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12.1.4. TAO Spiral: Extracting

How To Invent (Almost) Anything > 12. The TAO Design Process > 12.1. The Big Picture > 12.1.4. TAO Spiral: Extracting

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Fig. 12.1 Spiralling TAO process

This is the traditional creative stage in the process, where you start pulling out the golden nuggets of brilliant ideas. Unfortunately, this is not always easy and the gold may be buried deep, requiring a lot of patient work.

Sometimes you have to dig a deep hole before you are sufficiently convinced that the mine is empty. When this happens, you can either give up or, more realistically, backtrack to a previous stage and try again.

Many of the creative and inventive methods described in this book may be used in this stage (although this does not preclude their use in other stages!). Sometimes it may be easy to find the right tool to use, but it can be a more successful strategy to simply try different approaches until something works and the spark of creation is successfully ignited.
 

The stages of the TAO Process are:

• 12.1.1. TAO Spiral: Exploring
• 12.1.2. TAO Spiral: Prospecting
• 12.1.3. TAO Spiral: Digging
• 12.1.4. TAO Spiral: Extracting
• 12.1.5. TAO Spiral: Refining

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