Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward de Bono

De Bono is picking a fight with the cult of cleverness. In one clean sentence, he demotes the sparkling, undefeated thought in your head and crowns the slightly battered version that actually makes contact with the world. The intent is pragmatic, but it’s also a quiet rebuke to intellectual status games: the idea-as-idea can win arguments, signal intelligence, and stay safely untestable. Once you “develop and put into action,” it stops being a badge and becomes a tool, exposed to friction, compromise, and the possibility of failure.

The subtext is classic de Bono. As the psychologist who popularized lateral thinking, he spent a career trying to move creativity from mystique to method. This line tells you why: novelty isn’t the point; usefulness is. “Developed” matters as much as “action” because he’s not romanticizing impulsiveness. He’s describing a pipeline: shaping a thought into something buildable, communicable, and adjustable. Action is the experiment; development is the discipline that makes the experiment legible.

Contextually, it lands as a mid-to-late 20th-century corrective to both academic abstraction and corporate brainstorming theater, where ideation becomes its own performance. De Bono’s sentence works because it weaponizes a simple hierarchy: ideas don’t earn their importance by existing, but by changing something outside the mind. If an idea can’t survive contact with reality, it was never as valuable as it felt in the glow of possibility.