My Mind Map on Prof Gerard J. Puccio's (Buffalo State University) "Creativity and Creative Problem Solving" Workshop

Ever since I started mind mapping, I probably have saved tons of paper. How? Instead of several pages of notes that I would normally make when attending a whole-day seminar, I now record it on just one sheet of paper. It was with that mindset of being eco-friendly as well as to challenge myself to do the "impossible" of taking notes in colour and at one sitting, that I managed to produce the above creation of a 3-hour lecture by Professor Gerard J Puccio on 12 Jan 2001 in Ngee Ann Polytechnic. It was a privilege to attend this excellent presentation of using Creative Problem Solving as a technique in this complex world of ours. The Divergent-Convergent thinking process among other things taught during the workshop left a deep impression in my mind.

Fast forward to Dec 2012 an excellent video presentation "Creativity as a Life Skill" by Prof Gerard Puccio in which he talked about how we should be "deliberately creative" in this fast changing world of ours in order to innovate faster. Individuals and organisation who does not know how to promote creativity would be the eventual losers.  

Fast forward to 16 March 2013, The Straits Times, page D6
An article on Why Study? by the Dean of NUS faculty of Law, Simon Chesterman where he mentioned that to survive, to do well in this globalised world , one needs to be creative, to think laterally, to be passionate about things because they are part of your identity rather than part of your career plan. Because today's students cannot know what is going to be important to their career. A good example of this is the late Steve Jobs. Professor Chesterman further elaborated that it was "calligraphy" that Steve was passionate about, 10 years before he designed the first Macintosh. Back then, he thought it had no hope of any practical applications. Thus Professor Chesterman said that it will not always be possible to predict what subjects will be important. But if you find something about which you are passionate, if it is part of your identity, you may find a way to make it important.

What Professor Chesterman says does ring a little bell for me. I am glad he wrote that article where he elaborated on why students considering a university education should ask themselves whom they want to be, not what they want to be.

Mind Map Blog by Choon Boo LIM is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License