Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward de Bono

De Bono is smuggling an ego check into what sounds like a pep talk. “Motivation,” in his framing, isn’t raw ambition or hustle; it’s the discipline to pause. That’s a quiet rebuke to the default modern posture of constant motion, where speed stands in for insight. He treats stopping as an active choice, almost a minor act of defiance against the social reward system that pays out for quick takes and visible productivity.

The line about “things that no one else has bothered to look at” isn’t romantic lone-genius mythology so much as an observation about attention economics: most people aren’t withholding brilliance, they’re withholding time. De Bono’s subtext is that creativity is less about having rarified ideas than about redirecting perception toward the obvious. The “taken for granted” detail matters because it reframes originality as a kind of recalibration, not invention from thin air. You don’t need a lightning bolt; you need the willingness to notice the furniture of everyday life and ask why it’s arranged that way.

Contextually, this sits neatly inside de Bono’s broader project (lateral thinking, Six Thinking Hats): creativity as a trainable method, not a mystical trait. Calling it a “simple process” is strategic. He’s selling a democratizing thesis: the barrier to creative output is often procedural, not genetic. The intent is practical and slightly moralistic: if you want better ideas, start by auditing your assumptions, not your ambition.