
20. When everything fails, re-read the instructions. But innovative solutions do not come with instructions for their discovery. So practice the improvising life style, trying things out, just to see what might happen. Then you will be ready to deal will unexpected events.
21. Creative people cannot be too dependent upon another’s judgments which are often based upon past criteria, for the future has its own requirements that others might not yet understand. To the innovator, rules are made to be broken. Imaginative solutions often come to those who pay attention to the metaphors of their dreams. Be willing to change your mind–it shows you are learning something new. Your wishes drive imaginative solutions to the surface. Though curiosity killed the cat, information brought it back to investigate further.
22. Innovators look to the situation’s potential and the beauty of a solution. Yet the practical consequences and how others react often decide if an idea ever gets a hearing.
23. All these are characteristics of creativity.
24. If you do not try to carry out a new idea, how will you know how good it is? Besides you may never get valuable feedback to make improvements.
25. Rewards tend to alter the focus from the creative process to externals. Intrinsic motivation from the joy of the work stirs most creativity.
26. Some people create to compensate for unmet needs, but they sustain little joy in the work. Healthy people express creative attitudes in all they do. As they fulfill the creative potential in the work they do, they fulfill themselves.
27.Creativity exists on a continuum. Although some people have more creative talent than others, all can become more creative.
28. The most original thinkers spend more time analyzing the problem than trying to find a quick answer to an inadequate question.
29. Sometimes the right answer is not always the best solution. Too often it causes us to stop investigating further. If you answered 16 (counting all the small squares), you were right. If you answered 25 (adding also the nine four squares), you were right. If you said 29 (adding also the four nine squares), you were right. If you said 30 (adding the large sixteen squares), you may have the best answer possible . . . till someone comes along with a better one.
30.
Sometimes you have to go outside your internal boundaries, challenging the assumptions and the unconscious gestalt of the square. Can you find ways to connect the dots with three lines or even one line? (These solutions will be in later issues)
31. To put milk in, water in, anything in. To use as a buoy, a plant holder, a club, a bat. Cut it up and use it as a bailer, a funnel. The more you list, the more likely you will come up with original answers. Usually these are toward the end when you run out of remembered solutions.
32. Any word can be used as a metaphor to serve as a bridge to a better solution. Shifting perspective through the right metaphor may help us find some paths to ending war. We all need to be more creative, or we are not going to live on this planet much longer. I hope you came up with some good new ideas.