Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward de Bono

De Bono is smuggling a quiet rebuke into a soothing sentence: your "problem" might be less an external fact than a habit of perception. As the patron saint of lateral thinking, he treats cognition the way a designer treats a prototype - not as a sacred truth, but as a draft that can be revised. The line works because it flatters and indicts at once. It reassures you that clarity is possible, then implies you helped manufacture the confusion by insisting on a single frame.

The key move is the slippery phrase "looked at". De Bono doesn’t say the situation changes; the viewing angle does. That’s a psychological pivot away from brute-force willpower and toward reframing: shift assumptions, swap constraints, rename the goal. The promise is almost scandalous: the "right course of action" can become "so obvious" that the very category of "problem" evaporates. That’s not optimism; it’s cognitive judo, using the mind’s own tendency to categorize against itself.

The subtext is a critique of conventional intelligence. Traditional problem-solving rewards linearity and debate - two teams arguing inside the same box. De Bono’s wider project (think Six Thinking Hats and corporate creativity workshops) was built for boardrooms and classrooms where people mistake stuckness for complexity. He’s insisting that stalemates often come from the frame: a false either/or, a prestige narrative, an unexamined definition of success.

It’s also a warning: if you can dissolve problems by reframing them, you can also hide from real ones. De Bono’s genius is making that tension feel like an invitation rather than a lecture.