Card #8 – ”Ignore the Dominant” from the Creative Whack Pack
Available on the iOS App Store and as a physical deck of cards

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “When there is no sun, we can see the evening stars.”
In this delightful maxim, the “sun” represents the dominant feature of a situation such as a noise that drowns out other sounds, a player who outshines his teammates, a strong spice that overwhelms the other flavors in a food dish, or an activity that leaves no time to do anything else.
The “evening stars” represent the less obvious aspects of a situation. We don’t see them because the “sun” is so bright. But when there is no sun, these “stars” are visible.
Indeed, we can that discovery often means the uncovering of something that was always there but was obscured by something else.
For example, one day on his regular walk past the local blacksmith’s workshop on his native island of Samos, the ancient philosopher Pythagoras temporarily ignored (or forgot) that the banging sounds produced by the smith’s hammering of iron bars were “noise” — his typical reaction — and instead heard them as “information.”
This insight soon led to Pythagoras’s discovery that musical pitch is a function of the length of the material being struck — and this became his first principle of mathematical physics.
I’ve incorporated this “sun and stars” insight into the following creativity strategy. Whenever I want to get a different perspective on a situation, I like to ask myself these two questions: “What’s the ‘sun’ or most dominant feature of this situation? What new ‘stars’ come into view when I ignore it?”
— What “stars” are visible when you ignore the dominant feature of your situation?