Edward de Bono (b.1933,) fully Edward Francis Charles Publius de Bono, is a British psychologist and writer. A leading designer of critical thinking, he is famous for coining the phrase “lateral thinking,” in which thought becomes a deliberate—rather than an instinctive or reactive—action.
Born in Malta, de Bono is a graduate in medicine from Malta University. He won a Rhodes Scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained an honours degree in psychology and physiology and then a DPhil in medicine. From 1976–83, he was a lecturer in medicine at Cambridge, and he is involved with several organizations to promote the skills of modern critical thinking, including the Cognitive Research Trust, Cambridge.
With the boom in the self-help book market in the 1970s, de Bono turned his attention to the more lucrative field of popular psychology. He published such popular books on problem solving as The Use of Lateral Thinking (1967,) I Am Right and You Are Wrong: From Rock Logic to Water Logic (1992,) and Six Thinking Hats (1999.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Edward de Bono
The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Ideas
Everyone has the right to doubt everything as often as he pleases and the duty to do it at least once. No way of looking at things is too sacred to be reconsidered. No way of doing things is beyond improvement.
—Edward de Bono
Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Thinking
Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Thinking, Mistakes
One very important aspect of motivation is the willingness to stop and to look at things that no one else has bothered to look at. This simple process of focusing on things that are normally taken for granted is a powerful source of creativity…
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Motivation
If you wait for opportunities to occur, you will be one of the crowd.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Opportunity
Dealing with complexity is an inefficient and unnecessary waste of time, attention and mental energy. There is never any justification for things being complex when they could be simple.
—Edward de Bono
In the future, instead of striving to be right at a high cost, it will be more appropriate to be flexible and plural at a lower cost. If you cannot accurately predict the future then you must flexibly be prepared to deal with various possible futures.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Future
An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea that exists only as an idea.
—Edward de Bono
Topics: Action, Ideas
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