Albert Einstein said, ‘Imagination is the preview of life’s coming attractions. It is more important than knowledge. Imagination is everything’.
Imagination is a type of thinking by which you form in your own mind a new image or picture of something that has never existed before.
It is applied intelligence. Intelligence is aptitude, natural ability, raw mind power or reason which is an extension of the basic eternal quality of the divine mind.
While all normal human beings are inherently intelligent by virtue of their divine creation but they possess different levels of imaginative abilities because of their different developmental processes through which they pass from birth to adulthood.
Your imagination is your creativity (seeing the connection between two seemingly different ideas or things), ingenuity, innovativeness, inventiveness or the ability to create something new that has never existed before in the world.
Research indicates that there are two main types of imagination ‘synthetic imagination’ through which you can arrange old ideas, concepts or plans into new combinations to create new products and services.
For example, early this year in January Frank Darko a Ghanaian inventor combined parts of an ordinary bicycle and floatable materials made from cork to create a bicycle that rides on water!
He dropped from a technical school to design a bicycle that rides on water to help the school children who had to swim to school.
Other example of products from synthetic imagination are the ‘Sony Walkman’ and ‘hair dryer’.
In the creation of the ‘Sony Walkman’, the innovation only lay in the miniaturizing parts to make the tape-recording machine portable.
It was a marketing brilliance rather than a technological breakthrough.
As Akio Morita Chairman of Sony at that time pointed out, ‘There was no new technology involved in the Sony Walkman. What we did was see the technology we had already in a totally new configuration’.
In the creation of the ‘hair dryer’, the innovation was also in the combining of already existing electric heater, motor and fan to create it.
Most ‘new’ products that you see on the market today were created through the use of synthetic imagination.
They are simply improvements and modifications to existing products, copies of competitor’s products or line extensions.
A survey conducted by Booz, Allen and Hamilton in the USA which studied 13,000 new products introduced during the five year-period ending in 1981, found that only 10 per cent of the products surveyed were ‘true’  innovations!
That is, resulting from creative imagination.
The second type of imagination is ‘creative imagination’ by which your conscious mind, through your subconscious mind, gets direct communication with your super-conscious mind or Universal Mind to receive new ideas.
It is by this creative imagination through which ‘hunches’ and ‘inspirations’ are received, all basic or new ideas are developed, thought vibration from the minds of others are received and one individual may ‘tune in’, or communicate with the subconscious minds of other people. For example, Dr Elmer Gates of Maryland, USA created more than 200 useful inventions through his use of creative imagination. His laboratory was completely sound proof to maintain silence.
Whenever he wanted to draw upon the forces available in his super-conscious mind or Universal Mind, he would go to his laboratory room with a pen and a pad, sit down, shut off all the lights and then concentrate upon the known factors of the invention on which he was working.
He would remain in that position until ideas began to ‘flash’ into his mind in connection with the unknown factors of the invention.
On one occasion, ideas came through to him so fast that he was forced to write for almost three hours!
When the thoughts stopped flowing and he examined his notes, he found that they contained the answer to his problem.
In this way, Dr Gates completed over 200 inventions.
He earned his living by ‘sitting for ideas’ for individuals and some of the largest corporations in the USA paid him substantial fees, by the hour, ‘for sitting for ideas’!
Many successful inventors like Dr Gates himself, Thomas Edison who invented the electric light bulb and others like them used both synthetic and creative imagination to come up with their inventions.
It is documented that Thomas Edison had a couch in his laboratory on which he could take a nap whenever he wanted to get in touch with the Universal Mind for answers to the problems which he was investigating.
Right here at home in Zambia, in Kitwe on the Copper belt, I have – myself – personally interviewed a car mechanic locally and popularly known as ‘Mabuleza’ who uses the same technique of taking a nap to get answers from his inner mind whenever he has a car problem which he does not know how to solve.
After hearing about his case I was curious and so I made an appointment to go and see him. When I asked him if he ever dreamed of any other thing whenever he slept or took a nap, he said no!
He said, ‘I only dream about cars’!
That can give you a small window to how single-mindedly his mind is focused on his work!! Mabuleza could qualify for what is known as ‘a bush mechanic’ or someone who learned car mechanics only through apprenticeship.
He hardly went beyond primary school and knows absolutely nothing about how conscious mind, subconscious mind and super-conscious mind or Universal Mind work.
However, one thing that he knows for sure from his practical experience is that imagination works, at least for him, and he uses it many times to make his money and so can you!
On the other hand, schooling is a process of receiving classroom instruction from a teacher. In essence, schooling is only a mental conditioning process through which you pass to become somebody like a teacher, lawyer, medical practitioner, journalist, social worker, architect, accountant, electrician, agronomist, engineer, psychologist and so on mostly so that others can employ you to do their work!
While imagination is natural and open schooling is human-made, value-laden and narrow. For instance, there is no value-free schooling.
Every form of schooling serves a set of values, beliefs, attitudes and philosophies.
Modern schooling was invented during the period of industrialization in Europe to create employees to work in factories and industries for a wage.
Schooling’s ultimate goal of employment is what makes it narrow in both its outlook and practice.
Not long ago, sadly and tragically a Zambian young man who successfully completed secondary school with six points committed suicide because he did not get a government bursary to go and study at the University of Zambia.
If this young man had just exercised adequate imagination he could be alive today and later contribute to the development and prosperity of Zambia.
Some years ago, realizing the independent and open power and nature of imagination a Yale University president in the USA gave this advice to a former president of Ohio State University, ‘Always be kind to your A and B students. Someday one of them will return to your campus as a good professor. And also be kind to your C students. Someday one of them will return and build a two-million dollar science laboratory’!
The moral of the advice is as clear as daylight on a sunny day.
This world is full of people who either completely never went to any formal school, dropped out of school or graduated with low grades and later became inventors, millionaires and billionaires!
John Williams in his book The Knack of Using Your Subconscious Mind lists many inventions that came through creative imagination and their inventors came from all walks of life: ‘The father of photography was an army officer; and of the electric motor , a book binder’s clerk. The inventor of the telegraph was a portrait painter. A farmer invented the type writer; a poet, the sewing machine; a cabinet maker, the cotton gin; and a coal miner, the locomotive. The telephone was the after-school work of a teacher of the deaf; the wax cylinder phonograph, a lawyer’s clerk; the type-setting machine, a grocery man. A physician made the first pneumatic tire because his little son was an invalid’.
The people with great imagination who dropped out of school and went on to create multi-billion dollar businesses include Mark Zuckerberg who dropped out of school at the age of 16 and went on to become co-founder of Face book with a net worth of 4 billion dollars in 2009; Michael Dell who dropped out of school at the age of 19 and went on to become founder of Dell Computers with a net worth of 17 billion dollars in 2009; Steve Jobbs who dropped out of school at the age of 18 and went on to become co-founder of Apple Computers with a net worth of 5 billion dollars in 2009; Bill Gates who dropped out of school at the age of 19 and went on to become co-founder of Microsoft Corporation with a net worth of 59 billion dollars in 2009; Richard Bronson who dropped out of school at the age of 16 and went on to become founder of Virgin Atlantic Airlines with a net worth of 4 billion dollars in 2009; and Henry Ford who dropped out of school at the age of 16 and went on to become founder of Ford Motor Company with a net worth of 188 billion dollars in 2009.
Just as Albert Einstein put it, imagination is indeed everything and it is more than knowledge which schooling gives because it often draws upon the omnipotent Universal Mind!
A combination of both your imagination and schooling should multiply chances of your personal success but if you have only imagination and no schooling you can still make it big and succeed in your life!!
Use your imagination to overcome the limitations of your schooling to succeed.
The author is a motivational mentor and consultant in positive mind-set change. Email: positivemindpower1511@yahoo.com.