Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward de Bono

De Bono is aiming at a quiet trap: the way the mind confuses whatever worked yesterday with whatever is true. “Temporary structures” is a deliberately deflating phrase. It reframes our beliefs, habits, and institutions not as solid realities but as scaffolding thrown up by circumstance - useful, provisional, and dangerously easy to mistake for permanent architecture. The line “a particular sequence of experience” does more work than it seems. It suggests that our mental models aren’t even the product of deep reasoning; they’re often the accidental sediment of timing, repetition, and what we happened to encounter first.

The intent is instructional, but the subtext is almost political. If your worldview is built from a sequence, it can be rebuilt by a different sequence - new inputs, reframed problems, lateral moves. That’s classic de Bono: creativity isn’t self-expression or artistic flair; it’s a tool for cognition, a way to escape the ruts that logic alone can deepen. In his broader project (lateral thinking, “Six Thinking Hats”), he treats creativity as an engineering discipline for the mind: deliberately generating alternatives rather than arguing inside the existing frame.

The context matters: de Bono wrote in an era enthralled by IQ, systems analysis, and managerial “rationality.” This sentence pushes back on that prestige. It implies that intelligence can become a prisoner of its own efficiency, optimizing within a box it never chose. Creativity, here, is less about making something new than refusing to let history - personal or cultural - be mistaken for destiny.