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      INNOCENCE

      “While we may not be able to control all that happens to us,

      we can control what happens inside us.”

      – Ben Franklin

      Creativity starts with the willingness to look at the world through innocent eyes. It involves shaking ourselves from our prejudices and established thinking patterns. Copthorne MacDonald, an expert on the cultivation of wisdom (http://www.cop.com), explains how innocence helps us discover new insights:

      “We find ourselves looking at the same old data, but we now see it in a dramatically different way. We experience another valid, and sometimes more significant way of understanding what is.”

      Sadly, the world grinds away at our trust and our innocence. Experience teaches us to doubt, to scoff and roll our eyes. In no time at all, the world can turn a genuinely creative individual into a Real World Adult. At that point, there’s not much of the real you left—too often, just a job title on a business card, a nameplate on an office door, a number on a badge, a face in the crowd.

      Think back. Remember when you were young and the world was a glittering place of limitless possibilities? Everywhere you looked, you found something new and different. Remember the magical feeling that you could do anything simply because nobody was telling you otherwise.

      A child’s word is made of spirit and miracles. We sometimes think that children should follow us, listen to us, become like us. Follow a child closely for an hour. Not to teach or to discipline, but to learn, and to laugh.

      – SARK, “A Creative Companion”

      Or to put it another way:

      “The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”

      – Aldous Huxley

      The key word is “spirit.” The goal is not to remain a child for the rest of your life, but to retain that childlike spirit of wonder and a willingness to innocently believe in possibilities.

      As children we have a natural innocence. As we age we lose it. I believe that one of the greatest benefits of spending time with children and grandchildren is that they teach us the virtues of innocence—IF we are aware and open to the learning.

      Three Quick Examples of Innocence

      EXAMPLE NO. 1: TRUTH IS RELATIVE TO THE CUSTOMER’S VIEWPOINT

      One day, I was reading Big Bird’s Color Game to my then three-year-old daughter, Tori. On one page, Big Bird was shown thinking of something orange that’s good to drink. “I bet you can’t guess what it is,” so said Big Bird in his word balloon.

      On the next page, Tori had a choice of a half-dozen orange-colored items—a butterfly, a T-shirt, a jack-o-lantern, a toy boat, a tiger lily and a glass of orange juice.

      Which one did you pick? Tori picked the tiger lily because of its long stem, which she took to be a straw. When you’re three years old, “good” equals “fun.” And it’s a lot more fun to drink through a straw than from a plain old glass. The tiger lily might not have been the answer Big Bird had in mind, but it was a valid response to the question.

      EXAMPLE 2: MORE THAN ONE RIGHT ANSWER

      Children have an ability to see alternative answers as their brains have not become mentally constipated with the “one right answer.” Consider an incident that occurred when my other daughter, Kristyn, was taking one of those pre-screening evaluations for kindergarten. The woman administering the test showed Kristyn a picture like this:

      What does it look like to you? Kristyn decided it was a windmill. The nice lady explained that, no, it was an airplane propeller—at which point Kristyn launched a 10-minute counterclaim. She argued that, with all due respect, the picture she had been shown was most definitely and undeniably of a windmill.

      Afterwards, the nice lady explained to my wife that, technically, she should have subtracted points from Kristyn’s score for her answer.

      “But she convinced me,” the nice lady said. “I guess it is a windmill after all.”

      EXAMPLE NO. 3: WHO’S THE SMARTEST?

      As an early post-toddler, my son, Brad,, was told that his clothes should match. He followed these directions explicitly. As a result, he often wore socks of two different colors. When it would be pointed out to him that his socks didn’t match, Brad would argue they did. And he would be right, inasmuch as each sock would match a part of the rest of his outfit. After dressing himself with, say, a red shirt and a pair of blue pants, he would choose a red sock and a blue sock.

      When you think about it, Brad actually might have a better idea. Just because his socks didn’t match each other didn’t mean that, in the larger sense, his whole getup wasn’t color coordinated.

      Grow Up but Don’t Grow Down in Creativity

      The whole point of growing up is to become a grown-up. It’s too bad, really. What happens to us? In the transition from innocence to experience, why do so many circuits in our brains slam shut?

      It’s because, early on, we’re told to stay inside the lines when we color. It’s not a bad thing to learn how to color inside the lines, unless it’s the only way we know how to color. In other words, as our education increases, imagination often decreases. THAT IS IF WE LET IT.

      Think about what Marvin Camras of the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute, the inventor of magnetic recording and holder of more than 500 patents, said in an interview in Inventors at Work, by Kenneth A. Brown, published by Tempus Books of Microsoft Press:

      “I think little children tend to be creative, but the more education you get, the more the inventive spark is educated out of you. In our educational process, you have to conform. Educators don’t like you to go off the beaten path. In math, for example, you have to follow the style that someone suggests. After you’ve gone through more and more education, you conform more and more. You might even say that you’re discouraged from inventing. Of course, different people have different natures. Some people can invent in spite of their education.”

      As we march toward Real World Adulthood, we

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