I asked for strength and God gave me difficulties to make me strong.
I asked for wisdom and God gave me problems to solve.
I asked for prosperity and God gave me brawn and brains to work.
I asked for courage and God gave me dangers to overcome.
I asked for patience and God placed me in situations where I was forced to wait.
I asked for love and God gave me troubled people to help.
I asked for favors and God gave me opportunities.
I asked for everything so I could enjoy life. 
Instead, He gave me life so I could enjoy everything.
I received nothing I wanted, I received everything I needed.
- Unknown


"I asked for wisdom and God gave me problems to solve"

In the following link you can see some of the problems you can help people with:

http://encompasseap.com/AEP_orientation_for_employees/wha05/01wha05.htm


Some times we are looking for ideas to solve a problem and we find solutions for other problems.    The value of ideas increases when you are aware of the benefits these ideas can provide to people who you know their sufferings.  

Sometimes the people who suffer don´t want to contact professionals but would talk about them to their friends.  When looking for ideas, our friends can be a good source of inspiration as we know their problems, thoughts, motivations, circumstances... also we can think about how a friend would solve a problem and think about suggestions for our own improvements.

My first contact with creative thinking was when after reading many books about personal development, I wondered if there could be just one book to help with all areas of personal development, with all type of problems.

Then, I realised that creative thinking techniques could be useful for all type of problems.  The internet, wikipedia, search engines, blogs, etc. meant that there was a lot of information available that could be used adjusting it to your own circumstances.

Thinking creatively is a process where on one side you feed yourself with ideas, expanding your thoughts with information from different fields and on the other side you concentrate, simplify, synthesize all these knowledge into something with a different meaning attached to it (maybe because you are using it for different purposes).

On one side you can combine ideas from different fields.  On the other side you can combine different type of words to create new concepts.  You can build up different type of paragraphs to construct an argument.  Some times these combinations can happen on a random basis (being provoked or unprovoked).  In the end, a new combination of ideas can generate new ideas.

Thinking about meals, thinking about dressing... there can be some common elements repeated but at the same time there can be many small changes when adding other small elements or ways of combining them.

To write a blog, to keep records of your ideas, of your thoughts, motivations, etc. can be a powerful way to go back to your motivations and to link new and old thoughts and experiences.

When thinking about atoms and how the different elements can form the different type of materials we know, we could think that among our thoughts, there are some small particles that can be isolated so that they become easier to be combined in different ways.

This could mean to break some of our old products, ideas, thoughts, learnings, so that we can combine them in new and different ways, with new and different meanings.

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things."

Steve Jobs